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[Mongrel]

Well, their main argument will be that there aren't enough of them, that they need to hijack the Republican party entirely. I think the corporate/landed aristocracy wing of the GOP can handle that kind of challenge, but I'm not 100% sure.

And as has been cited in many sources, they're also working very hard to find folks who don't immediately seem crazy.

I really think this could go either way. After all, there was a time when we all thought there was no way someone as obviously deficient as Bush could be elected.

[Classic]

As usual, I blame the religious.
The idea that a leader should be relatable or personable as well as (or, superseding) inspiring and competent sounds suspiciously like the post-enlightenment "personal relationship with god" plea. And without context or knowledge to accurately conclude which idea came first I'll blame the source I'm disposed to dislike.

[Thad]

The Tea Party was never that popular. They only one because progressives and leftists had no one to vote for, so they didn't vote.

The nonvoting public, as a potential voting bloc, is something I always try to keep in mind -- particularly ethnic minorities.  But as much as anything I think the Tea Party victories were based on anti-establishment fervor rather than general policy agreements.

Well, their main argument will be that there aren't enough of them, that they need to hijack the Republican party entirely.

That's not a sustainable long-term strategy.  Look at the Democrats.

Of course, the Democrats aren't nearly as good at getting what they want as the Tea Partiers.

I really think this could go either way. After all, there was a time when we all thought there was no way someone as obviously deficient as Bush could be elected.

HE WASN'T.

Not in 2000, anyway.

[Mongrel]

Okay, well, leaving my opinions on WE WUZ ROBBED 2000 aside, it was close enough that they could fake it. It's not like Gore had a margin so great as to make it incontestable and they somehow inverted the electoral votes of ten states. Point being that a sensible, educated, attentive electorate should not have let Bush within a thousand miles of 4% of the vote, let alone 40% (or whatever).

As for getting what they want, the Tea Party has this going for them: They're the hungry ones.

The Teabaggers have the drive and the desire, and they're the ones out there looking for ways to win more votes and break their opponents. They are the ones who are happy to be underestimated. Old-guard Republicans and Democrats as a whole are floundering and listless, bumbling about the status quo. Everything I have seen so far shows the Teabaggers gaining increasing sophistication and resources. Make no mistake, they are very dangerous and should not be dismissed.

[Mongrel]

And now for some levity.

This is one of the best Onion articles I've seen in a long, long time. Drunken Ben Bernanke Tells Everyone At Neighbourhood Bar How Screwed U.S. Economy Really Is

The pictures really put the icing on this funny cake.

[Mongrel]

Meanwhile, the NY Times provides a factual account of the above (minus the drunken Ben Bernanke)

[Thad]

Okay, well, leaving my opinions on WE WUZ ROBBED 2000 aside, it was close enough that they could fake it. It's not like Gore had a margin so great as to make it incontestable and they somehow inverted the electoral votes of ten states. Point being that a sensible, educated, attentive electorate should not have let Bush within a thousand miles of 4% of the vote, let alone 40% (or whatever).

No argument there.

I just don't want to legitimize Bush's appointment.

As for getting what they want, the Tea Party has this going for them: They're the hungry ones.

The Teabaggers have the drive and the desire, and they're the ones out there looking for ways to win more votes and break their opponents. They are the ones who are happy to be underestimated. Old-guard Republicans and Democrats as a whole are floundering and listless, bumbling about the status quo. Everything I have seen so far shows the Teabaggers gaining increasing sophistication and resources. Make no mistake, they are very dangerous and should not be dismissed.

Agreed as well.  I don't mean to dismiss them -- saying "This is what I think is going to happen" is different from advocating complacency.

I WOULD add that, generally speaking, people like politicians who are strong but flexible.  The Democrats fail the first test and the Republicans fail the second.

I DO think the voting public wants people who are willing to compromise.

And, as unyielding as I probably seem, there are precious few issues where I am unwilling to accept some sort of middle-ground.  (Torture.  That's actually the only one I can think of off the top of my head.)

My problem is that the "middle ground" our politicians typically agree on is nowhere near the middle.

There are plenty of issues -- the economy, healthcare, copyright law, the military -- where I'm very liberal but am willing to accept a result that's more centrist than what I really want.  The trouble is that the solutions the federal government passes are inevitably to the right of the middle ground I think we should be willing to settle for -- and indeed, I think the President and many in his party START the debate by asking for an acceptable middle-ground compromise.  Which is not the correct way to haggle.

MEANWHILE: Fred Kaplan analyzes the military budget and discusses areas where we should consider targeted cuts.  I'm not really down with the idea of mass layoffs but I understand the argument that we're not likely to need as many troops as we have.  And that's the nature of cutting government spending without increasing revenue: you're costing people their jobs.

[Thad]

...I know that judging day-to-day market results is a mug's game, and that it's silly to expect an immediate fix when legislation passes, but..."Dow down more than 400 points as market plunge continues" is one of those headlines that suggests to me that raising the debt ceiling has not saved our credit rating or reduced or fiscal uncertainty.

[Brentai]

I've effectively lost $3200 since Tuesday.

[AČ]

But the Steam Sale only started yesterday

[Thad]

I've effectively lost $3200 since Tuesday.

I don't know how much I lost and I frankly don't want to.  I'm going to ballpark it at "My 401(k) has lost all the interest it ever earned."

But actually, my knee-jerk assumption that this is about faith in the nation's credit simply isn't borne out by the data -- investments in bonds actually went UP while everything else was going down.  So more likely this is a delayed reaction to last week's economic growth report.

Which, frankly, was disastrous and indicated that the recovery is even slower than we thought and now is pretty much the WORST POSSIBLE TIME to be talking about multitrillion-dollar spending cuts.  So, you know.  We're all gonna die.

[Brentai]

Shut up Thad.

[Pacobird]

Over/under on how long it takes before we start seeing a leftist extreme bunch? I suspect we still have to starve and impoverish a few million more folks before comfort levels are sufficiently trashed, but we're well on the way.

I've never been one for the "Americans are lazy and stupid" thing as it applies to government participation, mainly because there really isn't much of a point in being politically engaged on an individual level and there never has been.  Unless you start rioting you're more or less confined to the power of your vote, so tying yourself in knots over it won't make you more politically effective than the guy who just votes as an excuse to leave work at 2 PM.  The really maddening thing is that the other guy is probably right.  You can't expect the vast majority of people to take to the streets to change society if they have other things with which to distract themselves.

[Mongrel]

Over/under on how long it takes before we start seeing a leftist extreme bunch? I suspect we still have to starve and impoverish a few million more folks before comfort levels are sufficiently trashed, but we're well on the way.

I've never been one for the "Americans are lazy and stupid" thing as it applies to government participation, mainly because there really isn't much of a point in being politically engaged on an individual level and there never has been.  Unless you start rioting you're more or less confined to the power of your vote, so tying yourself in knots over it won't make you more politically effective than the guy who just votes as an excuse to leave work at 2 PM.  The really maddening thing is that the other guy is probably right.  You can't expect the vast majority of people to take to the streets to change society if they have other things with which to distract themselves.

Well, "Americans are stupid" is a kneejerk Canadian thing, but I doubt we'd call you guys lazy. Crazy for working too hard letting corporate bosses work you to death, more like it.

I do think the the American political process has become so far removed from individual citizens that the public and political spheres (or rather the public and ruling spheres) are essentially separate things now. Intentional or no, that's probably the best way to murder a democracy.

[Pacobird]

On the plus side, blue chip stocks have apparently recovered much their losses from the past few days, because the ECB said it would go to the wall for Spain and Italy and the minicrash was as much, if not more, about Europe as it was about US debt bullshit.

Still looking forward to taking my honeymoon in a Weimar-esque Mediterranean hellscape~

[Thad]

I've never been one for the "Americans are lazy and stupid" thing as it applies to government participation, mainly because there really isn't much of a point in being politically engaged on an individual level and there never has been.  Unless you start rioting you're more or less confined to the power of your vote, so tying yourself in knots over it won't make you more politically effective than the guy who just votes as an excuse to leave work at 2 PM.  The really maddening thing is that the other guy is probably right.  You can't expect the vast majority of people to take to the streets to change society if they have other things with which to distract themselves.

Now see, this is exactly the sort of fatalism I've been trying to avoid in my own worldview.

And keep in mind my last post ended with "We're all gonna die."

[Smiler]

Guys I figured it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTP7jRgOIEw&feature=player_embedded#at=28

Fucking smurfs.

[Pacobird]

The turning point for me was my last year of law school when I took a class on Cyber Law and we got into all these really interesting and technical issues about privacy and copyright and whatnot and how corporations and the government basically fuck the average dude six ways from Sunday.

So at the end of the course, the prof comes out and says to this six-person class, "so what do you guys make of all this?  Do you support policies like what we've discussed?  Oppose them?  Sup?"  and then he added somewhat facetiously, "do you care?"

I don't know if I was insulted by the question or didn't like the class or was a week from graduation and didn't give a shit, but I just straight up said "You know, I can't really bring myself to care."  Prof looked nonplussed, asked me why.  I said it was because the sea levels were going to rise twenty feet by the time I die, displacing hundreds of millions of people, drinking water was drying up, people were getting tortured, millions dying every year in Africa from treatable diseases, the US spending billions to support the tobacco industry, 50 million without health insurance, the US and Europe generally approaching insolvency, etc., all seemed like much greater problems to me than college kids getting busted for stealing hollywood movies or the CIA making a record of what kind of shit I buy on ebay.*

In an attempt to, I guess, sympathize or placate me or whatever, the prof said he understood that a lot of people could adopt this stance of rational ignorance, but that kind of ticked me off.  I said it wasn't rational ignorance at all; I perfectly understood the implications of IP and privacy and what have you, but I simply didn't care, because these are First World Problems and while yeah, the RIAA is kind of shitty for theoretically suing someone for 150 grand for downloading a song, that does not rise to even the fourth or fifth tier of injustices mankind is perpetrating on his brother at this exact moment, so no, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.  Sorry.

I got an A in the class, one of two I got in a substantive class throughout law school.  Hilariously, the other was Copyright.






*I expanded on this second point in library school to browbeat other library students who honestly felt protecting the privacy of a patron's borrowing records made them Christ figures or something (real talk)

Now see, this is exactly the sort of fatalism I've been trying to avoid in my own worldview.

And keep in mind my last post ended with "We're all gonna die."

If you really want to be frustrated, try to find one instance of somebody saying "Americans should take more time to educate themselves on the issues before they vote" without actually meaning "anybody who doesn't vote the same way I do must be ignorant".

[Mongrel]

Freaknomics predicts a boom in 2012

Well, it's a bold prediction at least.

[Mothra]

Yeah, but the mind-boggling fact that literally millions die every year in Africa from treatable diseases does not make these other copyright/privacy problems any less shitty. It's entirely possible to care about both things, you know, if you gave enough of a shit to give a shit.

That said, yes, our priorities are well out of place, and we should not care about some kid getting sued by the RIAA nearly as much as people actually dying incredibly shitty preventable deaths every day.

You can still take like an hour of one day to review your class and develop an opinion on this handful of topics.