Tom DeLay gets a lesson in Conservative values!

Workhorse Politics » Tom DeLay Sentenced to 3 Years

Let the Market Regulate Itself, Except When We Want To Impose Our Morals on The Rest of You?

Over the years we've all seen examples of Conservatives opposing industry regulation. The industry should be self-policing. The government should not be spending our money to inspect meat, or children's toys. If a company makes defective products, consumers will not purchase from them, so the problem will just take care of itself.

I would love to hear a Right-winger explain to me why the same market forces should not be allowed to regulate media content. Why moral standards of some of us must be imposed on all of us. Why it is OK to show someone getting shot to death, but not to show people making love, on television. These are the same people who whine about Government getting too deeply into our personal lives and choices. About "the nanny state."

I'm glad to see the FCC is finally reevaluating the arbitrary and unAmerican "decency" rules that control our media content. I hope they end up throwing all such imposed rules out the window for good.

If you don't like it, don't watch it. If you think it will corrupt your children, exercise your responsibility as a parent, use the parental controls available on your cable box and/or stay on top of what shows your kids are consuming.

What He Said

My Country, Tis of Me - Magazine - The Atlantic ... Michael Kinsley's standout passage:

... the Tea Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America. Not because it is right-wing or because it is sometimes susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories, and not because of racism, but because of the movement’s self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.

“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

This kind of talk is doubly self-indulgent. First, it’s just not true. Second, it’s obviously untrue. The government’s main function these days is writing checks to old people. These checks allow people to retire and pursue avocations such as going to Tea Party rallies.

Bush v. Cheney

Sherlyn Gay Stolberg has drawn an interesting juxtaposition of the differences between Bush's brand-new reflective, candid mood and Cheney's unflagging bombast.

The difference in tone, friends and advisers say, reflects a split over Mr. Bush’s second-term foreign policy, which Mr. Cheney resisted as too dovish. It also reveals their divergent approaches to post-White House life. Mr. Bush, who is planning a public policy center in Dallas, is trying to shape his legacy by offering historians a glimpse of his thinking, while Mr. Cheney, primarily concerned about the terrorist threat, is setting the stage for a role as a standard-bearer for conservatives on national security.

I wonder whether Cheney will find many adherents in the post-Bush/Cheney era. From what I've gleaned in my readings of Conservative analysis, well, "I don't really think many Conservatives are hitching their wagon to your star, Dick."

Let's see: Spend a trillion dollars fighting a war for the past six years (a war whose very premise collapsed within the first few months), engender a heretofore unknown depth of hatred towards our country making it difficult to negotiate any issue to our advantage, give no-bid contracts in the most astounding act of cronyism and insider illegality ever to companies to which you have strong ties only to have it uncovered that they are defrauding our country and wasting our money and doing a really bad job in many cases, and spread our troops so thin and abuse their willingness to serve to such a degree that our military power is teetering. And, a full seven years after 9/11, only a miniscule percentage of incoming shipping containers are inspected, the Federal budget is so shot they're gonna have to take police back off the streets and defund Homeland Security programs, and that immensely sad gaping hole in my beloved downtown Manhattan, a site that was an engine of American competitiveness, profitability, and power -- well, today, seven years later, it is .... a sad gaping hole!

Pardon me for shouting, but WHAT DID ANY ACTION CHENEY TRUMPETED AND INFLUENCED HAVE TO DO WITH (1) CONSERVATIVISM, OR (2) NATIONAL SECURITY?

And we were supposed to do What with Social Security?

Now let me get this straight --

Conservative Republicans have cried for years for that the American system of Social Security should be drastically altered to allow folks to "make their own decisions with their own money" and invest in the stock market rather than pay taxes into the kitty. I guess the idea is that if you make an unusually bad investment with your retirement money your eventual impoverishment in old age is your own damned fault and you can live in the dark and eat cat food.

And now we're being told that the taxpayers must bail out the markets or folks' pensions and retirement funds will be severely affected.

So, which is it? That taxes protect the right of our nation's elderly to live out their lives in decent conditions, or that folks have the right to choose, and will bear the responsibility of having chosen, their own investments?