Comments on: The Man Has a Point

By: Fred Donaldson

Fred Donaldson — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:30:46 +0000

Yikes! We really need another Peterson committee to investigate how to lower taxes for hedge fund founders.

By: perplexed

perplexed — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 02:30:44 +0000

Not so much “devolved” as “has been sold to the highest bidder.” Devolved could be constued to be a natural phenomenon of some sort.

By: Carol

Carol — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:44:41 +0000

Why are you surprised?

By: Carol

Carol — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:44:15 +0000

“But Rep Waxman’s comments capture something fundamentally undemocratic about the process.”

It’s not just the super secret committee that’s fundamentally undemocratic. Our entire government has devolved into a fundamentally undemocratic system.

By: Daryl

Daryl — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:27:33 +0000

This is exactly the point. Not only is Congress not doing anything but they have appointed a “Super Committee” for not doing anything. How is anyone supposed to take these people seriously?

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:47:29 +0000

The problem is that Republicans want to burn this country down as punishment for electing a black man, and the corporate media is complicit. I don’t see what to do at that point.

By: Chigliakus

Chigliakus — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:27:29 +0000

Unfortunately I think that’s the best possible outcome we can hope for from this Super Committee–gridlock causing failure to reach a deal and then the defult expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Any deal reached with the Republicans is going to be very bad for approximately 99% of the American people.

By: Kenyon Wells

Kenyon Wells — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:14:04 +0000

I’m surprised no one has challenged, from the right or the left, the constitutionality of this “super committee” process.

By: the buckaroo

the buckaroo — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 02:55:32 +0000

…there was a day in the history of the Congress when brains had at least an equal show with cowardice.

By: perplexed

perplexed — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:33:39 +0000

I wholeheartedly concur with Waxman’s sense of outrage, but maybe its time we dropped any pretense of “democratic outcomes” until we’re willing to secure that our legislature is truly representative. Until Americans understand that “true representation” is as fundamental to “democratic outcomes” as true random sampling is to statistical inference, we have little hope of achieving “democratic outcomes.” We can’t have a minority pre-selecting our choices for representatives by controlling campaign funding and also have “democratic” outcomes any more than you can select a biased sample and extrapolate the results you get to the larger population. Garbage in, garbage out; there’s no meaningful connection between the legislature we have and “democratic outcomes.” Unfortunately, just like Obama’s mini-stimulus is being used as an example of why “Keynesian stimulus” doesn’t work, what we’ve got going on here will someday be used as an example of why “democracies” don’t work. Neither example stands up to any logical scrutiny, but that doesn’t prevent it from being misused.