The latest from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com
- Stephen C. Rose: Killing Two Stones with One Bloomberg
- Steven Denlinger: Go home, Eeyore - and send out Tigger!
- David Horton: The bulldog's bulldog
| Stephen C. Rose: Killing Two Stones with One Bloomberg | Top |
| By Stephen C. Rose Stone One is the sinking feeling in NYC over Mayor Mike Bloomberg's somewhat regal declaration for a third term in the face of term limits. Stone Two is the sinking feeling in the White House. What is the problem? Isn't there someone out there with decent credentials who can pass vetting and not have an identity crisis on our watch? We want both of these weighty problems to go away. And Bloomberg has a large enough ego to say, "Commerce? You think I can't turn that into the equal of State and Defense? Watch me." http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/ More on President Obama | |
| Steven Denlinger: Go home, Eeyore - and send out Tigger! | Top |
| I'm pissed off at Eeyore right now. Or maybe I'm actually talking about his brothers - who all went into government. Some of them now go by the names of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and John Boehner. I'm tired of people who can only see the negative - yet call themselves patriots. Sick and tired of people who are convinced that America has no future, that the era of American prosperity is over. Never mind that these Eeyores got us here by leading us through over two decades of unparalleled greed. Never mind that the problem from start to finish was unbridled capitalistic furor - and a retreat from Roosevelt's New Deal. Now these Eeyores are rewriting history, trying to prove that Roosevelt's ideas actually extended the Great Depression. They still believe that Big Government is the problem - when in actuality, if we had only HAD a big enough Government, the scoundrels who put us in the current economic mess would have gotten caught with their hands in the cookie jar, long before they could do the damage they did. These Eeyores are so determined to prove that cutting taxes is the only way to stimulate an economy that they'll happily flush economic hope down the toilet - just to prove that Obama's Jobs Bill is wrong. They fail to see the X Factor: the power of dreams and hope and communities caring about each other. They need to watch It's A Wonderful Life again. They're hoping Obama will fail because they hate any kind of economic restraints. They're the mean boys in the classroom who hope the teacher will fail in his efforts to bring an unruly class into line, because that means they'll have to follow the rules. Translated into real life, their concept that deregulation will stimulate the economy is akin to encouraging faster delivery service throughout a major city by removing all the traffic lights. They think that freedom from restraint is always the answer - that ethics and community service and responsibility and justice and kindness are synonyms for the word weak. * * * Eeyore can't see the value of positive thinking. He thinks logically. He wants Tigger to fail. The Republicans in the House and Senate want Obama to fail. They hate the idea that government might have a place in the world. They try to act as if they're the last bastion of fiscal restraint - just when it's time to spend money. These pirates act as if they haven't spent the last eight years turning the nation over the lobbyists, sucking up to the oil companies, giving tax breaks to people who spent it by living in high style. These bullies were led by a President whose Attention Deficit Disorder was so severe that he thought the answer to every test question on economics was tax cuts . He didn't understand anything about the economy because he was drinking at Yale rather than doing his homework. Thus, he never figured out that Ronald Reagan might have talked tax cuts a lot -- but he also raised them in order to balance the budget. Bullies like this didn't have the decency to come up with a real alternative to the Democrats' Jobs Bill (A round of new tax cuts doesn't count, John Boehner!). They just acted like Eeyore on a black Monday morning, complaining, complaining, complaining. They were all about no, no, no. During the recent creation of the stimulus package, they played the role of the Kid on the Playground who takes his ball and goes home when the rest of the kids won't play his way. Out of one side of their mouth, they claimed they weren't actually allowed in the clubhouse - that the Democrats wouldn't let them get involved. On the other side of their mouth, they shot spitwads at the three Republicans who seemed to have no problem prying open the door of that clubhouse and sitting down at the bargaining table and dramatically influencing the Jobs Bill. What? * * * Yes. Rather than joining the few Republicans who came up with a solution, these Republicans anarchists stood outside the negotiations, led by the shameful Ohio representative John Boehner, who hissed and snarled into any and all cable microphones, trying to run down the reputations of the three senators who tried to help the Democrats solve problems. Why? Don't they get it? Don't they see the massive numbers of Americans who now live in pain, who walk the streets without work, who live without hope? Lindsey Graham, after treating the national budget like a giant credit card for eight straight years under Bush, why is it suddenly time to be frugal? Just because the people who need help aren't driving BMW's and Mercedes Benz? Granted, Mitch McConnell, the common man doesn't have the deep pockets of the oil companies, but do you have to make it so bloody obvious? * * * Most important, why is stupid so popular? As a red-blooded American, I'm tired of Idiots, and the big fat Idiot who leads them. I recognize a pack of bullies. They're always the minority - who claim to speak for the group. I faced them in my own small schoolyard. Those bullies were rude and stupid then, and the bullies I see in Congress today are still rude and stupid. Their intelligence is feral and cruel - they'll shoot at anyone who sticks his head up, anyone who tries to fix the problem. They figure that the other children will be too frightened to come out and play if they keep saying that the country is being run by grizzly bears - big mean SOB's who won't let anyone succeed. They tell people that Obama's jobs package is filled with pork that will only feed the bears and make them more powerful and deadly. They tell people that these big, mean grizzlies will be eating little children for TEN LONG YEARS. Bullies like this like to stand around telling scary stories about what will happen if we follow Barack the Magic Negro, and they emphasize their point by playing racist songs using exactly these words on their television and radio shows. HA HA HA. Their goal is to keep us running scared, so they can eat the juicy fruits and luscious treats left behind by the littluns who flee the schoolyard. * * * These bullies even have an ace card they intend to use when Obama succeeds, when the economic playground is cleaned up, made safer, and gets some interesting, safe new games started. I saw them use it after Clinton fought to raise taxes at the beginning of the 90s. Once the economy took off, these bullies flipped this ace onto the table. And they used it to take credit for the era of economic growth that took Bush and a Republican majority six years to kill through fear and greed. You see, when Eeyore is proved wrong - And when the little red hen called Obama succeeds - And when the wheat starts growing, and the harvest is wonderful, and the bread smells great - In other words, when the American economy defies expectations and takes off again, due in part to the perception of safety created by the Jobs Bill? * * * Mark my words. When all this happens, the Republicans will claim that all this good stuff would have all happened anyway. That all this good stuff had nothing to do with Obama's Jobs Stimulus Bill - because it didn't stimulate. Ugh. Go home, Eeyore. Send out Tigger. More on mitch mcconnell | |
| David Horton: The bulldog's bulldog | Top |
| I try, from time to time, satisfying idle curiosity, to fathom the mind of the creationists, rather in the way that I might try to understand the thought processes of a tribe from deepest Amazon, or the art of a Pleistocene hunter. And here is something that came to me, unbidden, as I watched a documentary on Darwin's voyage. You know how creationists always refer to "Darwinism", and ask the, to them, rhetorical question as to who would you rather believe, god or Darwin? I had thought this was just pure ignorance, a not unreasonable guess given their total failure to understand the simplest thing about the world they live in (it evolves). But now I wonder if the problem goes even deeper than this. I wonder, and it is like confessing a murder, whether they believe that had Darwin never lived, never voyaged on the Beagle, that the people of the world would have gone on, happily, accepting the truth of the biblical accounts of Genesis? The Catholic Church, similarly perturbed by Galileo, forced him to recant his belief in the anti-biblical heliocentrism of this particular solar system. The Pope of the day and his cardinals seem to have thought that they need only silence this fool who, asked whether he would rather believe his own eyes or the bible, chose, temporarily, his eyes, that the Sun would keep happily circling the Earth as it had done for the preceding 6000 years or so. Educationally challenged evangelicals seem similarly to believe that Darwinism was simply a quirk in the eye of the man who Lincoln must have been proud to share a birthday with, and that, if silenced, species would go back to being placed in position by divine intervention, as they had always been before 1859. But in one sense Darwin was just (!) the right man in the right places at the right time. Had he not discovered the mechanisms by which species both changed over time and separated from each other then someone else would have done so. Either sooner (Alfred Wallace was so close that he pushed Darwin into publication), or a little later (could Huxley have failed to come up with the process if he was not needed as Darwin's bulldog, might he have needed his own bulldog?). It might have taken a bit more time to see the full sweep that Darwin's genius (not "just" anything) saw, but there were hundred of biologists playing around with ideas who would have recognised the truth within a few years of 1859. Great men speed up the recognition of great truths, but they don't create the truths. The world is there, in all its complexity and beauty, whether we accept it or not. A tree falls in the forest whether or not it is observed. You want to keep believing in the Sun circling the Earth, or creationism, go right ahead, but your belief system, in this as in all else, exists in a parallel universe to the real one. And that would be true whether I had discovered it or not. On The Watermelon Blog we try to keep evolving whether anyone notices or not. | |
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