DAILY TOL: Tree of Liberty

The framer’s of our Constitution were a non-trusting lot.  Even a cursory examination of how the three branches of government interact shines a bright light on either their intense paranoia or inspired genius.  They knew that in man’s quest for power and control, the people would fear a government that did not fear the people.

The best way, they reasoned, to keep a government fearful of the people is by keeping that government from amassing too much power.  The first step to keep a government from amassing too much power is to split it into three parts.  Then, just to be sure, our framers interlocked the three parts in such a way that any stretch by one part to gain power would place stress on the other two and thereby maintain the desired equilibrium.  Paranoid…perhaps.  Genius…undoubtedly.

We have the Legislative branch where the raucous House of Representatives provides the closest link between the elected and the electorate to which they have to answer every two years.  It is in the House that passions flare and the inspired ideas of the people are often first given voice.  If the House is the cup in which our passions boil, the Senate is the saucer that protects the People from scalding coffee that sloshes over the side.  The Senate…where one lone voice can halt the entire body and where 60 must agree before a vote can even be taken.  It is in this most deliberative of bodies where the President must go for advice and consent when appointing those who have their hands on the levers of power.  This advice and consent provides accountability to the People indirectly through their elected Senators.

We recently witnessed one of the most crucial examples of advice and consent with the confirmation of our new Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor.  This confirmation process isn’t optional.  It is clearly spelled out in Article II, Section 2 of our Constitution which states that all “high government positions,” are required to be confirmed.

How then is it that President Obama has more than 30 unelected, unconfirmed, high government positions currently filled with people answerable only to the Executive branch.  This is simply unacceptable and we must immediately demand that these positions either be confirmed by the Senate or explicitly require by Senate resolution that no appropriated funds can be used by, or in the service of, these Czars.

Because it is fashionable to place all Patriotic arguments in terms of Left and Right, Blue and Red, Donkey and Elephant, I include for your linking pleasure a pleathora of liberally inclined patriots who have taken serious issue with this egregious extension of power by the Executive branch.

• Salon
• Senator Byrd
  • CBS
  • NY Times
  • La Times
  • CNN
• CNet

Read for yourselves.  Become educated, which means doing more than mindlessly ingesting data without engagement or analysis.  This is our Republic.  Take responsibility for your role as a member of the electorate.  Hold your Senators accountable by demanding that these Czars, too, be held accountable.

Mark your calendars because today I am coining a new term that will soon sweep the nation.  I’ve coined terms in the past only to see them widely adopted without acknowledgement.  No more…I’m planting my verbiage flag today.

Bubbleheads

These creatures come in two primary varieties, Professional and Amateur.  Each of those varieties have a two minor variants, Democrat and Republican.

I don’t so much mind the professional bubbleheads because their job tends to make them that way.  Limbaugh, Hannity, Mathews, Olbermann, Maddow…bubbleheads all.  In short, they live in their ideological bubbles surrounded by like-minded bubbleheads all constantly nodding to each other.  I guess that really makes them Bobblehead Bubbleheads.

It’s when you and I join the Bobblehead-Bubblehead ranks that I really get irked.  Are we that intellectually lazy that we have to tune in for someone else to give us our opinions.  “Oh, thinking is just too hard,” we must be saying to ourselves, “Let me tune in to Chris Mathews for some spot-on analysis of the issues.”  What’s the point, folks.  Can you not predict what Chris “Obama makes a thrill go up my leg” Mathews will say about any issue?

Free your mind, Neo.  I swear, if I ever run for office…and God help you all if I do…I would hold regular Opposition Townhall Meetings, where the price of admission is to completely disagree with what I believe.  If we truly want to move our country forward, we first must have vigorous debates.  In times like these, the most intellectually honest of us should be seeking ideological whiplash by reading about an issue first in the Weekly Standard and then Daily Kos.  Watching it first with Olbermann and then with Hannity.

If you are a liberal, put down the Chris Mathews crack pipe a minute, take a long pull off the Sean Hannity pipe and see if you feel like your head is about to explode.  If it does, that’s good, it means your brain still works and you can stop being such a bubblehead.  Use these professional bubbleheads to challenge your assumptions not validate them because such validation is a foregone conclusion and turns your brain to jelly.

Check out the clip below where Chris Mathews couldn’t control himself for even 30 seconds when Bobby Jindal came out to deliver the GOP response to President Obama’s address to congress.  He just had to exclaim, “Oh, God…”  I’m pretty sure Mr. Mathews wasn’t actually being visitied by God which leads me to say, “Mr. Mathews…you, sir, are a Bubblehead.”

A few days ago I wrote about my belief that our government is incenting personal irresponsibility.  One of our readers evidently created a link from my post to their Facebook and I ended up getting quite a bit of e-mail, the vast majority of which was quite positive.  I’d encourage those that sent e-mails to memorialize their thoughts as comments, good, bad, or indifferent.

In that post, I anticipated certain characteristics of President Obama’s, then forthcoming, Housing plan.  Unfortunately, many of the aspects I feared are present in his proposal.  I’ll rehash a bit of that here, but for a different purpose than presented in the original post.

First, I’ll start with the premise that I believe it is patriotic to do what is in the best interest of the country.  If you disagree with that premise, you certainly won’t find much common ground in this post.  That said, regardless of where one stands along the Liberal to Conservative spectrum, I believe most of us agree with this premise.

That being true, it follows that fostering one’s ideology in service to a political party can hurt the country and thus be unpatriotic.  In such situations, having the virtue of intellectual honesty becomes indispensable.

Here is a quick example and then I will tie it back to the Housing proposals.  First, I think it was quite nice that Tol gave a nod to Daily Kos and its founder in his first post, but I think that site very often places winning before country.  I scan the front page Diaries at Daily Kos regularly and Kos regularly keeps folks updated on the MN Senate race, but I have never read a cogent post against Al Franken.  Two issues:  First, just on the face of things, is it reasonable for everyone in a community to believe that Al Franken would be a better Senator than Norm Colman.  Al Franken?  Everyone? I’ve done considerable research on both men and I simply don’t think a strong, let alone, absolute argument can be made for Franken.  He seems to be the choice of those who want to “Win” rather than do what is best.  Ok, but more important than any one man or one election is the electoral process itself.  If the people of MN want Franken, they should get Franken.  However, they seemed to first have chosen Colman and under recount now may have chosen Franken.  I’ve done a fair bit of research here as well and there definitely seems to be multiple standards applied to what constitutes a valid vote, depending on where in MN it was cast.  I could well be wrong, but on Daily Kos I found no such discussion but plenty of gloating and plenty of what appeared to be win-centricity.

I understand the genesis of this passionate group-think from folks who, perhaps, felt disenfranchised and disillusioned after the last eight years, but principles are things you should embrace most tightly when tempted to discard.  Regardless of label, vigorous debate is good and homogeneous thought is, at best, pointless.

Allow me to tie this back to Housing via some personal disclosures.  A couple years ago I moved my family for medical reasons, selling a house and purchasing a new one.  I had been in the old house for a while and accumulated some equity.  When establishing the new loan, I used all that equity as a down payment.  I made this decision over the advice of my mortgage broker who suggested I max out the loan to value on the house, which would free up that equity to buy new cars, a family vacation, or “something nice for my wife.”

Well, financing cars, vacations, or something nice for my wife over 30 years struck me as wrong so I opted for a smaller loan, smaller house payment, and more equity.

Less than a year after buying the new house, I received an unsolicited appraisal showing that it had appreciated by around 40% and was offered a home equity loan for all that appreciation PLUS some of the original down payment I had made.  We still had the same old cars so could have swapped them out for even better ones than those suggested by the original mortgage broker, but my principles hadn’t changes so I declined.

Since that point, about 35% of that 40% appreciation has vaporized and had I followed conventional wisdom, I would be nearly upside down on my house, with huge payments and a risky job market.

Whose fault would that have been?  Predatory lenders are, well, predators but temptation is as old as Adam and we have to take responsibility for the apples we eat.  Or do we?

Under this week’s proposal people can “transition from home ownership” (the new euphemism for foreclosure) without affecting credit ratings.  Those that continue to make payments are eligible for $1,000 from the government.  Bankruptcy judges can reset mortgage terms. And on and on…

Forcibly removing families from their homes evokes a visceral reaction in me.  I hate the idea.  It makes me angry and it makes me deeply sad.  Angry at the lenders.  Angry at those too weak to resist temptation thereby placing their family’s well being at risk.

And yes, righteous anger, as one of the vast majority who has acted responsibly and has sacrificed to try and ensure their family’s safety.  Some may say, that it is sour grapes because the Joneses are driving around in their new Lexuses while their mortgages are being reset.  No, it is that the government’s actions will cause via deflation and later inflation, me and my family to literally pay for the poor judgement of others.  $1,000 to people who stay current on they payments?  Since when did doing the right thing become behavior subsidized by the vast majority who have been doing the right thing all along.

It simply is not sustainable.  With each action that rewards irresponsibility, some additional fraction of Americans will throw up their hands, succumbing to the siren’s call of eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow the government will cure my hangover.  When we pass that tipping point where our countrymen simply vote themselves bread and circuses, collapse and/or revolution becomes inevitable.

This seems self evident to me, but if I am wrong show me where.

It angers me nearly beyond words that Ideologues like those at Daily Kos do not even discuss this.  Surely most of them pay their mortgages and live within their means.  Surely being progressive doesn’t mean advocating irresponsible behavior that they must then pay to correct.  I don’t care what side of a reasoned argument someone comes down on, but have the argument…Please!!

In its absence, I can only assume monolitic agreement occurs because they want their party to Win more than they want their country to win.

President Obama paraphrased scripture in his inaugural when he stated that it was time to put away childish things.  I quite agree.  Self-centered irresponsible behavior subsidized by one’s neighbor and placing party before country are two childish things whose time never should have been.

My son and I had an interesting conversation this morning and having recently started this blog, I spent a bit of extra time thinking how I would respond.

Here’s the backdrop.  On Friday, he was in the room when a news report was broadcast that a few of the USS Cole family members were asked to leave the White House and were not allowed to speak with the press while on the grounds.  This little nugget was bouncing around his head until this morning when he asked what it was all about.

As parents, we are presented these teachable moments all the time; life is nearly one continuous teachable moment, but that’s another story.  Part of the problem in our country today is that parent’s often infuse blind ideology into their responses or, worse, cede the discussion entirely to our school systems, which have a decidedly ideological bent.  This approach, while making the parent or teacher feel pretty good about themselves at the time, can create a life-long impediment in our children’s ability to judge situations and arguments based on the merits rather than some deeply ingrained ideological filter.

All that said, here’s how I responded:

Read the rest of this entry →

Imagine my surprise, but one of the things I prize most in any discussion is intellectual honesty. To disagree with someone on a point simply because of their ideology or because you’ve disagreed with them on all previous points is simply intellectually dishonest.

Here’s the backdrop.  David Gregory has picked up the mantel of Meet the Press and clearly went to school on the man whose giant shoes he’s agreed to fill, the late Tim Russert. He does a good job and I recommend his program. Today, he asked Barney Frank why so many politicians fail to live up to the public’s expectations. I’m paraphrasing, but Rep. Frank said, “The voters do not hold us accountable enough.”

I couldn’t agree more. And let’s start with Rep. Frank. Why do the people of his district return him to Washington every two years? While he attempts to shift blame, he has Chaired the Financial Services Committee for over two years now. How is it in that time he never caught wind of the tsunami in which we now find ourselves. More, a year ago Rep. Frank was publicly proclaiming Fannie and Freddie fundamentally strong.

There are many issues on which Rep. Frank and I disagree, but that is not the point of this post. My point here is that until our representatives believe there are consequences for failure, their behavior will not change. Voter’s must enthusiastically cross party lines when their party’s incumbent fails to deliver. Democrats in Massachusetts should have gleefully sent Rep. Frank packing for his abject failure as Chairman.

Speaking for my lone vote, I have placed my Senators and Representative on notice, just because my state and district is Red/Blue, don’t be complacent. The people are roiling mad at your continued bickering and ineptitude. Your party affiliation will not protect you from incompetence, at least if I have anything to do about it.