LOL — I JUST GOT IT. Gosh I am slow lately.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

The congress is a really daunting issue to deal with. My suggestion is a bit radical since term limits are not my favorite course of action. Basically I think a lower ratio of Representatives to constituents would be much better. In many areas congressional districts have millions of constituents which requires a ton of money to get elected. Much of this money comes from outside interests to the actual districts they wish to serve. The whole idea of citizen representation is eroded for our lower house due to the dilution of constituents vs. representative. The size of congress could be expanded to allow for more voices. That might seem a bit counter intuitive, but it would allow for true coalitions and probably would break down the two major parties which have had a monopoly on power for so long.

Similarly, I think it is time return the selection of Senators to the states (as it was in the beginning of our Republic). Now Senators seem to look like they are “super representatives” instead of looking after the specific interests of their states. This too would return more power to the states and remove the massive amounts of money that influences Senators.

I am not here to defend the democrats or republicans. The issue today is who is leading us right now, not 8 years go or 50 years ago. There are plenty of salient points to be made when illustrating different issues over time and some can be useful and instructive. Will history say “oh, that crisis was caused by Barney Frank” NO, and why? Because he was not elected president, he was not leader of our nation. Frank will be a mere footnote if remembered at all.

I’m going to have to disagree with you here. Fact is the majority of those “leading” us today are the same as the past decades… meaning Congress. They hold the purse strings. They create the legislation and regulations. They dole out the cash. All a POTUS can do is say yes, or no. If he wants legislation intro’d to the floor, he must get a Congressional member to write it up and introduce it.

Too many place too much power in the hands of the POTUS when it comes to this stuff. His veto power is not usurped by the construction and details of the bill. Virtually everthing that is going on with the economy today can be traced back to Congress and their poorly constructed legislation.

bbart… I’m away from my own computer set up and couldn’t accommodate for the size of the photo. So I just provided a link… tho it appears you don’t want to see it anyway. But it was provided in response to blast’s comment #16.

But I do agree…. I don’t think it’s a healthy thing to get people to again spend. In the 90s the household debt was getting out of control. Fact is, people… and our Congress… need to learn to live within the budget they have – not the budget they wish they had. Fiscal responsibility is a lost art in both personal and government.

Any fix will just postpone the bullet we will inevitably have to bite…. and possibly prolong the recouperation period. We should just get it over with… but I don’t see that as likely at this moment. Those in Congressional leadership and new WH admin will prefer to put a bandaid on this so that making it worse cannot be tied to their legacy. But this didn’t start over night, and was decades in the making. It will take time to reverse the damage… and retrain consumers and govt to live within their means. (if either of these dogs can learn old tricks….)

Ron Paul’s “conservatism” . . . . NOT!

One Conservative’s Top Ten (- 1) list of objections to Ron Paul

He’s a quirky Libertarian (as most I’ve either read about or known). Deal with it.

“The ACU provides reasonably objective ratings of ‘conservatism’, and gives Paul an 82 or 83.”

I’ll have to go over there and check it out, because his voting record doesn’t confirm that.

Out of 100 votes
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/p000583/votes/
he…
(1) …voted with the Reps 53 times, and against 29. (53*100)/(53+29) = 64.6% pro-Republican
(2) …voted with the Dems 14 times, and against 65. (65*100)/(65+14) = 82.3% anti-Democrat

Looks like their measure of his “conservatism” might be his moderately strong opposition to Democrats rather than his luke warm support of his own party?

Your going to have to do better than make unsubstantiated claims.

UPDATE- hold the phone… here’s something interesting.

I always considered Ron Paul more a kook than a conservative. But even I was stunned when I did some analysis of the American Conservative Union’s lifetime ratings for congresspersons. [I changed the author's link from "LA" to "TX" to facilitate checking] It was worse for Ron Paul than I thought. He is clearly not among the more conservative of our elected representatives. The results surprised me so much, that I reprint here an edited comment I posted to another thread (the ratings referred to are the ACU’s lifetime rartings through 2006):

Ron Paul has [ONLY] (my emphasis, not author’s) an 82.3 rating. Ha! Some conservative. Here are some well-known Senators who are (or, in case of those who recently left Congress, were) rated more conservative than Paul:

Kay Bailey Hutchison
John Cornyn
Trent Lott
Lindsey Flim Flam Graham
Bill Frist
Amnesty Mel Martinez
Chuck Hagel
John Sununu (New Hampshire for God’s sake!!)
Libby Dole
Lamar Alexander

(Of course there are many other senators, such as Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch, who are not listed here because it is a given they are more conservative than Paul.)

Paul has the same rating as John McCain!!!! [OUCH!]

Plus, there are over 170 – 170!!!! – House members rated more conservative than Ron Paul. That means he is one of the MOST LIBERAL Republican House Members in the United States!

More revealing, of Texas’ 32 members of the House of Representatives, 20 are more conservative than Paul! He comes in 21st out of 32. Imagine, he is not even in the top half of the Texas delegation when it comes to voting for conservative principles!! Thank goodness there are people like Sheila Jackson Lee (7.5), or Ron could be the house liberal.

Who started this myth that Ron Paul was a conservative, anyway? And who exactly is buying it?

LOL! I guess we know whose “buying it” don’t we bbart. Nice try, though.

NO. I can bring so much more. But I would have to start so far back for you to understand, I wouldn’t know where to start. This is why I suggest to you a Political 101. After that, we could maybe exchange. This is not an insult, it is a good advice for you.

LOL! Politic 101 would help you understand and maybe give you an answer.

This is odd.

The tenor of the comments and posts here tend to just slam the Democrats and demonize the incoming administration without first taking to full task to those who were most in power TODAY. The thing is, if the evils that have been placed on the democrats as being most culpable are true, why the heck didn’t Bush do something to change it? I can say the same of the democrats as well but they were not the party in charge so their culpability is much lower (but I still would call them out as well). There were plenty of whistles around and not many blowing them. But… it does not change the fact that President Bush had a near Carte Blanche to get many of the things he wanted and yet FAILED to do so. One of the privileges of rank means you also get a large share of the blame and rightfully so.

Bush was talking about the fundamentals of the economy being strong from 02 on, and unluckily McCain repeated that same rhetoric. I can certainly respect that some of the rise of the deficit could have been tied to the recession at the beginning of his term, and even a touch of 9/11 as well, but at what point do you say ENOUGH is ENOUGH and call his administration a total economic failure.

Remember the problem with China at the beginning of his administration when they held a crew of an American military reconnaissance plane captive? What he do? Nothing except ask China for a loan by allowing the yuan (China’s currency) to be undervalued for YEARS and in the process exporting our national security future and importing a bunch of trinkets.

- pay off the debt and let government stabilize things. Ten to twenty years of belt-tightening all around, plus lots of corporate failures and lost profits due to low consumption. We’ll call this ‘Depression II’. If the bailouts all go through and are handled well, this is probably what we get.
- do nothing and let much of the debt go to default (and it will, look how big the problems already are *before* we enter recession); banks will fail, credit companies will fail, anyone who is holding a lot of mortgage debt securities or securities backed by credit card debt is dead meat. Lots of people lose their life savings, probably somewhat at random depending on the exposure of companies in their portfolio. Recovery is probably faster than 1), above, but short term uncertainty is much higher (maybe a little like 1873).
- increase the money supply so that all debts are rapidly reduced in real terms by high inflation. You need to increase the money supply a lot. Five years of 20% inflation might do the job, but the problems that would cause are also enormous. Anyone who is currently holding debt in dollars would be screwed (not just mortgage / credit card debt securities as for #2), along with people who hold cash, are on fixed incomes, and so on. Existing debtors would be happy, but it would probably be a generation before the credit markets recovered.

Take your pick. There’s a small chance that Paulson et. al. can pull off the same trick as Greenspan and extend the credit spree a couple more years, but ultimately we will face one of the scenarios outlined above or some hybrid. You can’t just make $9 trillion in excess debt disappear, no matter how good your policies are.

You could say that. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I supported him in the primary and admire his consistency and dedication to principle. Of course, ‘RonPaulian’ is just aimed at evoking cultishness, not really at describing my views…

And, no, he’s not a Conservative

No? The ACU provides reasonably objective ratings of ‘conservatism’, and gives Paul an 82 or 83. Not the gold standard (there are others, like Tancredo, who consistently score in the high 90s) – but let’s keep in mind that Clinton, Obama and Maxine Waters got scores of 9, 8, and 0 respectively. You can really only exclude Paul by playing semantic games where conservatism means exactly what *you* want it to mean.

no, he’s not a real Republican, either

Barnhart is just pissy because Paul wouldn’t come on his show. He should probably stick to doing that instead of writing, too, because his writing is awful. Anyway, his main complaint seems to be that Paul endorsed Baldwin rather than McCain (the rest is just miscellaneous observations and whining). Yes, Paul is at the fringe of the party in many ways. In the end he still won his district running as a Republican, and as far as I know neither you nor Barnhart are the official judges of who is and isn’t a ‘real’ Republican.

Ron Paul is a Little Obama with training wheels

Either you don’t actually follow politics closely (see the ACU ratings above) or else you are a single-issue voter on one of the handful of issues where Paul and Obama agree. Actually, now that Obama has done a center-left move I can no longer think of a single issue where they would agree (maybe Gitmo?).
For example, you can read what he has to say about the bailout(s). Not much common ground there between Obama and Paul (by comparison, both Tancredo and McCain supported the bailout, along with Obama as expected).

But let’s try to put things in more accurate perspective. Yes.. the crisis started with a $10 tril national deficit. When you start talking inflation, plus the deficit rise under Clinton respective (link to historical US debt graph below) all starts to come into perspective.

Now consider that Clinton’s admin (for his deficit rise) didn’t have a 911, and hadn’t hit the full impact of the oncoming recession yet. Frankly the rise… while appalling on all levels compared to decades before… doesn’t look so out of whack. So please don’t be building political mountains out of mole hills. Frankly, I am on your side that most D & R politicians aren’t worth the water they drink daily. But we aren’t talking a mountain of difference here from the 90s to now.

Which now brings us to the “blame game” or the “cure”?

If you want to be correct in the blame game, it is bipartisan, long term Congress. So unless you can figure out a way for those in power to limit their terms, we peon constituents are screwed.

The “cure” is to muddy the Congressional waters enough so that one radical wing doesn’t get power over another.

And for now… we’re in “hold” pattern to see if Obama is a Karl Marx, or a Reagan-in-disguise-because-of-desperation.

“Ugh. Just take responsibility! They had the White House and the majority, what more do you need.”

And your point would be….?

Do you think the fact that they didn’t succeed, presumably because they didn’t try hard enough (even though no effort on their part may have brought success), in opposing Democrat corruption and incompetence, that they should now be replaced by even more corrupt and incompetent Democrats? I hope that’s not what you are arguing for, because it is just plain dumb.