Good morning. Links?
- To start off, a little political satire.
- N.T. Wright has a new book.
- Men, women, and late-modernity.
- Helping wrongdoers. Love thy neighbor?
- Seeking Celts.
- A quote on thinking about the unborn.
- Texas doesn’t make sense to some.
- Ms Pelosi bemused over Obama’s, well, lies.
- The bombers will “always” get through.
- Regarding the discussion over “hope/change” as lie … read the last paragraph, which puts it quite succinctly.
- Ethics (rules) sinking the Democrats.
- The three hierarchs and ecology.
- Violation of some sort of separation of state and market.
- The buck doesn’t stop in the white house apparently.
- And to finish … a ski mask.
Regarding the discussion over “hope/change” as lie … read the last paragraph, which puts it quite succinctly.
Basically the ‘lie’ is people who didn’t like Democrats before the election still don’t like them therefore there is no hope or change. Nice. I like the dichotomy between asserting that Congress is ineffective and hasn’t done anything while at the sime time asserting there’s a brewing revolt against all the radical stuff Congress has done.
I also like the nice explanation for the low poll rating of the GOP by asserting that the only nationally recognized Republicans are in Congress theref’re the GOP suffers because the public hates Congress. Heh. The nationally recognized Republicans are Beck, Limbaugh, Palin and Fox News. Most Americans probably don’t even know a Congressional Republican of any importance.
Boonton,
Man, the filters you use for reading text are very strong. When I see that paragraph, thing like “promises of the most transparent administration” connecting to “pushing forward legislation faster and with less public insight” are just passed over by you entirely.
Objectively name one modern administration with more transparency.
Boonton,
He has no more transparency than the prior admin, yet he made quite a number of specific promises during the election of transparency features he was going to utilize, none of which have been implemented.
Uhm, I don’t know the ins and outs of any foreign administrations with enough depth to state whether they are more or less transparent.
If I offered that Norway or Czechia was more transparent for example, could you refute me? Do you have any knowledge of any foreign executive’s practices?
Please demonstrate how Norway or Czechia is more transparant than the Obama administration.
Additionally, and more relevant, please demonstrate how he is less or equally transparent compared to the Bush administration.
Boonton,
Apparently you didn’t read my reply carefully enough (or I wasn’t clear enough).
I didn’t claim that Norway or the Czech Republic were more transparent, I wouldn’t know and even if I did you would not be familiar enough with other countries domestic day to day administration’s activities to be able to make the claim to the affirmative or negative of whether Mr Obama’s Administration is the “most open” administration in the world.
Glenn Greenwald has any number of essay’s complaining that the Obama admin is breaking it’s promise of more openness. He’s not a right wing hack by any means.
In what way do you consider his administration more open than the prior one? I have not claimed he’s less transparent to Bush, but that basically he is just the same. I say basically because there may be small differences which may allow one to argue one way or the other which is more “open” but that substantially there is no difference.
Boonton,
Actually, in one large substantial way this adminstration has been less open than the prior one. On several occasions for very large bills in Congress, the Administration has pushed artificial deadlines and created fictitious deadlines to push bill when public debate was still heated and many in the public had little or no chance to get familiarized with the contents of the bills in question. I don’t recall the prior Admin. doing that … and it is a large factor which is working against openness.
To make the argument that the two admins are ‘the same’ with differences that basically just offset each other when looking at the big picture, you have to demonstrate some type of analysis of the entire admin’s policies on transparancy….not simply cherry pick a few examples that bug you.
On balance I think it’s clear this administration is more transparant and has made a bigger effort to be so than the Bush administration. Granted that is setting the bar very low, the Bush admin. seems to revel in its arrogance and secrecy.
Now the two large bills I think you’re talking about are the stimulus bill and the healthcare bill. The stimulus bill was clearly a time of the essence concern. Fiscal policy moves slowly. The health care bill has been debated for nearly a year now so I’m not sure what you’re talking about when you complain about ‘fictitious deadlines’. What makes a deadline ‘fictitious’?