While voters in our groups gave the president higher marks on the economy after the speech than before, that was clearly driven by his new priority, jobs, and perhaps a clearer understanding of the difference between Bush era policies and the new one. Still, the president and the Democrats in Congress do not yet have a narrative or a framework to explain their economic policies in a period where the gap grows between macro and micro growth.
To make matters worse, there is the perception by some fairly smart people that there may not be a narrative to be found. We may be living in an America that is ungovernable.
System Failure Toward the end of the decade, as the establishment definitively rebuked Bush and sought to distance itself from his failures, the big-tent center-left coalition took on an influential constituency--the Colin Powells and Warren Buffetts--who didn't want reform so much as they wanted restoration. This was reflected in a strange internal tension in the Obama campaign rhetoric that simultaneously promised both: change you can believe in and, as Obama said at a March 2008 appearance in Pennsylvania, a foreign policy that is "actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father."
If the working hypothesis that bound this unwieldy coalition together--independents, most liberals and the Washington establishment--was that the nation's troubles were chiefly caused by the occupants of the White House, then this past year has served as a kind of natural experiment. We changed the independent variable (the party and people in power) and can observe the results. It is hard, I think, to come to any conclusion but that the former hypothesis was insufficient.
The Teabaggers, Sarah Palin, they are a natural outgrowth of the elemental , gut level perception that things have become fundamentally unhinged. The pain that this movement seems to represent is all to real. The fear that this pain spawns leads them to flail about for reasons, causes, ways out, and heaven help anyone who has the responsibility, the job of trying to fix the mess - which maybe in the short term unfixable.
Here in Texas, the fallout of misgovernance is all around us. Recall our rankings in education, child welfare, prisons, care for the mentally ill, juvenile justice. Don't forget our defective revenue system make worse and worse by the Governor's mindless mantra of cutting taxes.
There is a sickening sameness to stories about how Texas treats its least powerful citizens. The pattern usually starts with some perceived need to economize, usually brought on by efforts to maintain public
services on the cheap. There is also the element of irresponsible tax cuts . Unfailingly the red herring of "abuse" by the victims justifying more odious rules and arbitrary hoops to be jumped through is injected, this is accompanied by the explicit or tacit appeal to "our" moral superiority to them - poor people, poor children, those who must use and work in public schools, the unemployed, those without health care the list is endless.
Now comes the latest installment of this sad and tawdry soap opera with its standard casts of characters - the Food Stamp approval scandal.
Let the usually reserved William Ludwig, USDA regional chief, explain:
"All states are feeling the pinch right now because of the economic recession, but I'm not aware of any state that is having it to the degree that Texas is"
[snip]
Ludwig, who rarely gives interviews, oversees food stamps for Texas and four other states. He attributed the state's problems last week to a "whole series of missteps, mismanagement over the last four years," starting with thousands of state workers getting pink slips in advance of a massive privatization effort.
"America's government was made only for people who are moral and religious."
That is the message behind ten billboard advertisements in Florida that are attacking the separation of church and state; the Community Issues Council (CIC) has funded the billboards advertisements in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times, Terry Kemple, the president and sole employee of the CIC, claims that there is a national necessity for Christian governance.
However, the billboard featured in the St. Petersburg article attributes a completely false quote to President George Washington: "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible." While the newspaper characterized the quote as "fictional attribution" and Kemple does not believe that there is a "document in Washington's handwriting that has those words in that specific form," the billboard itself directly attributes the quote to Washington.
The billboards have not gone unchallenged; there is an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Tribune by J. Brent Walker which thoroughly debunks the "false claims and misleading assertions about our country's history and commitment to religious freedom." However, thousands if not millions of people will read those billboards and many will take the misleading attributions as fact.
In the Constitution -- Article I lays out the role of Congress and Article II lays out the role of the President, not the other way around. Thus Congress has a great deal of power to lead right now, if Senators and Members would only exercise their governing rights under the Constitution. But for too long we have vested far too much power in in our Presidents. And we are wanting to vest more power in the hands of our President-elect right now than he can have. He, like all of us, is bound by Constitutional processes, and he understands them full well, having taught Constitutional law for several years himself.
Thus, the profit margin you were so quick to criticize ends up being far less in the long run than the bloatedness that often is our government.
Several commenters had their say and made some good points. I occurs to me that I have never laid out my case against using the free market as a check on government. Simply stated the "free market can't be a check on government because not everything can be measured in dollars and cents, nor do we have the "free market" the writer seems to believe. Finally, as long as elections are financed by the corporations and individuals with the big bucks the smart marketeer will do what we expect marketeers to do: rig the game in his favor.
The real problem is Perry's conclusion that the state is unable to perform one of the most basic functions of government since before the invention of the horseless carriage: The construction, maintenance and operation of vital public infrastructure.
The governor's fear of taxes in any form is so visceral that he finds himself unable to conclude that there is any other way to build much needed public highways than to turn the process over to private enterprise.
Perry and his supporters love to pitch the idea by saying it is a way to develop public infrastructure without levying any new taxes.
What they fail to highlight is the fact that somehow at some time the public will be picking up the tab for privately developed highways, only the bill will be higher because the developer will be tacking on a profit margin - probably a very large profit margin.
More beneath the fold.
[minor revision - links added]
Is there any area of our government, over the span of the last seven years, any area, in domestic or foreign policy, national defense, public welfare, the economy, name it, where the average, reasonably informed American might point to success, to signs of progress, of improvement, something, anything, to point to with satisfaction, with pride?
Yesterday I read an article by Steve Benin on the resignation of Karen Hughes from her post as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a mouthful there, and a job for which she was as ill suited and unqualified as the man who appointed her and in which, during her two year tenure, she accomplished little, if anything.
In truth, she accomplished nothing, unless you want to count convincing large portions of the world that all Americans must be as out of touch with reality, as clueless and unthinking as their current Commander in Chief, and at that she excelled, as anyone might, having been dispatched to the Middle East with the rank of Ambassador, but without knowledge of the language, culture, history, religions, and general pet peeves of the various states and peoples of the region.
But Karen Hughes was tapped for her office for the same reasons as all Bush appointees are chosen, not for expertise or experience, not for performance or integrity in public service but for loyalty, for unwavering belief in the Messianic delusions of neo conservatism, and a willingness to march in lockstep, nah, goose step, against all who might disagree or dissent.
So, you are Exxon, one of the richest corporations in the world. You have operations here in Texas and Texas, lacking a sane, progressive income tax system to pay its bills, taxes land. You want to cut your tax bill. No problem, just graze a few longhorns on the property in question and call it an "ecology labatory" or grow some crops around it and claim the agricultural exemption.
Last year, 61 parcels of land in Travis County were designated as ecology laboratories for research purposes, which saved the 22 owners thousands of dollars in property taxes.
But this year, every one of those ecolab exemptions was denied after the Travis County Central Appraisal District determined that they weren't legitimate. A couple have been reinstated since they were pulled, and other property owners may sue, but there is a fundamental problem with the state's ecolab and wildlife preservation tax exemptions: It is hard to know whether they are legitimate.
Texas also provides tax exemptions for agricultural and ranch land, tax breaks that can be abused as well. An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal focused on corporations that set aside acreage in Texas to graze cattle or as wildlife habitat to get sizeable tax breaks.
A piece over at Quorum Report which I can no longer find quoted some of the "enviornmental reporting done to qualify for the ecolab break, things like reporting that a certain bird flew over the property.
The meme that seems to be developing over the past weeks is this: "Americans want the politicans to reach accross the partisan divide and work together." NPR is running a series on reaching accross such divides all this week.
Notice the persumption in that meme: that what brought us to the present political trainwreck was the failure of ALL politicans to reach accross the great divide and extend a hand of cooperation toward our common goal - the well being of the American people.
[Click on the links for pictures, I haven't yet figured out how to insert images. Anyone?]
Two devices designed to perform the same function, one automated and one manual. You will find the automated widget more frequently than ever. Thus you will find yourself frustratedly, even frantically, waving your hands to no avail in an attempt to coax a few inches of paper to dry your hands, or a short stream of water to wet your hands. Why not have a knob or a lever to manually control the flow?
The Austin City Council has released the final ballot language for the upcoming propositions including the citizen-initiated Proposition 1 and 2. For the first time in Texas history, a municipal council was directed by federal court to rewrite ballot language as it was found that the language did not "present a fair measure of the proposed measures [and] chief features" and gave the City Council a deadline to change the language. Since I covered the last, and now found illegal, ballot language, I'll do the same for this final version.
Cross-posted from Daily Kos. Suggested by a commenter that I post it here as well. Thanks, edalex.
If you go a little over 1 mile southwest from the direct center of downtown Austin, Texas, you'll find yourself at one of the greatest natural sites left in Texas: Barton Springs pool. Fed by the endangered Edwards aquifer, the water is a clear and cool 68 degrees year round, making the swimming in the middle of the Texas summer at least bearable until the cool Fall breezes sweep in. Barton Springs is in the southern part of a 12 mile long greenbelt of undeveloped land that snakes through the western edge of Austin, much of which has been set aside by the citizens of Austin in bonds to protect the green space as well as the sensitive aquifer that resides beneath it. Most Austinites visit Barton Springs pool a couple of times a month in the summer to roast in the Texas sun and share the natural experience with other Austinites so close to the hustle, sprawl and large, multi-story buildings of downtown. To most in Austin, Barton Springs isn't merely a swimming hole; it's a generational gift to them from their parents and a prime example of what defines Austin as a city and a culture.
Is there any area of our government, over the span of the last seven years, any area, in domestic or foreign policy, national defense, public welfare, the economy, name it, where the average, reasonably informed American might point to success, to signs of progress, of improvement, something, anything, to point to with satisfaction, with pride?
