Andre's Executive Order

Alright, I didn't really want to go here because it's being hammered to death, but I'm getting a lot of questions about the debt ceiling, and most of the explanations I'm seeing from the media suck. So here's my take. Why do we have a debt ceiling? A government the size of the United States has an amazingly large financial gray area lurking in predicting the funding necessary to do its job. This gray area is the necessary costs to running the government that we can't predict in advance of a regular budget. By way of example, a single day of operations in Iraq or Afghanistan costs roughly 720 million dollars. Generally speaking, nobody can predict the outbreak, start, or end of war. Similar expenses include natural disasters such as Katrina or man made disasters such as the Wall Street scandals. Not all such gray expenses are negative either. Unexpected opportunities can arise that defy the planned budget or were dependent on unlikely legislation for infrastru...

Politics doesn't have to be dirty. In fact, it is most successful when it's not. This might come as a surprise to some, but the political process is actually most effective when shrewd negotiators attempt to find ways to advance their agenda while maintaining the ability to cooperate both with those in their own camp and those across the aisle. The most effective politicians around the world have been those who can further the cause they stand for and at the same time maintain the respect of those outside their camp and even earn praise from their opponents. But Americans generally see politics as a dark art and politicians as corrupt liars and backstabbers. This actually comes from a misunderstanding of the political process. Politics are about balancing an staggering number of diverse interests and opinions both those of your opponents and within your own party. It makes it very hard to make definitive promises or assurances. Example : I am a Democrat who wants to see e...

There is a lurking feeling that hovers in the back of our minds these days that I think most of us would agree on. That feeling is that our representative democracy isn't really either. We've seen the signs of it as the lines on the road have slipped behind us over the years, but something today in particular suggests that we finally have arrived. I'm going to just point out what I see and let you chew on it. The Democrats At our core, we progressives stand for a few very basic very clear values. We want our government to control the playing field and enforce equitable rules on the environment from which our free market then prospers. We consider programs such as social security, medicare, and core regulation of industry to be critical to maintaining a bottom line below which no person or corporation will fall. A progressive makes no apology for building a robust, strong government that is held accountable to strict rules of law protecting the rights of individuals and t...

"Father, there are many who want to destroy us from outside this nation," Broun said. "Folks like al-Qaeda and the radical Islamists. But there are folks that want to destroy us from inside, the progressives and the socialists, who want to make this nation a nation that's no longer under you, under God, but a nation that's ruled by man." Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) This was part of Representative Broun's 4th of July prayer delivered to the Cobb County GOP at a holiday barbeque. Progressives are lumped in with terrorists as forces arrayed to destroy the American way of life. In order to be the better equipped progressive in these highly polarized times, we can't write this kind of rhetoric off as merely hate and use it to justify a broader division between the ideologies that make up our country. That kind of thinking offers the tempting yet destructive justification to answer in kind; to get nastier and up the ante of our fighting. This, in turn, ris...

Politics (from Greek πολιτικός, "of, for, or relating to citizens"), is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs...[3] I'm going to make the case that conservatives and independents in Wisconsin should vote to put Democrats into the majority in the Senate using the recall elections to achieve it. It might sound counter-intuitive, but I'm going to make a few very specific points that I think will be compelling even to Republicans. The argument is that this would be a good idea for conservative politics in the long run even if you disagree with almost everything the Democrats stand for. The Mess What is 'slash and burn' politics? Well let me give you an example outside of the political arena. Consider football. There are certain strategies in football where you use advantages created by the realities of the rules to achieve in-game goals. A ...