Masson's Blog
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., on Thursday proposed the United States take responsibility for building a global tsunami warning system and spending $7.5 million a year to maintain it.
The world may or may not need a global tsunami warning, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to observe that Joe Lieberman sucks so much it hurts.
I-80 crash claims student’s life
[Derek] Kieper, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, died early Tuesday morning when the Ford Explorer he was a passenger in travelled off an icy section of Interstate 80 and rolled several times in a ditch. Kieper, who was riding in the back seat of the Explorer, was ejected from the vehicle.
Ironically, Mr. Kieper had written a polemic against government mandated seat belt use just this past September:
There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group. . . . [I]f I want to be the jerk that flirts with death and rides around with my seat belt off, I should be able to do that, too.
Yahoo! News – Democrats Split Again Over Party’s Agenda:
The above linked article describes a split in the Democratic Party between the “liberal” Dean faction and the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council. I think this framing, and the article generally, contains some inaccuracies. First, I’m not sure the DLC is centrist so much as it is watered-down and unprincipled. Many times the DLC is credited with Bill Clinton’s success. I think the truth is the other way around. I think Clinton’s gifts were such that he could succeed with almost any set of stated principals. The DLC of Joe Lieberman and Tom Daschle is just plain ineffective.
Characterizing Howard Dean as “liberal” sort of misses the mark as well. He is certainly populist and was out front in his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. However, isolationist foreign policy has traditionally been the hallmark of conservatives. His tenure in Vermont showed him to be fiscally conservative as well. He almost makes a fetish of balancing the budget — which appeals to me, but doesn’t necessarily appeal to the big budget wing of the Democratic Party (and certainly cannot be a concern of any Bush supporter.) His focus on grass root issues and middle class wages can probably be considered liberal, but his ideas on budgets and foreign policy are conservative, if anything.
Whether he is the best hope for the Democratic Party, I don’t know. I don’t suppose I could be considered representative of a typical Democrat. My politics are socially permissive and fiscally conservative. “Do what you want, but don’t ask me to pay for it.” and “People who work hard and play by the rules should be able to succeed; those who don’t, shouldn’t.” So, I’m probably more in line with Libertarians and Paleoconservatives. Nationally, I have turned away from the Republican Party because of the shocking indifference to proper use of the Constitution exhibited during the impeachment abomination engineered by Gingrich & Co. This was followed by the Bush’s Budget-Busting Red-Ink Republicanism and opting to invade Iraq rather than focusing on al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism. I’m also not real keen on the rise of the Religious Right and the control of the Old Confederacy on the GOP. Get me an Eisenhower or a Rockefeller, and I’ll probably vote Republican.
But I digress.
I’m pretty excited to have run across Douglas Rushkoff’s weblog. I’ve really enjoyed his books over the years, and it’ll be nice to see what he’s thinking from day to day. He has a recent post entitled No Surrender. In it, he describes the dilemma of the Progressives. They just lost national elections to the Republicans. As they see it, Bush sold the red states enough mythology to get the poor people there to vote against their economic interests and to send their kids off to die in a war that has yet to be adequately justified. That 80% of Bush’s supporters seem to think Hussein was involved with 9/11 is evidence that a good line of bull trumps objective reason at the polls. He describes the leftie handwringing and the temptation to go the way of mythology to win elections.
What I enjoyed about the entry was his recognition that the Progressives have their roots in the Enlightenment. It’s probably a bad idea to try to betray that heritage in an effort to promote it. The Enlightenment was about the recognition that man best promotes his condition by recognition of observed truth rather than through obedience to revealed dogma. The real world is scary, though, and fairy tales can be comforting.
For the past month or so, I’ve been on an enforced moratorium from political news. As a practical matter, this means that I have been limited to local news, sports, and, to a greater degree lately, technology sites.
It’s amazing how much more pleasant life is just being ignorant. My life is pretty good right now. Why worry about the “have nots” in the world or the country’s future, or what kind of world I’m going to leave my kid? (Let the heavens fall so long as queers can’t get married, right?)
Anyway, that moratorium was originally supposed to be for a month, which is now up. Maybe I’ll extend it a bit. I’m more up to speed on local news, and it gives me more time to noodle around with tech projects such as switching from blogger to movable type.