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In what is a sign of either America’s complete inability to produce anything but remakes, or a somewhat odd desire by the GOP to re-enact the 1994 election (because, yes, they won… but their hate-figure Democratic president then remained in office for six more years; did they forget that part?), the Greedy Oligarchs’ Party has reintroduced its Contract With Pledge to America.

In response to which I’m sure many people will be taking out the old fish-rifle and blasting away into a barrel, but honestly I don’t even feel like bothering. No one pays attention to rational, mature, nuanced dialogue any more in America, after all. Why not just indulge in some bitterly sarcastic, juvenile mockery instead?

That seems more accurate

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I kind of just want to record these comments, here, for myself as much as anything.

The context of the following quotes is America’s latest useless, brainless, hysterical hissyfit, that over the Cordoba center. The Cordoba center will be more familiar to most people, unfortunately, by its condensed and intentionally-charged, as well as critically-misleading name, “the Ground Zero mosque.” As usual, thanks to our “liberal media” for sacrificing both accuracy and objectivity in favor of attention-getting and, not coincidentally, inflammatory phrasing.

I should offer a gold star to The Economist, however, for not only its reasoned and mature perspective on the matter, but for absolutely piling on. A praiseworthy effort.

Sadly, many of America’s so-called “leaders,” have unfortunately been lacking any similar commitment to those national ideals (not to mention the plain, old-fashioned concept of “standing up for what’s right”) which are apparently inconvenient just now.

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I generally can’t bring myself to write much about climate change any more, these days. It just seems pretty much hopeless. I don’t want to dwell on it (which is what I just said, I guess), but I basically see two big problems.

One: Preventing dangerous climate change has, for whatever reason, become as pure a “wedge” issue as any; the reactionaries are 100% set against anything of the sort. Which leaves… us. But liberals/Democrats and our causes seem to have hit our high water mark, with the White House, the House of Representatives and (at one point, allegedly) a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. And we still can’t seem to do much of anything. This is as good as it seems likely to get in the foreseeable future (which depresses me more deeply than I can really describe) and it seems very unlikely that any kind of adequate climate change legislation will be passed. Even if it were, the GOP would very likely swear up and down their determination to repeal it and, unlike health care reform, I think that would be a very real prospect.

Second, however much one feels that the United States and other first-world industrialized nations should bear the bulk of the responsibility for containing greenhouse warming—and I’m personally willing to go along with that argument fairly far—we simply can’t do it alone.

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