Sure. I mean, we just finished watching the Republicans shut down the government, causing significant economic and even medical and scientific harm, because they didn’t like a plan to give health care to poor people that had already become law and proved too popular to legally overturn. Even though that plan was based largely on their own models, because the Democrats had decided finding a compromise was more important than keeping their promises about a public option. But we shouldn’t let occurrences like that stop us from pretending the problems are just as bad in both parties.
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Some of those boxes are going to be collections only of mighty short and stubby crayons.
As it turns out, almost the exact same voting scheme was considered by UK Fields medalist Tim Gowers a couple of days ago. Unfortunately it will still allow a these kind of shenangans - if the crazies are distributed the right way. See http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/holding-a-country-to-ransom/
As it turns out, voting is full of mathematical paradoxes.
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Who created the HEW, the Interstate Highway System, and appointed the liberal Earl Warren to the SCOTUS? Eisenhauer.
Who created the EPA and OSHA, signed the Clean Air Act and endorsed the ERA? Nixon.
In the past, it was possible for Republicans to create useful, vital programs for the country. And both Nixon and Eisenhauer were elected handily each time.
From Reagan onward, however, the only government programs the GOP fulsomely approved of were new weapons projects.
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Fortunately, a bunch of stubby, broken crayons will only contribute one stubby crayon to the next level. In order for that coffee-klatch to have nothing but stubs, all ten klatches feeding into it would have to be full of stubs. To promote a stub all the way to the sixth level, you’d need a stub majority across a hundred-thousand klatches involving a million participants. Okay, it’s America, it could happen. But surely the more likely outcome would be sharper crayons on average?
I’ll give the Tea Party credit for one thing: they have been far more successful at bringing change (and chaos) to the right than MoveOn.org and the Occupy Movement have been to the left. The far left should be taking notes and copying their tactics and strategies if they want to achieve anything significant.
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Oh, my, no. California’s redistricting process was originally a Republican attempt to create a balanced 50-50 bipartisan “reform” committee to do the redistricting in a state that’s very far from 50% Republican, instead of letting the Legislature do it or appoint an “independent” committee to do it. However, the process for nominating people to the “reform” committee was open, and the Democrats did a good job of getting their people on it while the Republicans dropped the ball, so we ended up with a redistricting committee that was more Democrat-heavy than the legislature (but less attached to the future success of any individual Democrat.)
They did an ok job, as far as I can tell, but it wasn’t what I’d call a model process.
Well chaos I can agree on, change not so much. That remains to be seen. The tea party doesn’t seem to care as much about social issues like gay marriage, and hot button religious topics like abortion as the christian right does - issues the christian right doesn’t like to compromise on. The christian right might be cheering them on, but there are some real problems with that relationship. The tea party has now alienated the moderate right, and that sets the stage for the christians and moderates to get together and figure out that these tea party guys are delivering too much chaos, not enough change that’s good for republicans.
“The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
Douglas. Adams
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Well, boatloads of money from someone as wealthy as the Koch bros would be a good start, yeah?
But the “conservatives” have already disowned Nixon and Eisenhower as non pure.
Nah - I mean, good to remind that some of these guys managed to accomplish better stuff than their reputations might otherwise allow. But it’s simplistic. Nixon = Drug War. And wanted to secretly ship dissenters away to Mexican jails. That’s like saying Jeffrey Dahmer was underappreciated because he picked up the neighbor’s newspaper for them while they were on vacation once.
The system didn’t ‘just’ break. It’s been broken and corruptible all along. Hard to remember that, through our strong reactions to the immediate bs, I know. But true. At one time, remember, it was thought that anyone smart and hard-working enough to acquire some land was a pretty good way to pick voters. I have to hand it to McCain for at least understanding that, once we treat corporations like citizens and allow them access to the political process, it’s basically all over for puny little 1-person citizens.
The Tea Party has consistently invoked, and then implemented (in their own strange ways) tactics that it considers leftist. Rules for Radicals? Frances Fox Piven?
If you consider the long range goal of the Democrats to hurt the Republicans it makes sense that they would promote leadership that is in the right wing of the party right now. When discontented Republicans get ready to jump ship they will be more likely to land on the Democrat’s deck. If Obama can present strong conservative leadership without pandering to the far right he can take the big chunk of the middle that is up for grabs into the Democrat’s fold. After mid-terms we will see a tack back to the left if Congress can be secured for the Democrats.
BINGO. Reagan is the watershed. A man formerly called a “neo-liberal” now the patron saint of people called “neo-conservatives”. A man who repeatedly flipped back and forth on issues, now lauded as a straight shooter. A man who flagrantly disregarded Congress and the law, and yet had an airport named after him. A man who is frequently cited by our current president as an inspiration, and just as frequently invoked by self-described government-hating “patriots”. A man who denounced his political rivals in the Screen Actors Guild to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Affairs Committee. The “Great Communicator” whose speeches were both ghost-written and plagiarized. The first so-called conservative to be vehemently opposed to conservation.
My old college roomate used to crow whenever President Reagan came on TV, “Ronald Wilson Reagan! Six-Six-Six! When the false Christ appears the True Christ is forgotten!” It seems oddly prescient now.
In the public schools, they teach kids that Reagan was a hero, and the bestest president since Washington. They don’t talk about his tearing the solar panels off the White House, or claiming that trees cause pollution.
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The semantic relationship between neoconservative and neoliberal is not even close to the semantic relationship between liberal and conservative.
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I don’t even know what the hell a neoliberal is. Who is a good example of this?
I first heard of the Reagan 666 from “Popular Paranoia”, the insert in Infocom’s Bureaucracy game. I led a sheltered life.
I first saw it in Mad Magazine (or maybe it was Cracked?) in a grocery store in the mid to late eighties.
Classical liberalism was a political philosophy. In the context of classical liberalism, Adam Smith argued that market economies tend to promote prosperity; iirc he also criticized the laws of settlement, regulatory capture, the criminalization of organized labor, and the tendency of organized power to write the laws for their own benefit.
Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy that tosses the political values, and tosses any support for labor and opposition to rent. Holding that market economies tend to promote prosperity, it tends to promote markets, it opposes tarriffs, but supports intellectual ‘property,’ it tends to be suspicious of public goods and common property, it tends to promote privatization, with the resulting corruption, cronyism, public losses, private profits, and so on.
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