We have a Senate race in Minnesota that’s gotten rather dirty. No one in another state will be surprised by this, but we like to think that we’re better than this up here. We’re not. We’re human. And we have a lot of money coming in from the outside to make it all just as nasty as … as anywhere else.
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Yearly Archives: 2008
Patriot
To hear the podcast, please click on the “play” arrow. The music is “Liberty City” by Jaco Pastorius.
Election Day is not a national holiday, at least not in the traditional sense. But it is the one day that our nation asks something from all of us, even if it’s just a few minutes. If you follow calle ocho through Little Havana in Miami on Election Day, you’ll see a long line houses with the red white and blue of US and Cuban flags stretching off into the horizon. Families sometimes come together across generations, as with any holiday, before they go off to vote. Cubans are a people that know what it means to be free because freedom and good times are often best measured against their opposite.
Senility System
The conviction of Senator Ted Stevens has highlighted one of the unspoken problems of the US Senate. The pictures of Sen. Stevens, the longest serving Republican Senator ever, have shown a rather pathetic senior citizen fighting a battle against what appears to be reality. There’s little doubt that he’s way past his prime, which is what the problem is in the Senate as a whole. It’s not that they are all corrupt, it’s that some of them are surprisingly old.
Bennies
As the reality of our economic situation sinks in, some implications will seem a bit strange. A Depression (or a Depression like situation) is marked by the loss of jobs, and we can reasonably expect higher unemployment. Unlike the last Depression, however, people have a lot riding on the bennies they get through employment. The implications will become vast before this is all over.
The Pragmatic Party
Back in 1999, I wrote this piece to recruit potential members of what I called “The Pragmatic Party”. It was a party beyond ideology and all the other nonsense people drone on about – a People’s Party for a cynical age.
Naturally, it went nowhere. Since I wasn’t surprised, I wasn’t upset. But when a crappy looking attack piece tying Obama to Bill Ayers hit my mailbox today, I had to laugh. After all, this was exactly the kind of nonsense I knew how to innoculate against. As this campaign descends into a pitiful series of lessons from Tactics 101, I thought it was time to re-run my original piece from Columbus Day Riot on how to run a Pragmatic Campaign. Here it is with only the introductory paragraph removed.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 