Paul Slansky is frustrated that conservatives have captured the American Flag as their symbol. The emblem of the country's highest aspirations was mindlessly ceded to the holier-than-thou zealots who used it as a bludgeon against the less fanatical. Here's Slansky's solution: Progressives should take the American Flag back by displaying…
About some things, Americans are incredibly stupid. For instance, I’ve kept an eye on science and religion related ignorance for years. 15% of Americans don’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun. Half of the people in the United States (an allegedly “Christian Nation”) can’t name Genesis as the first book in the Bible.
There are a lot more statistics where those came from. If you’d like to read a few dozen zingers, read Rick Shenkman’s article in Alternet, “Ignorant America: Just How Stupid Are We?” There are some real head-shakers in Shenkman’s article. Several might have you wondering whether we should require citizens to pass rudimentary intelligence tests in order to vote. Shenkman’s compilation of stupidity had me wondering this. I know that this is an extremely controversial idea based on the way it has been misused in the past. It is clear, though that huge numbers of people have no idea how their government is designed to work, who is running their government, the basic characteristics of the scientific method, the basic facts of the religions to which they cling, or rudimentary principles of geography, history or economics. Now really . . . should such a person vote? This question makes me squirm.
I’m not really suggesting that we should take official government action to keep people from voting based on their intelligence levels. On the other hand, reading Shenkman’s article makes me wonder whether our “Get out the vote” campaigns should be focused on getting …
Hardly a day goes by when you don't hear yet another Republican claiming that the "surge" is working in Iraq. And see here and here. If the surge is really working, let's see daily videotape showing Western reporters strolling freely through Baghdad's neighborhoods, outside of the Green Zone, chatting with…
The list has grown too long to ignore. We are a country that exercises almost no foresight. We wait for disasters to occur and only then (if then) does it occur to us to do something about the problem.
Here’s an especially heinous example: our government hires numerous financial experts, of course. Alan Greenspan was one of them. Why couldn’t any of them see the subprime disaster long before it occurred? Instead, our government’s experts allowed unscrupulous mortgage companies to lend out far too much money to homeowners in the form of “exploding ARMs” such that it was entirely predictable that the borrowers would fall behind on their payments after only a few years, and that many would lose their homes through foreclosure. Our government stood by while these loans were hyper-securitized to the point where the unscrupulous mortgage companies would go belly up, tranch-laden real estate trusts (who ultimately purchased the loans) would throw their hands and claim that they were innocent and Wall Street would laugh all the way to the bank. That is, until Wall Street failed and successfully begged the federal government to bail out Bear Stearns. All of this was entirely foreseeable. The real disaster is that we failed to use our brains.
For another example, think of the Minnesota Bridge collapse. Let’s see… what might happen if you don’t allocate proper federal funding to fund sufficient bridge inspections? Of course, it’s only after a huge bridge collapses or a major levee breaks that we …
Jeffrey Klein has made a compelling case that there is something McCain is not telling us about his military service or, rather, that he is not being forthright about some of the claims he is making. Since McCain has made this campaign about character, let's talk about character. Let's start…