No Time for Rockefeller Republicanism

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Saturday July 16, 2011 · 11:36 AM PDT

2011/07/16 · 11:36

this is not the time for Rockefeller Republicanism. We've got a country that is sinking. We've got a country that is on the verge of a crisis in the debt ceiling issue, and that's just one symptom of much larger problems.

---Former Minnesota Gov Tim Pawlenty on Meet the Press, July 10, 2011 Read More

Fourth of July

Barth

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Monday July 04, 2011 · 6:23 AM PDT

2011/07/04 · 06:23

Please forgive a "repeat post" from July 4, 2007. There is no time for anything new today and no post under this name will appear until mid month what with this and that. One extra thought: When you read the Declaration today, as you surely will, note in particular the complaint about the King obstructing immigration.

I love this holiday. It celebrates incredible bravery and the recognition of not only what had become necessary, by the "course of human events" but the equally important "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" that "require[d] that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Hence the brief essay, not only relating the policies of the Crown which so enraged the citizens of what were to become "these states," but also what these "united states of America" were to be founded upon: "self evident" "truths" that "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." And that when that consent no longer exists, the people are subjugated to a government that they are entitled to overthrow.

Barth

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Saturday July 02, 2011 · 4:43 PM PDT

2011/07/02 · 16:43

This has become an annual rite: the recitation of a blogger, one who sees himself as a defender of all that is the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society about love for this so secular holiday and for this country in which we were blessed to live, and for the luckiest of us, to have been born here. It applies no less this year than any other even if the ties that have bound us all together as one, often frayed, and pulled apart, are really on the eve of destruction.

The optimistic view of our founders (even, perhaps the nine year old John Quincy Adams) that what makes us one (e pluribus unum) made sense under the circumstances of our nation's birth, and maybe it still made sense through the four score and seven years which immediately followed, through Missouri Compromises that solved nothing, and a civil war which ended with the victorious telling the vanquished that they would have to abide by a new arrangement, but whether might makes right, it certainly doesn't make the side with inadequate might see the error of their ways.

Barth

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Monday June 27, 2011 · 8:26 AM PDT

2011/06/27 · 08:26

1. Any person who attends a caucus on behalf of, or votes in a primary for, Michelle Bachmann to become President of the United States should no longer be permitted to vote again.

2. This is a repeat observation about a repeat program: If you can watch this 60 Minutes segment, yet still advocate for massive cuts in federal spending, you have surrendered several of the essential components of what makes up a human being:

Barth

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Saturday June 25, 2011 · 9:38 AM PDT

2011/06/25 · 09:38

He was the kind of a phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body

---J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

So you may have been watching the Senate of the state where a few us live wondering what we have been complaining about. Senators stated their opinions, for and against the bill, then they voted. It passed. The Governor signed it into law a few hours later. We would love to have a national legislature such as that instead of this mess where a minority party can block everything in one house and other one has nothing but crazy people in charge.

Barth

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Thursday June 23, 2011 · 3:49 PM PDT

2011/06/23 · 15:49

If anyone doubted this (and I suspect few outside the White House and Treasury did), there will be no "adults" coming to the rescue it appears. Congressman Cantor has announced that it will be impossible for him or his party to vote to extend the debt limit (to agree to pay our national obligations) without an agreement by Democrats not to seek a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

Congressman Cantor has done us a service. Even the giddiest advocate of bipartisanship can now see, there is no such thing, and all thanks to Eric Cantor, the "honest broker" with whom we thought we might "make a deal." No matter what the consequences, those recognized even by their own acolytes as well as by sane people all over the land making sure the wealthy contributors who might otherwise not be able to give them the millions needed to fund all their assaults on the political system, takes precedence.

Barth

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Saturday June 18, 2011 · 1:13 PM PDT

2011/06/18 · 13:13

Now we know that, despite all appearances, Congress can act as one body and do what needs to be done. To be sure, it cannot deal effectively with a deep recession and massive unemployment, it has not found a way to protect people who have or are in danger of losing their homes after a virtually unregulated financial community found as many means imaginable to make money by conning as many people as possible, it stands by and does nothing as over reliance on fossil fuels threatens first our national security and then the planet itself, and remains unwilling to address the complete corruption of our political system resulting from the system by which campaigns are funded.

But at least they have protected us from having a member of Congress who tweets photographs of parts of his body that cause schoolchildren to giggle.

Barth

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Saturday June 11, 2011 · 11:23 AM PDT

2011/06/11 · 11:23

Let's be clear on this. Your blogger has a strong connection to the district Congressman Weiner represents, but he does not live or vote there. The Congressman's value to those who see the New Deal as an irrevocable compact between the government and the citizenry, has been long apparent, but his interminable press conference on Monday and its shocking revelations about him, led to this post on Daily Kos:

Truly a jackass... (2+ / 0-)
He went from being considered a bit of a jackass, to a really brave teller of truths in a place where truth is rarely seen, back to being a jackass.

Obviously the press and broadcast interest in this junior high school cafeteria type story is ridiculous, but as a judge once explained to me when enormous numbers of reporters showed up to cover a fairly run of the mill case, they get interested when something is about sex. (Had she not told me this, I think the judge thought, I would not have known this.)

Still, Congressman Weiner: once you decided to represent ou[r] interests, and I don't mean just your congressional district, you owed us much more than you have shown this week. Going back on Rachel's show and lying to her!!!! You are truly a jackass.

Not a hypocrite, just a jackass. The reason Republicans (and Spitzer) have to resign for crap like this is that they hold themselves out to be arbiters of right and wrong in our personal lives. I have never seen Congr Weiner do this.

He will not be Mayor, but maybe he gets a prime time television program.

If so, it should be called "Jackass."

With all due humility, that is all that need to be said on this supposed "subject."

Barth

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Saturday June 04, 2011 · 1:28 PM PDT

2011/06/04 · 13:28

So Sarah Palin does not know the story of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride. Her alter ego from Minnesota got her Concords mixed up a month or so ago and thought maybe the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in New Hampshire (hence, the first in the nation primary?). Well she did not suggest the association with the primary, but it is worth wondering what these would be or self-appointed "leaders" think the "tea party" was all about.

Perhaps there is some insight here into why This Crowd seem to dislike teachers so much. Not a lot came out of whatever was spent on educating these two or the massive numbers of fellow numbskulls, disdaining the "reality based community" where the rest of us are forced to live. At the same time, this whole thing has ceased to be as funny as it once might have been.

Barth

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Saturday May 28, 2011 · 9:41 AM PDT

2011/05/28 · 09:41

There are any number of things worth addressing this weekend: the way that four dead presidents could rally a congressional district in upstate New York to win a House seat---quite a trick, a recollection of why many people considered President Clinton to be the last reasonable Republican president but no Democrat, and why making Elizabeth Warren THE issue in the 2012 elections would allow the country to make its voice known (as a recess appointment that expired right in the middle of the campaign surely would), but this is a weekend for memories. It is for barbecues and pool openings, too, for the beginning of the summer and for the Bruins first march toward a Stanley Cup in twenty-one years, but a moment to remember those who got us this far is also due.

Barth

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Wednesday May 25, 2011 · 8:16 AM PDT

2011/05/25 · 08:16

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, August 14, 1935:

We can never insure 100 percent of the population against 100 percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old age.
*This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

Barth

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Saturday May 21, 2011 · 11:39 AM PDT

2011/05/21 · 11:39

You can feel it. The tide is turning. Heads are over the sand, and what they see is a political party that votes to continue subsidies to oil companies and rails against the concept of affordable health insurance for all. (They call it "Obamacare" which says more than its abject rudeness suggests. Would anyone who did not agree with the project to build the interstates throughout the country refer to them as "Eisenhighways"?) They claim to want to balance a budget but refuse to even think about letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire favoring, instead, cutting "entitlements" that the rest of us have come to depend upon. Their enemies, they have told us, are public employees: teachers, police officers, firefighters, and the unions that protect their---our---rights to be dealt with fairly.

The election next week in the New York congressional district near Buffalo that has been rock ribbed Republican for decades will underscore what has happened. This is not a cause for celebration so much as a call for us to do more to wipe this political point of view for the respectability it continues to be accorded by David Gregory and the rest of the beltway news establishment, even as it has been roundly rejected everywhere else.

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No Time for Rockefeller Republicanism

Fourth of July

Independence

Deep Thoughts for a Monday morning in June

Pretense, Magic and Make Believe

Thank goodness for Eric Cantor!!!

A Republic, if you can keep it

Perspective(s)

Misdrection

In Memoriam

NY-26: a rerun worth watching

Us and Them