Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States
It's a historic event considering the context. As often as I have expressed dislike for any ideas that his race should play a part in any decision on how to vote, I am glad to acknowledge the step taken by voting him into office.
I've read a litany of blogs and commentary on the election and the results of the election. I still echo Radley Balko's sentiments regarding the price the Republican party needed to pay for abandoning any notion of being fiscally responsible/conservative. The distortion of the concept of a laissez faire market into one that is expressly corporatist has led to huge problems in the economic and financial center, all while ballooning false markets into an economically disastrous explosion.
My issue with the direction of the Obama Presidency is that it hopes to continue the false expectations put in place by the Bush administration. In some ways he has a difficult road ahead, because to change the nature of the economic downturn he'll either have to let the fallout begin or, as I mentioned in a previous posting, expand the intervention of government by continuing the Bush policies of extreme overspending in the hopes that there will be a turn around in the future that will somehow mitigate and continue the economic growth that was largely based on credit rather than an expansion in American earnings.
The other issue I have is the one of capitulation. The inability of the Democratic congress to enact anything that seemed to reflect the reasoning for being voted into office was troubling. There is an odd hope that the Democrats were just playing along to keep winning the elections without looking soft. Dailykos.com holds out that the Democrats will reverse all of these terrible choices in a sweeping fashion since now they have the power. That's idiotic. They made choices for political expediency. To forgive those misgivings leads down the same road that allowed the Bush Presidency to grab huge amounts of power. "Expand now and we'll cut back later." Temporary power has a tendency to become permanent and to forgive that capitulation smacks of illogical partisanship. Democrats, your leaders need to be held to task for their decisions and votes. If I can't have market liberalization then I'll have to settle for civil liberties. The issue is that Democrats have been largely ineffective in rolling them back.
The bright future I hope for is one where Republicans divorce themselves from the socially conservative fundamentalist right and focus more on sound economic policy. At the very least they'll learn to question executive authority. Hopefully they'll get rid of any semblance to Karl Rove style politics and instead focus on real policy that creates actual freedom rather than fear-mongering.
Inevitably the US is a market based economy. No amount of argument that Democrats are "socialists" will change the fact that we will continue to be a market economy. For one thing, if universal healthcare is going to happen please contact your Democratic congressman and senators about the Healthy Americans Act. Google it. Read up on it. Read multiple perspectives on it. It's a good solution that seems to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of our current system while still allowing market based plans to flourish without artificially forcing healthy people to pay more than they should as most community rating plans would, and in the end by offering individual subsidy it assists the needy without needlessly tying health insurance subsidy only to corporate benefits.
My last concern deals with environmental law. Because we are a market based economy the only way to push alternative ideas forward and allow them to flourish is to level the playing field. This means increasing energy costs for existing energy. Many mistakes have been made up to this point by backing the wrong thing. What is the right thing? We don't know. If we knew the solution it'd be easy to implement. We don't know. Something has to become competitive and the only way to push that is to level the playing field. The politicization of energy has caused some fundamental issues within the economy of the US that won't be resolved by randomly picking "the best thing" and running with it without understanding how it fits in the big picture. To make it fit in a market economy means making existing energy more expensive. This will affect the poor the most. Heating oil, electricity, natural gas, gasoline, propane, everything will be more expensive in order to level the playing field with the alternative. It might be worth it, to those that can afford it, but to those that can't...
I've read a litany of blogs and commentary on the election and the results of the election. I still echo Radley Balko's sentiments regarding the price the Republican party needed to pay for abandoning any notion of being fiscally responsible/conservative. The distortion of the concept of a laissez faire market into one that is expressly corporatist has led to huge problems in the economic and financial center, all while ballooning false markets into an economically disastrous explosion.
My issue with the direction of the Obama Presidency is that it hopes to continue the false expectations put in place by the Bush administration. In some ways he has a difficult road ahead, because to change the nature of the economic downturn he'll either have to let the fallout begin or, as I mentioned in a previous posting, expand the intervention of government by continuing the Bush policies of extreme overspending in the hopes that there will be a turn around in the future that will somehow mitigate and continue the economic growth that was largely based on credit rather than an expansion in American earnings.
The other issue I have is the one of capitulation. The inability of the Democratic congress to enact anything that seemed to reflect the reasoning for being voted into office was troubling. There is an odd hope that the Democrats were just playing along to keep winning the elections without looking soft. Dailykos.com holds out that the Democrats will reverse all of these terrible choices in a sweeping fashion since now they have the power. That's idiotic. They made choices for political expediency. To forgive those misgivings leads down the same road that allowed the Bush Presidency to grab huge amounts of power. "Expand now and we'll cut back later." Temporary power has a tendency to become permanent and to forgive that capitulation smacks of illogical partisanship. Democrats, your leaders need to be held to task for their decisions and votes. If I can't have market liberalization then I'll have to settle for civil liberties. The issue is that Democrats have been largely ineffective in rolling them back.
The bright future I hope for is one where Republicans divorce themselves from the socially conservative fundamentalist right and focus more on sound economic policy. At the very least they'll learn to question executive authority. Hopefully they'll get rid of any semblance to Karl Rove style politics and instead focus on real policy that creates actual freedom rather than fear-mongering.
Inevitably the US is a market based economy. No amount of argument that Democrats are "socialists" will change the fact that we will continue to be a market economy. For one thing, if universal healthcare is going to happen please contact your Democratic congressman and senators about the Healthy Americans Act. Google it. Read up on it. Read multiple perspectives on it. It's a good solution that seems to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of our current system while still allowing market based plans to flourish without artificially forcing healthy people to pay more than they should as most community rating plans would, and in the end by offering individual subsidy it assists the needy without needlessly tying health insurance subsidy only to corporate benefits.
My last concern deals with environmental law. Because we are a market based economy the only way to push alternative ideas forward and allow them to flourish is to level the playing field. This means increasing energy costs for existing energy. Many mistakes have been made up to this point by backing the wrong thing. What is the right thing? We don't know. If we knew the solution it'd be easy to implement. We don't know. Something has to become competitive and the only way to push that is to level the playing field. The politicization of energy has caused some fundamental issues within the economy of the US that won't be resolved by randomly picking "the best thing" and running with it without understanding how it fits in the big picture. To make it fit in a market economy means making existing energy more expensive. This will affect the poor the most. Heating oil, electricity, natural gas, gasoline, propane, everything will be more expensive in order to level the playing field with the alternative. It might be worth it, to those that can afford it, but to those that can't...
It is a problem: the only real link is that th;93#&yeve all made money for Orion. In terms of quality they're all over the shop... I can't imagine anyone whose tastes would run to all 20. They're not an outfit like Penguin Classics, say, or even Faber, where you can imagine any 20 books chosen from the list might have more in common.
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