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Banned
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Originally Posted by dc_dux
host..I assume that puts me in the denial crowd since I am more open to compromise and not as accepting of the ACLU/Greenwald rhetoric that IMO exaggerates the impact of the FISA Amendments.
rb....thanks for understanding, even if you dont agree.
So, for the record:
My Personal Resolution of Deniability
Whereas the accomplishments of the Democratic majority to expose and correct many of the abuses of the Bush Administration are numerous and comprehensive (see accomplishments), and
Whereas Uber Conservatives will deny such accomplishments and proclaim all Democratic actions to be political motivated by persons who don’t get it or are dishonest, and
Whereas Uber Liberals may declare such accomplishments insufficient and ideologically impure for not going far enough , and
Whereas, by most measures, a majority of American reject an extremist agenda, either uber conservative or uber liberal, and support or lean towards supporting a left-center domestic agenda and more mainstream center foreign policy/national security agenda , and
Whereas the Democratic party has expanded its tent and grown in the last six years to be more diverse and represent a broader spectrum of such policy positions, and
Whereas the leadership of the Democratic party recognizes that building a lasting and effective Democratic majority requires compromise, consensus building and a pragmatic and flexible approach to governing rather than a rigid ideological response.
Be It Resolved that many in the Democratic party in Congress and in Internet Political Forums will continue to pursue a pragmatic progressive agenda that has the support of a majority of Americans in order to achieve the goal of a more transparent and open government and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law.
Be It Furthered Resolved and speaking solely for myself, I have chosen such a practical and solutions oriented approach of my own free will and that I am in full possession of my faculties and not in denial.
DC_DUX More for the record:
host....I couldnt do what I do w/o those of you further to the left of me doing what you do....all in support of preventing the aceBush uberConservatives from continuing to do what they would do. |
_dux, I am surprised that I agree with you as often as I do, because I reject most of what you are saying, mostly because I don't see the "moderation" in the politics and core beliefs of the majority that you believe that they hold and exhibit, and, probably more so, because, even if your are correct about the broadbased American consensus, if "Middletown" is a "canary in the coal mine", there isn't time for your process of political progress, to get us where I think that we need to be.
There isn't time for the economy, for the supply of affordable oil, for the "war on terror", for the problem and effects of inequitable power and wealth distribution trends to "fix themselves".
This tells me:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...200944_pf.html
Questions for Tony Snow
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, May 12, 2006; 3:39 PM
....Poll Watch
Richard Morin writes for washingtonpost.com this morning on an poll conducted yesterday -- just as this new story was just starting to spread. It finds "that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it."
But take poll results about this complicated, unfolding story with a huge grain of salt.
As Carl Bialik wrote for the Wall Street Journal in February: "What does the public think about the Bush administration's wiretapping program?
"It depends on how you ask the question. . . .
"Such polls ask people for 'an opinion on an issue they're confronting and evaluating on the phone,' Mark Blumenthal, a Democratic pollster in Washington, D.C., and author of the Mystery Pollster blog, told me. 'They will pick up cues about language of the question.' "....
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...and so does this excerpt, that...."the people" need to be led, and Obama is following, not leading, and in his winning the approval of the "power elite", insuring that nothing of any substance, will change. I've highlighted in yellow, what I think is a condensation of what you say you stand for, and what the results of your principles/pragmatism, are....below that, are a near realtime description of the results:
Quote:
http://books.google.com/books?id=SVK...um=1&ct=result
....There had been a moment in the history of Middletown when it's symbols and beliefs ran parallel with it's dreams and the realities of everyday life. In the years of the economic boom, progress was apparent and touched everyone, though of course some profited from it more than others. With the Depression, on the other hand,
the distance between the symbolic universe of belief and the pragmatic universe of everday action has widened. They have again floated abruptly apart, and so far apart as to demand of Middletown either that it apply it's customary formula and blinldy deny that the gap has actually widened, or at least regard it as merely a temporary interrruption; or that it revise this high-floating world of symbols, restating it in humbler and less hopeful terms so as to re-locate it closer to everyday reality; or that it accept as normal the fact of living in an enhanced state of tension because of the unwonted permanent remoteness of the two planes. 32
The symbolic ceiling above Middletown has collapsed: there was no longer hope for everyone, but only a reality shaped by the will and actions of the power elite. Dreams themselves were reduced to contingencies and wonder had been exchanged for consumer object; or their range was restricted to the parameters of the possible, limited to the triviality of the objects within reach: in short, betrayed by themselves (Caillois 1990).
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...and "Middletown", in 2008...I found the comments, linked at the bottom, to be especially telling about where we are, and where we're likely to be going....this America in 2008:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...050502738.html
Middletown, Teetering On the Divide
An Indiana City With an Average Past Anxiously Faces an Uncertain Future
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; C01
MUNCIE, Ind.
In the 1920s, two amateur sociologists went searching for a city that was singularly unexceptional. They wound up here.
They made a study of Muncie, asking its children how often they read, and its women how often they ironed. Then more sociologists came, and market researchers and documentarians and journalists, poking and prodding over the decades, measuring Muncie with the calipers of their trades.
And the people here took it with characteristic good humor, except for the rare occasions when they wanted to run some pointy-headed jerk out of town. They understood why people came. America was nostalgic for a city like this, for a solid Midwestern community that called itself "America's Home Town."
Only now, Muncie is nostalgic for itself.
* * *
On the eve of the Indiana primary, does Muncie have anything to tell America? (And is it sick of being asked?)
"I don't know what to tell you about Muncie, but it's a dying town," says Ron Cantrell, working the cash register of a dusty liquor store on the south side of town, where things are bleakest. "It's almost dead. It's like a cockroach lying there with its legs in the air."
Muncie looks okay from certain angles, kind of like America. North of the White River, which bisects Muncie, things are pretty good. There's Ball State University and Ball Memorial Hospital, both large employers. There's Muncie Mall and the big-box stores, and -- why would anyone shop in Muncie's historic downtown anymore? How could those little shops possibly compare with Wal-Mart?
South of the river is the industrial part of town, and this is where you see the frayed seams of the Rust Belt. Here are the slumped houses, the abandoned fast-food joint, the wreckage of a leveled auto parts plant. Manufacturing jobs, long the backbone of the city's economy, have been leaving. Muncie has lost more than 10,000 people since 1980, and the population is now 66,000.
There are establishments on the south side that are little more than squat boxes with barred windows, built entirely for function and not a bit for beauty. One of these is the store where Cantrell works, which used to have two cash registers and now has one because there isn't that much business anymore. He sells cheap vodka and Natural Ice beer to people who walk and sway and shuffle in.
Cantrell, 51, says he'll be voting Democratic this election. He's not sure for whom yet, but Democratic for sure. Hillary or that guy, whatever his name is.
"As far as I'm concerned, the Republicans have turned things to [expletive]," he says. "I'm working two jobs now just so I can put gas in my van."
Cantrell talks about what it was like when his dad came up from the South, like so many others, to work in the parts plants in Muncie. How the city was thriving then. If people think this is Middle America, he says, they're wrong. Muncie doesn't represent Middle America anymore.
Probably.
"Well, I hope Middle America is a little better than what's around here," he says. "Otherwise, that's depressing."
* * *
What a burden, being average.
When Robert and Helen Lynd happened upon Muncie in 1924, looking for a place to study the effects of industrialization, they liked the city because it was "middle-of-the-road," they wrote, without "outstanding peculiarities or acute local problems." Not too big, not too small; not too hot or too cold. Not on either coast, but smack in the Midwest, which seemed more quintessentially American to the Lynds, somehow. For the purposes of their study, they named it Middletown.
Muncie was not truly average or typical in the literal sense. It had fewer immigrants than most Midwestern cities of its size, and what black population there was, the Lynds utterly ignored in their surveys.
But when the book "Middletown" came out in 1929, it became a national bestseller, and many Americans came to feel that Muncie was Anytown, U.S.A. Muncie became another Peoria for market researchers and trade journals, who figured that if, say, newfangled school supplies sold here, they would sell . . . everywhere!
"The only two books that are absolutely necessary for an advertising man are the Bible and MIDDLETOWN!" one sales journal declared, according to Sarah E. Igo's book "The Averaged American."
There have been many more sociological studies and books about Muncie over the decades -- so many that Ball State formed the Center for Middletown Studies. A filmmaker came in and made a documentary series that aired on PBS in the late '70s and early '80s.
The good people of Muncie could be forgiven if they have felt at times like lab rats.
"It was terrible -- it made us look like a bunch of dumb oafs," says Phil Ball, eating breakfast at an IHOP and remembering the documentaries.
Ball, 89, is a retired doctor and amateur town historian whose family came to this area in the early 1800s. (They were the "original" Balls, he points out, not related to the wealthy Ball family that made its money in glass manufacturing here, and after whom the university was named. "Fruit jar Balls," he says with mock derision.)
Ball has written a book called "Dr. Coldwater's Hilarious History of Muncie" and he pens occasional columns for the local paper with headlines like "What's the Latest News From Muncie? Nothing!" He likes it here, he says, because there's just enough to do and because he can get anywhere in 10 minutes and most of all, because he knows it.
"It's a comfortable town," he says.
Not a lot happens here, which was always part of the beauty of Muncie. We talk of "heartland values" and "Main Street" and "Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public." Muncie was all of that. Muncie didn't change. And now?
Muncie is still average, in a sense. If you consider uncertainty to be America's new norm.
* * *
The people of Muncie are not cynical when it comes to politicians, not exactly. But they are savvy.
They say we're not in a recession, says a retired press operator. You try telling the young people that.
They throw back shots and pretend to be like us, says a nursing instructor. I don't want a regular person in the White House. I want someone smarter than me.
They say, Jobs, jobs, jobs.
"I think it's a hollow slogan," says Jeff Lewis, who conducts political polls in Indiana, and who's sitting one evening at a retro-hip pub called Morton's, one of a few places that are trying to breathe life back into the old downtown.
"The glory days are gone," says his friend Joe Castelo, the former mayor of nearby Hartford City.
"Our students at Ball State . . . they don't stay around here," says Ray Scheele, a political science professor.
Once upon a time, "a guy who worked in the automotive industry here could have a boat, two cars, and his wife didn't work," Castelo says. "You were looked at like an idiot for going to college."
It will never be back the way it was, they all say. New jobs may come to Muncie, but it will never again be so easy to make a good living without a college diploma. And that's just the way it is. So when a candidate promises jobs, what sorts of jobs? And does the audience hear what it wants to hear because it wants things back the way they were?
The pollster, the politician and the professor are all Obama supporters. They think the Democratic vote will be close in Muncie, as it is across the nation, with the college students and the academics and the black community voting for Obama, and the white working class going for Clinton.
Speaking of Clinton.
"She opened up last week with, 'The issue in Indiana is jobs, jobs, jobs,' " Scheele says dryly. "And it played real well on the news."
* * *
When the Lynds landed in Muncie, they were nostalgic for what Muncie had been before industrialization. Now, industry is leaving Muncie and nostalgia has taken hold again.
Not among the young people, though. The young people are outta here. Everyone you talk to, their kids have left town for Indianapolis, New York, Washington.
"I would never stay here, ever, ever," says Destiny Wilcox, 23, of Evansville. It's Saturday and she's in her cap and gown, having just graduated with a degree in advertising from Ball State. Why would she stay in Muncie? she says. What would she do? Retail? Food service? Work at the university? "There are no jobs here."
At Clinton headquarters, DiAnne Hannah, 63, says she's voting for Clinton because Clinton "knows what reality really is," is steeped in the issues and can fix the problems with jobs and health care. Hannah says she left her job as a financial aid adviser at the university last year because she'd reached retirement age and she felt like if she stayed, she'd be taking the job away from someone younger, someone who really needed it.
"What chance do our young people have to stay here?" she says.
"What about someone like me?" says the woman across from her, Marti McKeighen, who's been making get-out-the-vote calls. Twenty-four years making auto parts on an assembly line at BorgWarner and now BorgWarner is leaving town. "I can't get my retirement and I'm 55 years old -- what's going to happen to me?"
Hannah and McKeighen start to reminisce about downtown Muncie and the way it was, back before the big-box stores and the strip malls. Grant's, JCPenney, the dime store, the soda fountain.
"This is old Muncie talking here," Hannah says.
"I remember when they had the Cinderella shop downtown," McKeighen says.
"Oh, yes," Hannah says.
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Last edited by host; 06-26-2008 at 10:52 AM..
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