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Archive | June, 2012

Absence from Blogging

ACED will likely not post anything, or only post very infrequently, from now until the end of July. Thank you for your support and patience.  

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Another Vapid Segment Brought to You by the Two-Party Mentality

Cenk Uygur asks guest “power panelists” if President Obama is “the lesser of two-evils” after a Bloomberg poll found that 62% of Americans believe the United States is on the wrong track, but that 16% more preferred President Obama’s economic vision to Mitt Romney’s. To me, this illustrates the stupidity of our political discourse and [...]

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Reject the Obama-Romney Frame This Election

The second response I want to make to President Obama’s Cleveland speech from last week (the first response is here) is this:  Regardless of your political goals, in order to use your vote to influence politicians, you should reject the electoral frame that President Obama articulated in Cleveland… And the one Mitt Romney proposed the [...]

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President Obama’s Economic Policy Vision Is Not “Fundamentally Different” than Mitt Romney’s

Thursday in Cleveland, Ohio, President Obama delivered a speech that purportedly outlined the differences between his “economic vision” and Mitt Romney’s.  According to Obama, the middle class has reached “a make-or-break moment,” and the upcoming election will represent a choice between “two fundamentally different views of which direction America should take.”  There are two points [...]

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What Is the Purpose of a Political System that Increases Inequality?

“According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances,” (emphasis added).  Stafford Beer. Yesterday I [...]

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Who Is Scarier? The Only Question That Seems to Matter in 2012

“A second term for Obama would bring on a socialist nightmare hellscape as he moves further to the left.”   Dick Morris on Fox News. “To me, the gap between President Obama and these people [the GOP candidates] is so enormous that it’s a threat to our country to elect people who take such a silly [...]

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Part 2: Manufacturing Choice Among the Democrats and Republicans

This morning, Matt Stoller provided a “recap” of the Wisconsin recall election.  A couple of key facts are that Walker won, and the Democrat whom he defeated, Tom Barrett, was a conservative/moderate Democrat.  It works well as a transition from yesterday’s Part 1 about how the major parties work in a coordinated manner to advance [...]

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Part 1: Soft Democrats and Hard Line Republicans Work Together

In this post, I make two assumptions: 1.  Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have shifted policies, overall, to the right over the last 30 or so years. 2.  The Parties started at policy positions that better represented the desires and interests of most Americans.  Their rightward shift moves them further away from representative political [...]

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