Why I'm Stopping

First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who helped build, contributed to, and most importantly, read this space over the last couple of years. However, I think it’s time to spend my time and energy on something else. Special thanks to Babs, who helped get this whole thing started, and to E, who’s been unafraid to share his thoughts with what he knew would be a less-than-friendly audience.

It’s odd to kinda pull the plug on this just as election season is getting warmed up, but it’s really been some time coming. It’s not a matter of being tired of talking about things, or no longer wanting to engage in the types of discussions I have. It’s just that the stated goal of the site - to allow lots of people from different backgrounds to participate in a reasonable discussion of what’s important to them - hasn’t happened. While we have a steady, loyal, and decent-sized audience, the participation part never really happened. We had a lot of great monologues and dialogues, but no real “conversations.”

The fact is, Babs and I have been talking about these things via Twitter for several years. E and I have had these EXACT arguments for going on TWENTY years. Hopefully, we’ll continue to do so. It just won’t happen here. 

In an odd way, the catalyst for this decision was seeing Gabrielle Giffords at the State of the Union address. It made me remember what the president said as he euologized Christina Taylor - the little girl who was killed during the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords:

And I believe that, for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina-Taylor Green believed.

Imagine — can you imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy, just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship, just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future.

She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations.

I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us, we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

So, that’s what I need to concentrate on. I need to make sure that civic pride - something that I was taught as a kid, something you were probably taught to - exists in my own two daughters. I want them to be proud of their country. I want them to be proud of the people who serve it. I want them to understand that public service - even elected public service - is a noble thing. A difficult thing. 

For all our disagreement, E is absolutely right about something - the government can’t, and shouldn’t, do everything. It’s not up to our politicians to turn back from the brink of brinksmanship. It’s not up to them to “clean up the tone of Washington.” It’s up to us. Washington, D.C. doesn’t export vitriol. It imports it. It’s a reflection of us, in every way, both good and bad. When WE stop, THEY will stop. And it’s up to us to make that happen. Maybe not for my generation, maybe not even for my kid’s. But it has to start somewhere. Civic pride needs to make a comeback. 

This doesn’t mean to give up on issues and ideas that are important to you. It doesn’t mean anyone should stop fighting for what they think is right. It just means that we stop engaging in political wars that inflict nothing but collateral damage onto our nation’s institutions, and more importantly, it’s pride. 

A few years ago, I took my daughter to Washington. We had a blast. We saw the White House (my first trip inside), got a tour of Congress, saw the Smithsonian, the Supreme Court, the Washington Monument, walked the mall, the whole shebang. Izzy loved every second of it, and talks often of going back. She was BLOWN AWAY when we got a Christmas card from the Obamas, and even recognized that she’d been in the room where the State of the Union took place.

Izzy wasn’t geeked over the White House christmas card just because President Obama’s a Democrat. She wasn’t geeked about visiting Congress just because Democrats controlled it. She was geeked about them regardless of those things. It makes me sad to think that someday that excitement will die because grown-ups want to win elections, and I’m going to do what I can to make sure it doesn’t. 

Preview of SOTU Address

(crossposted at Confessions of a Cybernegress)

In just two minutes and twenty seconds, the president gives us a preview of his third State of the Union address. Obama says that his address will “be a bookend to what I said in Kansas last month about the central mission we have as a country, and my central focus as president.”

That speech in Osawatomie was as full-throated an endorsement of working-class America as we’ve seen from him; and if he uses this year’s SOTU to accept the role as leader in what the GOP calls “class warfare,” the dynamics of this election year could experience a pretty big shift. How should my governor, Mitch Daniels, use Right to Work as a counter to the president’s call for workers’ rights? How would Mitt Romney—less a sure thing now than just a week ago—massage his wealthbot predator history into the record of a blue-collar ally? How might Newt Gingrich’s gig as a “historian” for hire be explained?

The president will lay out a plan for an America where “everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” Leaving Speaker “Not as I do” Gingrich aside, Romney’s ball-park 15 percent tax rate plays right into that argument.

We’ve just started seeing commercials from the Obama reelection campaign, and it looks like the president’s third SOTU will also serve as his official campaign kickoff speech. Good. This is the time for Obama to list his achievements and his failures; his victories over Congress and the GOP’s earth-salting tactics. And if he uses his record to make his case—something Andrew Sullivan has rightly wondered aloud about—the State of the Union might change the game for the remaining GOP candidates. 

Another Unconstitutional Power Grab by the Presidzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

I had meant to write yesterday about the Iowa post-mortem, the run-up to New Hampshire, how hilariously unexpected it actually is that Rick Santorum is a presidential player in 2012, Newt Gingrich’s officially unofficial launching of his campaign to be Rick Santorum’s running mate, Michele Bachmann’s sashay down the memory hole, Rick Perry’s on-again, off-again love affair with his own political reputation, and about a dozen other things. It should have been my most prolific day ever.

Instead, I had to acknowledge that Tuesday night just wore me out. And besides, there were constitutional crises afoot!

President Obama today will give a recess appointment to Richard Cordray to serve as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau established under Dodd-Frank.  With Senate Republicans vowing to oppose any nominee absent structural reform of the CFPB, a Republican filibuster last month blocked the Senate from securing cloture on Cordray’s nomination.  Because recess appointments last until the end of the “next session,” Cordray’s appointment would last until the end of 2013.

Republicans immediately cried foul, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell arguing that the recess appointment “threatens the confirmation process and fundamentally endangers the Congress’s role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch.”   Speaker John Boehner called the move a “power grab,” and McConnell warned that the move took the White House into “uncertain legal territory.”

I actually read more legal analysis of this than I wanted to yesterday, and highly recommend this post from John Elwood at the Volokh Conspiracy if you’re interested in the nits and grits of it.

Basically, there is an organization called the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau. I use the word “is” because it exists. That’s actually an important part of the story. President Obama nominated a guy I’ve never heard of named Richard Cordray to fill the top job at CFPB. Republicans in the Senate, the body tasked in the Constitution with confirming presidential nominees of this sort, has decided not to act on the nomination. Not that there’s anything wrong with Cordray, mind you. In fact, the reason they’re not acting is because he’ll be confirmed pretty easily if it were to come to a vote. Instead, the reason is that they don’t like the CFPB. So, they’re using their check against the executive branch to not allow this to go anywhere.

So, the president used a recess appointment to circumvent the Senate yesterday.

That’s it. That’s the story. The President used the same recess appointment power presidents before him have to appoint a guy I’ve never heard of to a position I forgot existed because Republicans in the Senate wouldn’t allow themselves to confirm him because they don’t like the fact that this agency exists. Which, again, it already does.

So, we have cries from the right that the president has now abused his executive authority in direct violation of the Constitution.

To which I say… whatever. Is it the best way to do things? No. I’d prefer whoever this guy is get nominated, voted on, and appointed to his post through the proper channels. But is it a constitutional crisis? Probably not. Elwood makes a pretty good argument that it’s actually the Senate (and Democratic Senates that have done the same thing) that are in violation of the Constitution by not fulfilling their appointed duties and being completely uninterested in staffing large swaths of the government.

Yes, the Constitution provides a check on executive authority in the form of the confirmation process. But it shouldn’t be arbitrary. It shouldn’t be a way to weaken government because you don’t like it. It shouldn’t be a way to to weaken a president because you don’t like him. This goes for everyone. Part of winning elections means you get to appoint people to government jobs. If Democrats didn’t want Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court, they should have beaten George Bush. If Republicans didn’t want there to be a CFPB, they should have drummed up more votes against it. But to tie an arm behind government’s back because you don’t like it is a shitty way to do business.

But, as with all these prior accusations of unconstitutional this and power grabbing that and thuggish whatever, I’ll say the same thing: bring it to the Supreme Court. Republicans have Darrell Issa in charge of oversight and a conservative leaning SCOTUS. Is the president defying the constitution? Prove it. Until then, do your jobs.

For Poops and Haw-Haws - The Political Compass

I’m usually EXTREMELY wary of self-administered tests of ideology, but at the same time I can’t stop taking them every time I come across one. So, I thought it would be fun to post a link to one I just found, called the Political Compass.

It has the same drawbacks as most of these - political opinion is such an amorphous thing that unless it’s 1,000 questions long, there’s no way you’re ever going to pin anyone down. And yes, some of these questions are a little weird, but hey, I’m not the one that came up with it. As long as everyone’s playing the same game and answering the same questions, it provides at least a little bit of a basis for comparison. So, check it out. If you want to post your results in the comments, I’d be interested to see how some of you score. As for me:

Just as I always suspected - I’m basically Gandhi.

The numbers, which I’m still trying to attach some significance to, are 

Economic Left/Right: -5.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.44

As to why I get plotted as “center-left” when some of you doubtlessly think me more extreme, I can only assume that if this were a questionnaire specifically for American political ideology, my little dot would be a little closer to the margin. But, when people talk about “liberalism” and “socialism” in central Europe, and places in South America, they keep it EXTRA real. I can’t compete with that.