Tea Party Plutocracy

In case you aren't paying attention, this is rather disturbing.

Judson Philips, president of Tea Party Nation, is in favor of only those who own property having the right to vote. See here. In a nation where owning property is as expensive as it tends to be in much of the United States (how many of those who "own" property do you think do so through credit and debt?), and where one third of the country does not own property, there is a name for that type of government and it is NOT democracy.

Moments from an Interview with Roger D. Hodge

Harper's Magazine recently published an interview with Roger D. Hodge, the author of The Mendacity of Hope. Although I disagree with many of his views on Obama, I thought the interview had some golden moments particularly when discussing the founding fathers. Here are a few of those moments:

Americans are preoccupied with the Founders, and that is not at all a bad thing, yet much of the contemporary discussion of the revolutionary generation and the early years of the republic is appallingly shallow. In my view, too little attention has been paid to James Madison’s political philosophy—which is surprising, since Madison is the principal author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Founders did not speak in one voice, and careful attention to the substance of their debates (which were in many ways far more acrimonious than our own cable TV spectacles) can help clarify contemporary controversies, especially when so many of our present political combatants are merely reenacting old debates in seeming ignorance of the principles that were originally at issue.

WikiLeaks, Terrorism, and AutoImmunity

Hello, my name is Will. My friend Aaron and I decided that we should start a blog, one which is likely to deal mainly with our thoughts about politics. Hopefully we will disagree, and dialogue about our disagreements, as much as we will agree. Hopefully we will also be able to rope several of our insightful friends into also sharing some of their thoughts here. And, of course, hopefully you the reader will join in our dialogue.

I have to start somewhere so I thought perhaps I would begin with the big news of the day, the secret diplomatic documents released by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks which are thought to have been provided to the site by the US soldier Bradley Manning.

I have not yet come to a conclusion about this event, or Manning's purported actions, or the nature of Wikileaks in general. I do, however, think that this event is very interesting for several reasons. I should warn the reader that the same observations which make the case interesting are also likely to make some of my thoughts potentially inflammatory. We do, however, live in a time when simple statements of fact can be controversial.

Manning's purported actions and those of WikiLeaks are being described alternately as a form of civil disobedience in the face of unlawful arrests and torture in Iraq, a suggestion made most notably perhaps by Daniel Ellsberg (who is himself famous for leaking the top secret Pentagon Papers in 1971) during his interview on Democracy Now, and as acts of terrorism amounting to a direct assault upon American security, for example by Republican Representative Peter King.

GOP, You're Up...

With Obama's announcement today of a two-year pay freeze for most civilian federal workers, and all the accompanying rhetoric of "the American people are tightening their belts, so should the government," it made me think of all of those government employees, and who they are. You know who they are? You're neighbors, you're cousins, you're mailman. They're clerks, and janitors, and security guards. They are, for the most part, everyday Americans like you and me.

Who hasn't had to tighten their belts? The top earners in this country. Yet while the GOP applauds the stagnation of wages for people like you and me, they are using every political trick and tool at their disposal to promote extending tax cuts for the rich that not only created the deficit in the first place, but if were let to expire, would go a hell of a lot further to reduce the deficit we have now, than any government pay freeze ever could.

We should let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire. Period. It's not even like it's a controversial concept. The vast majority of Americans are in favor of letting the cuts expire for the rich, including half of Republican voters!

GOP, you're up. Obama gave you the pay freeze. Now stick to your campaign promise to "listen to the American people."

I AM Serious... and DON'T Call Me Shirley...

As much as I hate for this sort of thing to be my first post, I'm sad to find out that Leslie Nielsen has just died. It goes without saying that he was a comic genius. Rest in peace.