and obama’s statement “explaining” his vote was filled with falsehoods. dishonesty from start to finish.

In-your-face lies. Spoken while knowing informed people would recognize he was lying.

So, how much “propaganda” does he think is OK? How can we know when he’s telling the truth? I’d really like to know.

5) Paper trails. IF we actually win, I want paper trails for all federal elections. No more half-way grassroots efforts for “one man, one vote.”

Having to win every election by a landslide just to make sure a democrat gets in, is getting very old.

1) Accountability – no matter what Bush does, I want a commission to review the crimes, and issue a report. If Congress can’t do it, then spend some money and ask a couple of think tanks to collaborate and issue a report. Money, deadline, fully published.

2) Transparency in every part of the government, e.g., Johnson at EPA may be charged with lying to Congress (re: California). “His” decision would not be known to us if an assistant hadn’t left the EPA and then told Congress how the decision was made. FOIA requests must be answered promptly. Whistleblowers up and down the line must be given incentives AND protected.

3) Campaign finance reform. The real deal. If democrats sweep the Congress there’s no excuse for not instituting rules so that every part of society gets a seat at the table. Talk up the $1.00 check off — increase it to $5.00. (Ask Fritz Hollings to talk to us about his new book. Use it as a “how-to.”)

4) Finally, a plan to cultivate people in the media who will broadcast a fair reading of the issues. In the past, we have relied too heavily on their judgement of what’s important and their sense of fair-play. We don’t digg our own stories enough, but we also don’t have go-to people who will give a fair hearing to our concerns. We need old media megaphones.

Steny Hoyer will lobby Obama hard to defeat Donna Edwards in 2010. Blue Dog John Barrow used Obama’s endorsement to crush the liberal Regina Thomas in the 2008 GA-12 Democratic primary. Donna’s criticism of Obama at the Netroots convention was a “profile in extreme political courage.” We have to defend Donna and beat Steny in the Democratic primary in 2010. That will be one of many battle lines between liberals and the Vichy Democrats.

Based on what happened in GA-12, I don’t see how Donna can win, if Obama endorses Steny’s replacement for her.

It’s the only system that has ever existed.

Point taken, albeit in a restricted sense.

My question stands: Is this a good system? And I am not aware that human institutions are cast in bronze or graven in stone.

Me, I think it a lousy system. For most of my long life I have been a student of the roots of political obligation: what can a polity demand of its constitutive persons; and a student of various theories of polity. Plato tried many different theories out in such dialogues as his Republic, and in his Laws. Aristotle had a go at it in his Constitution of Athens and in his Politics. Much later Thomas Hobbes made valuable speculation in his De Corpore Politico and in his Human Nature. And of course in Leviathan. A more recent invaluable discussion is in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism : Hobbes to Locke by Charles B. Macpherson. I have profited from Consent, Freedom, and Political Obligation by J. P. Plamenatz. Sir Isaiah Berlin has made interesting arguments in favour of accommodation of a very wide range of opinion in his advocacy of democracy. The literature is vast.

I still do not have a satisfying answer. But Plato did opine that the reign of the thirty tyrants seemed a political golden age as compared to the soi disant democracy of the 5th century B.C. Athens. Plato considered democracy mobocracy, and I do as well. Not that I adduce a more perfect system. I am disenchanted with all of ‘em.

LS July 29th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
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I want a straight forward answer…..did Obama attend in any way shape or form…the Bilderberger meeting. I want to know. Did he or didn’t he. Was he vetted by them or not.

I want to know this.

Dam straight, LS. I want to know as well.