I choose the phone book with one important caveat; cross check the names and just make sure we don’t choose anyone on the Walker recall petition list:)
He [Obama] could have ridiculed Mitt Romney’s super PAC for accepting $18 million from just 200 donors in the second half of last year, including million-dollar checks from hedge-fund operators, industrialists and bankers.
To get some historical prospective, it has been said the the 1960 JFK campaign got about 80% of it’s funding from about 4 donors.
Back in those days, you could actually get campaign buttons for free.
Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, assured a group of Democratic donors from the financial services industry that Obama won’t demonize Wall Street
Which is why one is able to breathe a sigh of relief after last night’s election results.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton: We regular conservatives “to all mortal appearance very much stupider” than the top conservative pundits have “found out the secret” flaw in Romney’s candidacy that most of those pundits have missed.
I think the people’s anger with Congress is misplaced.
They need to blame themselves, as well as their parents and grandparents, who voted for representatives in both parties whose goal was to expand this alphabet soup of administrative bureaucracies (EPA, FCC, FDA, HHS, TSA, SEC, FHA, FDIC, the list goes on ad nauseum). The administrative bureaucracy is now so large and out of control that it doesn’t really matter who we elect because Congress has effectively outsourced its power to unelected technocrats to dictate how we live through regulations, not laws. Newt calls it “bureaucratic socialism”. It’s been going on for decades, but people are finally waking up. I think the first wake up call came from the insane abuses by the TSA gropers at airports, and now by an unelected adminstrator like Kathleen Sebelious who is issuing orders that violate religious freedom. People are finally realizing that when they traded their liberty for a mostly false sense of security they made a bad trade.
On a related not, Walter Russell Meade has published a series of fascinating articles (three so far), titled “Beyond the Blue Social Model”. He goes through the history and mostly defends the initial progressive vision and accomplishments achieved under the “blue social model” of the last century, but he now recognizes that model is obsolete and is in desperate need of revision. He makes the case that it’s now time to stop centralizing more power in Washington and actually start to decentralize power and put it back in the hands of the state and local governments and the people. He is a Democrat. But he sounds more like a Tea Partyer or Rick Perry than Obama or most of his fellow Democrats.
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What They Are Saying About Me
"Someone with credibility is saying these things and trying to do something. Thank you."
"'Obtuse' is just about the nicest thing I could say about Jacobson. The problem with being too steeped in any profession is that you run the risk of no longer understanding the difference between reality and your profession's most obscure minutiae."
"I just wanted to thank you for writing such a great article on your reasons why you voted for John McCain. I wish everyone would have read that article."
"Jacobson is doing only what other McCain supporters are starting to do, produce these worthless pieces from some narrow perch in order to cover up their own racist bigotry"
"Cornell and the country need more educators like yourself to keep the flag of reason flying."
“I take it Jacobson teaches at the cow college part of Cornell, and not the elite section where Coulter attended.”
"Thank you for speaking out... and I hope you avoid repercussions in 'The People's Republic of Ithaca.'"
Comments
We should return to citizen legislators who have real jobs.
I choose the phone book with one important caveat; cross check the names and just make sure we don’t choose anyone on the Walker recall petition list:)
So, does this mean Tim Tebow, Tom Brady, Scooby Doo and Santa Claus can’t run, or just that they can’t run in Wisconsin?
Coooooorrrr-ect…
AND a Constitutional Federal government that citizen-legislators could deal with effectively,
WITHOUT the necessity of an entrenched, permanent bureaucracy to make sense of it (what sense there is…).
The NYT is stuck in fantasyland.
To get some historical prospective, it has been said the the 1960 JFK campaign got about 80% of it’s funding from about 4 donors.
Back in those days, you could actually get campaign buttons for free.
Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, assured a group of Democratic donors from the financial services industry that Obama won’t demonize Wall Street
These days that sounds like a quid pro quo.
Which is why one is able to breathe a sigh of relief after last night’s election results.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton: We regular conservatives “to all mortal appearance very much stupider” than the top conservative pundits have “found out the secret” flaw in Romney’s candidacy that most of those pundits have missed.
I think the people’s anger with Congress is misplaced.
They need to blame themselves, as well as their parents and grandparents, who voted for representatives in both parties whose goal was to expand this alphabet soup of administrative bureaucracies (EPA, FCC, FDA, HHS, TSA, SEC, FHA, FDIC, the list goes on ad nauseum). The administrative bureaucracy is now so large and out of control that it doesn’t really matter who we elect because Congress has effectively outsourced its power to unelected technocrats to dictate how we live through regulations, not laws. Newt calls it “bureaucratic socialism”. It’s been going on for decades, but people are finally waking up. I think the first wake up call came from the insane abuses by the TSA gropers at airports, and now by an unelected adminstrator like Kathleen Sebelious who is issuing orders that violate religious freedom. People are finally realizing that when they traded their liberty for a mostly false sense of security they made a bad trade.
On a related not, Walter Russell Meade has published a series of fascinating articles (three so far), titled “Beyond the Blue Social Model”. He goes through the history and mostly defends the initial progressive vision and accomplishments achieved under the “blue social model” of the last century, but he now recognizes that model is obsolete and is in desperate need of revision. He makes the case that it’s now time to stop centralizing more power in Washington and actually start to decentralize power and put it back in the hands of the state and local governments and the people. He is a Democrat. But he sounds more like a Tea Partyer or Rick Perry than Obama or most of his fellow Democrats.