first question

1. You say you will submit a bill every day congress is in session with language to repeal the health care bill, even though you admit that it wont pass the senate or make signature. Is this a valuable use of limited time? Is it sustainable to the electorate?

blisters in the sun

the violent femmes said that.

today i woke up and it felt like 2006. I'm excited. These last two years have been especially foreign to me, as I was put in a position where to accept and support optimism was the best thing to do, for myself and society, such that it is. This is not to say i did not believe in policy, but rather that I realized the avenue towards policy change being utilized was through collective optimism. It was my skepticism in the ability of the nation's collective optimism to remain well, collectively optimistic that many of my fears laid. And seemingly for worse, it faded...

I'd refer you back to my posts in the days leading up to and following election night 2008 for more detail on that, but the reader can find those on their own, and not rely on me. that brings me to my next point- The role of optimist and policy champion was too foreign to me, and indeed it was too foreign to the youth that made 2008 possible. We were too fickle in the face of angry and disillusioned middle aged white men.

We also know that i am passively optimistic, at best. And even that may be generous.

As i told my roomate today, sarcastically (but still astutely)-

'you know, they (tea partiers) keep going back to our founding documents, and in spite of the fact that they are misreading both the spirit and fundementals of those texts, they have gotten something right-- They are returning us to the time when only white, middle aged landowners had a stake in government.'

etc..

I mean that in all seriousness.

But the caveat is this-- its only because we let them (retake power). it is on us and no one but us. such is the reality of democracy. (or such is the reality of the illusion of democracy).

Maybe if we let their experiment have two years, at which point it will end in abject failure, we can take this back. If we do our jobs.

This begs the question, maybe an electoral majority is not where the democrats are strongest (a la clinton 1994)? We are going to find out, for sure.

But as J. Judis pointed out in TNR today, the cyclical recessions post WWII (read: early 1990s) are VASTLY different than the one of 2007-. Today's is much more in common with the late 1800s and the great depression. As we did from 2008-2010, looking to Keynes and Japan is not only rational, its prudent. But we don't need another lesson on depression economics by me (or maybe we do, and thats why we are sitting here today).

Dropped the ball.

So all of you guys, who are like me, and would rather be wonkish outsiders (those of us who realize that term is not a paradox). lets put ourselves back in business. Let's talk about the hegelian dialectic of the tea party and what that reveals about them. We can liken the emerging political actors to the characters in nazi literature in the americas, (be prepared for this one, its a certainty). There will be poetry. There will be economics. We are going to catch people with their pants down again (literally and figuratively, there will be lots of this, I'm quite sure). We are going to call bluffs and take people to task. We, don't have a narrow agenda.

Realize that this is not the low water mark that was Katrina. There is no Enron here. Or even shadowy politiking through the office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. Its better now than it ever was then. So lets not let those aspects of 'then' repeat themselves. Let's only be better watchdogs and better thinkers like we had been.

Thats all I've got for now-

so here we are.

I'm back.