Hailed On, Maybe Once Too Often

From the Star-Tribune

Nasty stuff! Not life threatening, just, "I hope this hail doesn't take the paint off the pickup" stuff.

Something like trying to listen to a Republican primary debate.

The Senate was barely able to muster a majority to support Obama's jobs bill, but a majority is not enough in the Senate: it takes 60% to get anything done in the Senate. They are not hasty, they! They are hopeless.

More and more, I wonder whether we might better be served with multiple parties. When there are two parties--in our case, both a little right of center--if one party decides it will not do anything, then nothing can be done. There are no real coalitions, no real bargaining, no deals, no compromises. We have trench warfare.

The Tea Party has dragged the Republican party off to the extreme right, and the Democratic party--which seems rarely comfortable making up its own mind--bargains from a position of poll reading. Obama says, rightly, that we need to do something really determined to get our economy going, to create jobs, and then he offers a half-assed proposal that even the Democratic Senate cannot get passed. "See!", the Republicans say, "He is a weak president!"

I think maybe he is. Only the Republicans in Congress are weaker. And the only thing weaker than the Republicans in Congress is the Democrats in Congress.

I may be wrong about wanting multiple political parties. It might result, not in being hailed on from two directions, but from every direction.

I don't want to complain about our political system. The people who bought and paid for the Republicans seem to be happy. The people who own the Democrats aren't quite as happy, but at least they own them.

Get out of those wars!
Invest in jobs of all kinds!
Create a fair tax code!
Quit subsidizing oil companies!
Clamp down on banks and investment scams!
And quit paying thieves and knaves millions of dollars for stealing us blind!

I don't want much. Just some fairness.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

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