John Cole on why your government can't do anything at all these days

[elfs]

Wow. John Cole on why our country has become ungovernable. He so nails it, it gives me the chills. He talks about how Americorp is allowed to "design tutoring programs," but it's members are forbidden from tutoring or mentoring children directly. Here's what would happen if someone decided to try and change it:

You all know how this story goes from here- improving literacy would become "socialist indoctrination." Improving health care would become "socialized medicine." Bridging the digital divide would become "giving laptops to welfare queens." And you just know that someone in Americorps may have one day talked to someone from ACORN.

The subservient GOP drones in the blogs would pick up everything Breitbart has said. Instapundit and Reason magazine would wake from their glibertarian slumber to denounce this "vast, wasteful expansion of government." The Fonzi of Freedom, Nick Gillespie, would make fifty idiotic web videos decrying the bill, in between appearances on Fox News and penning stupid op-eds with Matt Welch in the NY Post. Welch would do his own part, pointing out that the French have something very similar to Americorps, and he really enjoyed their services while he and his wife were in France, but now that they are here in America and rake in enough money that they don't need those services, he will loudly and in the most smug manner possible oppose Americorps.

Read it all: This Is What Obstructionism + Nihilism + the Wurlitzer Looks Like

What Cole fails to mention (perhaps because he doesn't assume he has to), is that so much of this right wing noise machine is funded not by its own efforts, but by a conglomeration of industries interested in regulatory capture (Reason magazine, for example, gets a lot of its money from Exxon Mobil), and quasi-religious idealogues representing the Coors, Scaife, and Bradley foundations, all of which (at least in the previous generation) supported the Randian viewpoint first made explicit by Thucydides in 431BC:

You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Comments

[tagryn]

I find it funny if predictable that he saves his worst bile for the Democrat moderates (rather than the GOP). Heretics are always hated more than infidels.

[caraig.livejournal.com]

Mostly because you expect the 'infidels' or the ideologically opposite to be... ideologically opposed. You don't expect people on your side to go all Third Way on you.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I find it funny that you don't see anything unusual about drawing parallels between politics and religious fanaticism.

[tagryn]

Politics can be just as powerful a force in rallying emotions as religion. Change the wording if you like, the point stands about how moderates in a party are often viewed with greater contempt by their more radical comrades than what the latter feel towards their more obvious ideological opponents, despite moderates being much more likely a prospect to made common cause with & persuade towards their perspective than the others.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was thinking more like "only in America".

But then, I'm sure that there's other countries where the two can equate. I just can't think of any really.

Reason Magazine and Exxon Mobil

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Source this claim or retract it, please.

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Re: Reason Magazine and Exxon Mobil

[elfs.livejournal.com]

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=63

Ron Bailey was also kind enough to confirm it himself: Confessions of Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore (http://reason.com/archives/2006/09/22/confessions-of-an-alleged-exxo), although he denies that Exxon-Mobile's funding of the magazine influenced his writing and, actually, I believe him. He also links back to the ExxonSecrets link himself as documentation for the claim.

Re: Reason Magazine and Exxon Mobil

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Yes, so the foundation got $20K from Exxon Mobil in 2005 and a total of $381,000 over the eight years from 1998 to 2005 or so.

Reason Magazine alone pulls in something like a million bucks a year in subscription revenue and probably a good bit more than that in advertising (my estimate, based on my knowledge of the publishing industry). The foundation has a couple of popular websites that also make ad money, and they apparently get a lot of donations.

Finally, they have 23 experts and 37 staffers (with some overlap) listed on their website, and even without knowing how many are full time vs. part time or what their salaries are, it's safe to assume that the organization's annual budget must be in the low millions at least to support all the work they're doing.

And you say that $20K per year is "a lot of their money"?

This just sounded too much like all that despicable slander about how Exxon was paying scientists to espouse false positions on Global Warming. Of course, that wasn't actually happening, and now it's the Global Warming advocates whose positions turn out to have been false.

Now that you know you were perpetuating a baseless slander, I presume that retraction will be forthcoming.

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Re: Reason Magazine and Exxon Mobil

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Mmm. A global warming denier!

You mean that blip in the 10 year old data of *one* study? Yeah, that means the whole theory is based on lies despite the fact that dozens of other, independent studies back up their conclusions.

What I like best about GW deniers though, is that basically their entire belief system rests on "but that would make life more inconvenient and uncomfortable for *me*!"

Re: Reason Magazine and Exxon Mobil

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Relax, sparky.

I just said that it's the proponents of Global Warming who turn out to have been making up facts to suit their theories rather than the few scientists and analysts who received small amounts of money from concerned companies such as Exxon Mobil.

I don't deny that there are long-term trends in climate change. I even accept that if you pick your start and end points appropriately, you can claim we're in a warming trend.

I do, however, deny that anyone has a model that lets us predict future changes based on the historical record, much less any actual knowledge of how human activities are likely to influence those future changes.

And since this seems to be the (reluctant) consensus of Global Warming activists, I hardly think you're in any position to argue the point with me.

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