If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Our national politics increasingly resembles a party in which your crazy uncle got hold of the karaoke microphone and won't give it back until he finishes a paranoid rant. Maybe if you pour him another Manhattan, he'll pass out before all your guests leave.
Imagine a Washington, D.C. where Republicans came to work each day fired up with renewed passion and zeal. A Congress where energized Republicans legislated in bi-partisan fashion on behalf of the American people.
It's spring, the buds are sprouting, the sap is rising -- and political redemption is blooming anew. Two politicians forced to resign from office due to sex scandals are back in the game.
To say a politician has flip-flopped ties the politician to his changing position. Flip-flopping is an intentional action, an opportunistic one. Evolving evokes a metaphor external to the agency of a politician.
While this year's conference will certainly be quite the show, it will serve as even further confirmation that the Republican Party does not reflect our community's political values and that the Democratic Party is the true political home for American Jews.
The invisible hand of the market, which the GOP worships as an infallible god, is curled into a fist and is pounding America's lowest-paid workers.
A surprising number of critics caution that he's promising more than he, his party, and even government can deliver; others worry that he is making a tough road tougher -- both domestically and internationally -- for an already bedraggled America.
Kerry and Hagel (like Colin Powell) missed their historical moment. Had they opposed Bush's war they might have made a difference. Now perhaps they can use their cabinet posts to implement a policy or two of atonement.
As with many religions, political parties have a tendency to start as a movement, transform into a business, and finally degenerate into a racket designed to fleece the yokels. One organization which has gone out of its way to illustrate this evolution is the Republican Party.
By using a loophole in the tax code, some individuals have organized their businesses in such a way that their earnings, what you and I would call "wages," can technically be called "profits" and therefore are not subject to Medicare tax.
Recovery will not be easy, and will likely follow the famous five steps Kubler-Ross describe in the aftermath of a death in the family: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Republicans are stuck on stage one, denial, and can't move forward.
While Newt Gingrich represents much that has been wrong with the Republican party for the last 20 years -- and is as responsible as anyone for the extreme partisanship in Washington today -- he has clearly learned some lessons from the past.
Faced with a choice between the path of reason and the road to ruin, Republicans cling to ruin rather than adapt. That is the difference between ideas and talking points. Ideas evolve with new information, while talking points are static.
For pretty much my whole adult life there have been very few political issues on which my brother and I agree. But in an interview that The Huffington Post did with my brother, there were actually multiple items that had me nodding my head when usually it would be shaking in exasperation.
President Obama and the Democrats' willingness to accept cuts to Social Security in the form of the gimmicky "chained CPI" right after an election where no candidate for federal office campaigned on it shows that the Right's long-term project of undoing the New Deal marches on despite the electorate's wishes.
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