We are at fundamental loggerheads
on those two agencies, and probably the EPA. The air we exhale
(carbon dioxide) is now a "pollutant." Next, they will begin the
Orwellian task of deciding who gets to pollute by being allowed to
breathe.
Overstated? Perhaps. But with the Health Care "individual
mandate," I'm thinking it is much less overstated than it was
10-15 years ago.
David
"Anyone
who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for
people than people do is a swine."--P. J. O’Rourke
On 11/10/2010 2:23 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Centroids :
Interesting take on
Radical Centrism from a mainstream newspaper writer.
I think he more-or-less
gets the idea, and obviously he is familiar with
at least some of the
terminology. One can, indeed, seek a new way,
an alternative to
Democratic and Republican political orthodoxy,
to try and be genuinely
fair-minded yet, in the end, make strong
criticisms of one party
vs the other because, at one time in our
political history, that
party needs it more than the other.
Personally, I have my
worries about the new GOP majority in the House.
Will it result in
pressures to dismantle the Dept of Energy and the
Dept of Education ?
While, yes, I would like to see both agencies
reformed, maybe greatly
reformed, no way do I want to see them
abolished. So, just
maybe, a year from now, it will be the Republicans
who merit uncompromising
criticism. I reserve that option and
will guess that, about
more than one policy decision in the House
in 2011, it will be
excercized. But now it is Obama's turn, and
the turn of the
Democrats.
Nice article. Not quite
the focus any of us here might prefer,
but thoughtful,
nonetheless.
Billy
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Community Voices
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
The
Radical Middle
Tuesday, November
09, 2010 01:40 PM
Written by Chad Hermann
(in which the
first lady saw the midterm elections coming)
In February of
2008, hitting her stride and kicking toward
the finish line of a fiery speech on the UCLA
campus,
Michelle Obama uncorked one of those giddily,
gloriously over-the-top,
really-kind-of-silly-if-you-think-about-it
passages for which the Obama campaign became
famous. (Rise
of the oceans, anyone?) The
kind
that swooned the hopers, rankled the haters,
and left everyone in the middle wondering, to
steal a great phrase from Dennis Roddy’s
Early Returns column today, how long it would be
before everyone on both sides drank a
large, steaming mug of calm-the-hell-down.
Almost three years later, we’re
still waiting and wondering. And after what
happened last Tuesday, it’s pretty clear those
actions won’t be ending anytime soon. But it’s
also clear that, for better and for worse, in
midterm sickness and in electoral health, viewed
through the 20-20 hindsight of November 2010,
Mrs. Obama’s remarks were positively prescient:
Barack Obama will require you
to work. He is going to demand that you shed
your cynicism. That you put down your
divisions. That you come out of your
isolation, that you move out of your comfort
zones. That you push yourselves to be
better. And that you engage. Barack will
never allow you to go back to your lives as
usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
Yes, it’s soaring and
eloquent rhetoric. And, yes, it’s pompous,
Messianic poppycock. But it’s also a kind of
eerie, awfully accurate pre-vision of the effect
her husband would have on the folks now steeping
themselves in the Tea Party.
Thanks to his Presidency — or, more
accurately, an often irrational fear of it — a
lot of people went to work (opposing him), shed
their cynicism (for some new and aimless
idealism), put down their divisions (to unite
against him), came out of their political
isolation, moved out of their homegrown comfort
zones, pushed themselves and their country to be
better (whether you agree with them or not), and
got engaged. Hoo boy, did they.
As long as he’s in office, it’s a safe bet that
these folks — far from the liberals and
progressives, the hopers and changers to whom
Mrs. Obama that day called — will not go back to
their lives as usual, or as uninvolved. The jury
is still out on uninformed.
All in all, not a bad bit of divination from
thirty-two months out. Good enough, I’d say,
that if Mrs. Obama makes any sort of soaring,
silly pronouncements next February, betting men
and women, especially those with a finger to the
wind and a stake in the outcome of November
2012, would do well to pay attention, to pore
over her words and see if they perhaps can read
her rhetorical tea leaves, read her mind, or at
least her rhetorical tea leaves, if only to see
what wickedness could be brewing next.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
|
