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i understand the gist of your problem, ace.
it's abundantly clear.
what you do not seem to understand are the myriad reasons for not bothering with most of them--they aren't serious as critiques--they're based on some arbitrary standard for action that no president has lived up to, least of all republicans. what conservatives arrogate to themselves--probably out of habit given the extent to which conservative language has been dominant over the past decades--is the ability to set those standards. but that doesn't come from anywhere, isn't based on anything--it's a best a collective verbal tic.
so far, i think obama's been pretty consistent in doing what he said he would do--as consistent as any reasonable person might expect--a bit more so even in some areas. not all.
on the earmark thing that the right is trying to make hay about: the claim that the budget was negociated last fall is not really open to debate. if that's the case, then it hardly makes sense to thrash about concerning it's content, now does it?
maybe for conservatives it does, but that has more to do with the sorry position the last 8 years of conservative power has left them in than it does with anything about the obama administration.
but i'll say that i would prefer fewer earmarks, mostly because even as i understand them to be a way in which congress does horsetrading in order to broker deals that enable stuff to get done, they seem an end-around insofar as an actual democratic process is concerned, shallow though it may be. so next year, we'll all see.
in the immediate run, the debacle left behind by neoliberalism is a far greater concern to me. i can't imagine why it isn't to you.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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