It's a shame you mix relatively reasonable criticisms with batcrap bonkers stuff like soros-mania. If you studied more and listened to beck/savage/limbaugh less you would be far more persuasive.

Now, I know you aren't really accessible or amenable to conversation and discussion, but some of your points are worth pondering, so I'll ponder away.

1. re: cap-and-trade - The recent cap-and-trade bill may end up being pure corporatist wealth transfer, and later be regarded as a big mistake. That seems very possible.

2. re: Green jobs - First - national security. Wether you guys in the faith-based anger community realize it, depending as a nation on middle eastern oil is inherently insecure and fragile, so, despite the cost, we have to start building a new economy and infrastructure that allows us to be free of middle-east dominance.

Not only is national and economic security at stake, but, again, wether you like it or not, oil, especially light sweet crude, is a very limited resource, and it's geological and geographic limits means that within our lifetimes the oil economy will start to become too expensive to function.

If we do not use the energy and wealth we have now to start buildng the new post-oil economy, we will be smashed as a civilization. Every step towards greater energy self-sufficiency we make now saves us a hundred steps we wil have to take 20 years from now, and a thousand steps we wll have to take 40 years from now.

You republicans HAVE to stop yearning for the past and trying to force everyone else to live in a psuedo-nostalgiac dream. Wether you like it or not, the world is changing, the American economy has changed almost beyond recognition, and no number of guns in the basement will stop this economic wave from washing over our country.

Second - green job sustainability. Yes, you may be right, many of these jobs will undoubtedly end up being dead ends, just as Bush-era corn ethanol was a dead end. We are going to have to learn by doing, and inevitably make a lot of mistakes in the process. Because our congress and elected leaders are all basically corporatists, serving the giant businesses who pay to get them elected, we have to expect corruption, favoritism, nepotism, greed, AND NOT SCIENCE, to rule the process.

Still, without trying to create these jobs, and create a new economy, we are trapped in the rotting carcass of the old economy, which simply doesn't work any more, and which places us at the mercy of the oil nations.

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Most of the rest of the stuff you write sounded like gibberish to me. Standard angry lowerclass white man stuff.

Your last line was "The buss is speeding to go over a cliff and we need to get hold of the staring wheel and the brakes."

So, what does that mean? Whats your solution?

This is the big republican problem, you know. You guys have no idea what should actually be done. No real plan you can articulate and lay out point by point.

However, since I expect our nation to continue in this "jobless recovery" in which the rich get richer by transferring American real wealth out of the country, while the lower and middle classes get poorer and poorer, I think you angry guys have a real good chance of taking power again fairly soon.

So whattya gona do when you guys have your hands on the steering wheel?

Bill,

You make some good points - but when you leap to make assumptions about the person who posted, it is annoying and reminds me of folks in the old school board who could not/would not argue on the points and always jumped to personal attacks.   You would be much more credible if you just stick to the content of the issue.

One good point of yours, however, is that the economy has changed beyond recognition.  It seems to me that current activity (stimulus, cap and trade, messing with healthcare, clunker programs, etc.) is simply designed to keep the old sinking system afloat - like artificially jump-starting a dead man's heart - because no one wants to experience (or be held accountable) for the inevitable real crash.  The fact is - we don't do enough real work to justify our massive consumption.  End of story.  We can sit around and pretend play with science experiments to create oil out of corn, etc. - but who is actually doing valuable work (i.e.. making food, making clothes, etc.) in this country anymore?  Too many of us are "working" by emailing each other all day and expecting nice houses and cars for all our "effort" - it is simply unsustainable.  Someone has to do real work around here.  Money, remember, is a token of something that actually has value.  What do we do in this country that has real value?  The only thing that comes to mind is healthcare - which is likely why the government wants a hand in it.

If there is a crash now, it is not Obama's fault - it is just the reality that we cannot continue on our current course.  What we need are people to stop being in denial about it and start thinking about real changes to make our work valuable again.  My guess is that the answer lies in re-inventing local economies - but it is not in hiring thousands more government workers to redistribute money.  

 P.S. Bill - "whether" is spelled "whether" - not "wether."

Cybercorrespondent would feel left out if I didn't give him the tribal salutes. He gave his tribal recognition signals, and I riposted.

And, when one leaves the darkarts rhetoric of attack unchallenged, and fails to give the reguired counterattack, the frame shifts and the original attacker gains the lizard brain points. I didn't create these political attack rituals. The republicans used these techniques of lizard brain manipulation for years, without response, leading to a cultural shift of perception, a shift of perceiving liberals as crusaders for justice, to wimps.

You personally are not required to participate in the ritual exchange. But I've seen you make your own ritual insults quite a few times here - so it's your choice to make as to wether or not you'll acknowledge that you are also part of the ugly rhetorical rules of our time.

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Oh, I don't think Obama is without his giant share of fault. He didn't devastate the economy - that was done by all of us over the past thirty years, since the oil peak of american production forced us to shift to dependence on importing energy and we started living off our capital instead of our income, as a nation. But Obama so far has played bait-and-switch - promising to fight for change, but instead practicing the clintonian neo-liberalism which is just a lite version of republicanism and "what's good for the rich is good for america".

It's a hard and difficult situation. As a nation, and an economy, we have lost the capacity for long term thinking, for planning, and for self-criticism.

At this time in history, we are in the stage in which, having drained the bank accounts and taken out all the loans we can, we are starting to feel the misery that comes from realizing that one had totally screwed up and a reckoning will soon come, and that reckoning will be terrible. BUT, the reckoning is not here yet, so we are pretending that things are still okay, still trying to squeeze out a few more loans and maybe sell some stuff to keep on living the big life. That pretense, which is at the core of our culture, our media, and our economy, keeps us from facing reality and buckling down to build a new economy to replace the one that is dying around us.

But, the thing is, we REALLY don't know what to do. Untill we start trying some things, and getting back in touch with the real, we just have no idea what will work and what is a dead end.

That's why I think doing something, even if it turns out to be wrong, (like 'green jobs' funded by government intervention, possibly) is better than nostalgia.

I am not quite sure what you mean when you use the expressions "real work" and ""working"" (emphasized with quotes). So explain please more of what youmean by this kind of talk.

I suspect what you are referring to is the kind of "office work" and corporate information work that is what I mean when I say things like "living off our capital" and "wealth transfer".

This raises a kind of interesting echo of socialism - what we've done this last thirty years is move the "means of production" outside of this country. We seem to have hoped that the rest of the planet would be forever happy using the means of production we transferred to them to turn their local real wealth - oil, metals, forest and farm products, anaimals and plants, and so forth - into stuff for us to use cheaply.

So here we sit - our means of production are now located in foreign countries, all with managed economies. Our oil is located under the land of unfriendly peoples. Our infrastructure is decaying, because under deregulation and corporate rule it doesn't increase shareholder returns to spend money on infrastructure.

We got snookered. We forgot that if we are going to be "conservative" we have to actually conserve something, and have something to conserve. And that if we are going to be capitalists, we have to conserve our capital, and live off our income.

That's one of the reasons "conservatives" and "republicans" earn so much of my ire - they betrayed everything that they ever stood for, they spit on their own principles, and they were in charge during most of these last thirty years.

Ooops, there I go, ranting again... We all have our cross to bear.

I have been sharply critical of some public officials for their actions - and with good reason.  I will grant you that and I will not apologize for my remarks in these cases.  My comments are always an opinion of what they actually said and what they have actually done (not who they are).

I do not recall ever making racial or religious remarks about them.  To go into what a "white poor male" supposedly "is" is no more "okay" than to remark about the suppposed negative traits of rich black women.  Racial and religious slurs are what they are and don't belong in rational or civil discourse.  The slur about being "faith-based" is another personal attack that seems too personal and too stereotypical to be any part of a real debate.  Do you actually know the writer and do you actually have reason to believe he/she is white, male, poor, or overtly religious? 

In the case of the school board members, my opinions about their behavior stemmed from direct observation of what they said and did. 

Just because I disagree with you and think your arguments are bigoted does not mean I'm a republican.  In fact, I am a democrat and always have been a democrat.   I don't care what republicans do or don't do - it doesn't make your silly rhetoric "good."  Two wrongs don't make a right and I'm just saying you look more bigoted to me than republicans right now.  I did not go to some republican school of "tactics" to learn how to disarm an argument - I actually agree with much of what you were saying.  I was just pointing out that you sometimes have good points and they are clouded by other nonsense you throw in there that proves nothing except that you hate republicans and have an emotional reaction to them.  I was trying to give you feedback.