Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

First it is killing people for no good reason.
Secondly it is bleeding us dry - as we now see serious cuts in the budget.
It is a poster child for corrupt corporations raping our country of its assests
and it is synonymous with Democratic party leadership failure to date.

On a long term note - i would like to see corporations stripped of all constitutional protections and the removal of their personhood.

Blogging the 2006 Ohio Senate Race

Cheap energy has made this nation possible, and trying to maintain the status quo on energy is the cause for many of our current woes.  

Because of our need for oil, we have to twist our foreign policy to please dictators.  Directly or indirectly, we put the lives of America's service men and women at risk each day because of the fragility of our energy sources.

All attempts to "drill ourselves out of the crisis" are doomed, and unless this topic gets considerably more attention, so are we.  Without an agressive program to replace our oil consumption with alternative sources, the economy, the environment, our rights, and our persistence as a nation, are thrown into jeopardy.  

Get behind a solid program to cut our need for oil.  The rest will follow.

Off the top of my head I might say the most important thing is not to let others get away with lies and distortions about, well, EVERYTHING.

When they start talking about "Clear Skies," point out those rules would filth up the sky. Say it bluntly. "Clear Skies" is Orwellian doublespeak. The "Death Tax"? Oh, come on!

Do what you can to stop politics as usual. People are doing it now. The Closed Session of the Senate. Barack Obama saying he would not let any EPA nominee pass until the EPA issues regulations for lead paint (which they were supposed to do in 1996). The dems and repubs in the Senate together are trying to force Bush to sign the torture ban. They said they'd put it in every bill until he signs it.

That's what we need.

If there is any one issue, I might say the environment. If the economy crumbles, we can probably recover without enormous difficulty. The deficit we can eventually pay off. The war will eventually pass (it might take us a century to regain the respect of the rest of the world, but we'd survive). But if we completely ruin the environment, if the ice caps disappear entirely and we see big hurricanes every year like this year, droughts, etc, etc., we're in trouble. That is something we CAN'T easily recover from.

I think the over-riding issue for me at the moment, it the defeat of the Republican machine and the impeachment fo President Bush...because nothing else can be accoomplished until they are gone.  Period.

We can talk about the environment, the war, the budget, taxes, social programs, but NOTHING will get done on those fronts until we remove the Republican Monster Machine.

Why impeach the President if we take back Congress in 2006?  Because we have to send a message to those who whould attempt this again...that they can't get away with installing Corporate Fascism and robbing the government scott free.

I hate to be so politically myopic, but first thing's first, in my mind.

The Albany Project. The best damned blog about New York State politics.

• Health care
  
• The growing class divide
  
• Energy and global warming

Pointless, incessant barking since 10/31/2005 03:16:11 PM MST

Plus, as one who'll be entering the job market soon, I'd like to see it get better.

My Left Wing: We don't suck.

There has got to be a better way of funding elementary and secondary schools than property taxes that make the quality of the schools a factor of how affluent the district happens to be--and which puts far too much power in the hands of often uninformed taxpayers, both when it comes to budgets but also curricular issues.

"No Child Left Behind" and all similar initiatives must be ruthlessly rooted out, along with the pernicious notion that corporate concepts of inventory and asset management can be meaningfully applied to education. The biggest stumbling-block in this regard is the culture of high-stakes testing that is even beginning to spread from elementary and secondary schools to higher education. And let me tell you, as someone who daily sees the results of that high-stakes testing in action, it's not pretty. Students arrive at college with no reasoning abilities, no understanding of either fundamental concepts or the underpinnings of the Western intellectual tradition. They cannot write, for the most part, a coherent sentence (much less even a short research paper). All they know is what was on the tests they had to pass in order to advance through the educational ranks--because that was all they were taught.

We also need to re-think the way we approach post-secondary education. We have created a college culture in this country over the last 25 years, but it's not the college culture we either need or want. We should absolutely support the premise that everyone who wants to go to college should be able to do so, regardless of background, ability to pay, learning disability or handicap, etc. But it does not follow from that premise that everyone should go to college--which is how we're selling it now.

Why is that a problem? Because there are an awful lot of young people out there (and I meet them on a regular basis) who haven't the first clue what they want to do in life. That's perfectly fine, and college has often been one means of helping such people decide their future course in life. But it can also be a very off-putting experience if a student is pressured into going to a four-year school because her parents want her to, or  because that's where everyone in his family has always gone. The simple fact of the matter is that some people aren't cut out to go to college; others aren't ready for it when they graduate high school. So let them make educational choices that are appropriate for them. If a young woman is happiest tinkering with automobile engines, then by all means let her pursue that. It may be that in a few years she'll be tired of manual labor and want to try something different--at which point she can always explore the college route. But if you force her into a college against her will, and she does poorly as a result, it will be a lot less likely that she'll ever come back.

OK, education rant over. Other key issues: energy (especially as it relates to our crippling dependence upon oil, whether domestic or--mostly--foreign), fiscal sanity (i.e., eliminating the Bush tax cuts welfare grants to the wealthy, reining in our exploding national debt, encouraging the return of a culture of saving instead of profligacy, reforming the Bush-era corporate-inspired "reforms" of credit card fees and bankruptcy policies, etc.), and the social safety net (and the erosion thereof by the Republicans).

Michael

I think that energy is very important as well.  This country should be focusing on developing new and more efficient ways of using energy.  The states is falling behind in the scientific development of new technologies in these areas, partly because the current administration has no respect for science.  

Best of luck.

The best I can do to sum up my thoughts is to say that I want my representatives to stand up for me - for regular, average Americans. Iraq is and will probably remain a crisis of epic proportions. So is healthcare, the environment and jobs.

My own Democratic congressman voted for the bankruptcy bill and did so in the face of the administration's war on the middle class. I want that kind of thing to stop. I real representation.

Until the campaign finance system is fixed, we won't truly solve any of those problems.

Money Laundering Delay.
Valerie Plame.
Fixing Intelligence.
Changing results of science reports to fit policy.
Media manipulation ala Armstrong/medicare/social security.
Media manipulation ala Miller.
Election Reform stonewalling.
Miers, Brown et al.
Cheney's Energy Policy council.
Enron et al.
Bremer's missing 9 Billion.
No bid contracts.

I'm a true believer in the idea that if you get rid of corruption, good policy just happens.

Thank you very much for asking. Is there any chance you would move to Florida?

All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss. (Douglas Adams)

OK....The medicine to prevent further strokes is very expensive.  I am applying for Medicaid, but that will take months, if it comes through.   How many people die due to situations like this?  My country cares little about people if they can't pull themselves up by their own bootstraps like good little pioneers should.  

cliff