Well…while I sit here watching the England France match, I thought I’d try to make some sense of the ideas that have been rattling around in my head today…one of the first is that I think it’s about time for a couple of things that have happened over the past day or so…the first of these is that one of the repubs has come out and said that the party has lost it’s way with all of the hostage taking on the debt and taxes…that came from ole Jeb Bush and he went on to comment that his father and Reagan would not be accepted in today’s party and something needs to be done about it…that they need to actually govern, not just oppose…
The second thing is a commentary done by E.J. Dionne in the Post today where he asserts that those on the left and center need to respond when the anti-government zealots keep screaming their heads off that government can’t do anything right….when all of us know that there are many things that only the government can and will do. Do you think that companies will spend their own money to stimulate the economy in a recession? Not on your life and I think E.J. is right that there are so many successes by government that we need to stop being afraid that the right will attack when we defend the role of government…they’re going to attack anyway so why be afraid of that? Geez…
Well…just a little short one to comment on an article that I read in the paper this morning done by E.J. Dionne where he posits that it is a lack of “reasonableness” that is poisoning our politics and keeping the country from dealing with the problems it faces. If you remember, early last year, I said the same thing about making a new party that is made up of reasonable people from both the right and left that can put party after country and use proven methods of economics to address the myriad problems in the economy. But, I still need to stress, as E.J does, that the unreasonableness is not equally distributed to both left and right but it is the far right that has hijacked the repub party and is the source of this nonsense. I guess I should feel flattered or proud that I came up with this idea first…before Keith or E.J. and that others are starting to see that it would be a good thing for the country and the world. See, I do have original thoughts that are not completely crazy….at least this time….
Well…if you don’t live in Michigan, you’ve probably not heard of the huge controversy we have going on in the East side of the state concerning the new US/Canada bridge that has been proposed to alleviate the congestion at the privately held Ambassador Bridge that connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Today’s article in the Detroit Free Press sheds a lot of light on why the Mattouns, the owners of the bridge, are spending so much money on trying to prevent another span being built…a big part being that they own the fuel sales rights on the bridge plazas and have a sweetheart deal where they don’t pay taxes on any of those sales…yep, they make a profit of almost 60 cents per gallon on each and every gallon of gas or diesel sold there, along with the money from tolls. A license to print money that they will fight to the death to protect…no matter what is good for the people of Michigan or the country….just another instance of the rich not giving a damn about anything but their money and power….who allows important border crossings to be privately owned anyway? This is one of only two in the US and needs to be run for the benefit of the country….not just one family.
The other thing that I wanted to talk about today is a neat article by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post this morning where he notes that people are starting to tire of the false choices that the repubs have been presenting to the country that are increasingly framed in the “either/or” and not the “both/and” that the country wants to hear…and the earlier presents a pessimistic view of the countries future that is not how you run a democracy. E. J. goes on to assert that this type of political rhetoric is one of the big reasons why we can’t find compromises anymore….I ask the question: why can’t we have a social safety net and lower deficits? Why can’t we cut government spending and still have the services that the majority of the country expects from government? I think it’s because politicians have gotten lazy and dogmatic and I agree with E.J. again that this type of false choice has substituted for thought and is the real reason that we can’t seem to solve any of the countries problems…geez…
What you never want to be….