Libs Jump the Shark: Demo Party of Howard Dean, Daily Kos, MSNBC?

highlarious

I don't see liberalism or dems fading away. After Obama won dems proclaimed the death of the reps party.That will not happen either even though I would like to see both disappear. The US something like the Canadian system, 3 or 4 major parties.,

As to what dems will do in 2010 or 12, it all depends on the economy.

Be careful what you ask for.  While Canada has four major parties, it is quite conceivable that one party wins the 155 seats in the House of Commons to win a majority.  This effectively creates a dictatorship as nothing stops them from enacting legislation and their agenda.

Canada's Senate is appointed and vacancies are filled by the Prime Minister, who will of course stack the deck with patronage appointments that he knows will support his agenda.  Those appointments are practically for life.

The Governor General (our representative for the Sovereign and quasi Head of State) is appointed by the Queen on recommendation of the Prime Minister (so essentially by the PM). He or she have no real political cloud and the appointment is strictly ceremonial and to give royal assent to the bills.

The present composition of our Parliament has created a game of chicken.  The PM baits the opposition they threaten and he plays chicken to see who will blink.  So far it has worked for him.

To give you an example of how much power the PM really has have a look at this:

During the implementation and ratification of the US/Canada Free Trade Deal the Conservative government easily pushed the bill through parliament .  When it got to the Liberal dominated Senate, they bulked and threatened not to give it the senate nod.

PM Mulroney, found a loophole in our constitution and appointed 8 more Senators and his bill was passed.  Talk about democracy at work.

That's why I say, be careful what you ask for.  No political system is perfect.  The Alberta Government has 72 of 82 seats in our legislature and does as it pleases. 

Let me amend that to4 parties but still a president and congress system.

I have heard Canada may move to an elected senate and has already set age limits.

Can't the GG dismiss the PM under certain circumstances?

I have been following the games of threatening to call new elections.

Thanks for the history

Jumping sharks!  TV and Movie episodes are often used to describe politics.  I do agree with some of the other commenter, the two party system is problematic and outside of what the founding fathers ideals.  Franklin and Jefferson told us to be very careful about factions as it could injure the republic and the rights of indiviudals

The stimulus and spend like hell approach should not be totally blamed on republicans nor democrats but to their advisers the main being the Prime minister of UK Gordon Brown if you have watch all of Gorden Brown's video's well before the Stimulus was adopted first by Bush and then by Obama you would see what I am suggesting.

He is still advising America   

So far most of what he as advised has been adopted by most nations around the World. Why are you blaming Bush or Obama, when its the advisor's that are at fault. Both these presidents have no real clue about the economy they are not that clever in such issues such things that why they have both seeked advice.

Blame Gordon Brown the stimulus was all his idea and please believe me as its so very true. He is vied as being one of the best economical whiz kids, this is the guy that qualified and attended university at the age of 15. People listen to him on global economy. 

I think it is time for Society to tell the Britneys, Chads, Lakteeshas, Luiz and Jean Guys of this World that the Hippie Lefty Philosophy their  Hippie Pot Smokin parents instilled in them as kids to go through life since they were toddlers on "Everyone Wins a Trophy for Participation" needs to end.  There are Losers and there are Winners. There is no in between , "Suck it up Prince and Princess'" No one owes you a Living, work for what you desire, and do not expect it to be handed to you!  That is what makes a great country and society.

Anyone who ever watches American Idol Auditions, knows what I am talking about! That is just one case in point of a typical Societal Meltdown caused by Mumsy and Daddums. Mummsy and Daddums prodding their little Lakteesha and Rodney, they are truly the bestest most talented singers in the world and they are a shoo in for American Idol, only to be shot down in flames, and then cry for the camera blaming the judges for their own failures, Mummsy and Daddums should have told them in the first place!  When that Fails, these Whiny ass kids tell a hard luck story, such as tear jerkers like Grandma has Cancer and is dying, her dying wish is that I become the next American Idol!

Please, please, please,~!! Whimper.  O give me a friggin break, do you really think these judges were born off a lettuce truck to fall for that crap?

Look at Reality TV, where contestants will do anything for a few dollars and a few minutes of fame to be on TV. One episode had contestants Deep Throating, chewing and swallowing as many Reindeer Cock, balls and all they could eat in a minute. My, My, Mummsy and Daddums must be so proud of their children, wonder if they mentioned their childs new Career aspirations at the Country Club, one wonders what their "Witty Retort would be"  By the way, my Britney just got into Harvard. You not wanting to be bested in the crowd state.,  My Son and Daughter are in a reality series where they gobble Goat Intestines and Swallow ReinDeer Cock!  Wow won't you be the talk of the tea party set with a comment like that?

Adults today have  totally unreal concept of Life as far as I am concerned, They have to know, You cannot all be Winners in Life, but you can be contributors the team, we all cannot be Movie Stars or Leaders of the pack, regardless of what Mummsy and Daddums say! They are your parents, they will also say you are the most beautiful and talented, when clearly others will tell you the truth you are not.  31 inch diameter Cankles on a woman is not attractive unless you are Bill Clinton, a sparse mustache and uni brow on a 12 year old boy does not make him Tom Selleck, it makes him look like a friggin ogre, at least till it grows out fully.

Our country has no place for "Jumping BandWaggoners" who flit to an fro to the "Cause Celeb of the Day" only to abandon it when it is required you participate and have to put some sweat equity into your country.  In Canada, we have the same thing, the NDP Jack Laytons, Elizabeth Mays of the Green Party, all who have lofty goals, but no clear direction how to carry it out, and these two parties have thousands of Sheeple who blindly follow them, not realising if these lofty goals ever came to fruition, the first who would complain would be the Lefty Sheeple who would proclaim, "What? You mean it's not FREE?" You mean we have to pay for all these social services?  Gee WHiz Layton and May never said anything about raising taxes to pay for the Carbon Tax or Free Housing and Day Care. Boy thats a Fly in the Ointment!

You lefties and Corporates all Scream we want less government, we want them to stay out of our lives and quit controlling us, we want to be free as a Butterfly and do as we please.  Yet when Shit Hits the Fan, as in the economy, guess who comes whining to the government for financial assistance. Ya cant have it both ways there "Shit for Brains"! No one forced you to contribute you RRSP or life savings in your Brother in Laws failed venture making Buggy Whips and Tofu Powered Lamps.  That was your decision. The same with credit, you bought it, you gotta pay the interest no matter how high it is, you knew that when you applied for the credit card or bank loan, so unless you are a total "Tard" perhaps you should slap on a paper hat and serve fries for a living, at least you can scam a few fries when no one is looking.

Bottom Line, Lefties who are quick to blame the Governing Parties for their Failures rarely follow up their Gripes with a solid plan of action that is both affordable or feasiable.  The only lefty who did was Tommy Douglas who implemented Canadas Socialised Medicine, that was 60 years ago, and at least he had the BALLS to state it aint gonna be cheap, we all have to pay and contribute to it, to cover the ones who financially cannot.

Thats all I have to say on that subject.  If you want something bad enough, you better be prepared to work damn hard for it.

Crap Deu, and shut that bloody Blazooky Up!

Barry Artiste

A great , long and worthy burst, there, Mr. Artiste. It is the culture of narcissism of which you speak.

The kids in school today can't read or write properly, yet they aspire to be lawyers and doctors. What is the matter with owning a dry-cleaning shop or something similar?

Some high schools I have been at have eliminated woodshop and autoshop because too many adolescents of color took the courses, embarrassing the lib teachers who, I suppose, felt that they had failed to "reach" those kids who were now "condemned" to a "blue-collar existence".

Only thing is that blue-collar folk today often make more money than white-collar folk and have more independence and control of their work situation.

Thanks to all posters.

Hell, I remember my Dad saying Do well in school son, cause if you don't you'll end up digging ditches or being a garbage man.  Jesus Tap Dancin Christ, do you know what a city worker ditch digger makes and Hour? Around $30.00 an hour with benefits, a garbage man for the city makes the same,Crap a flag person at a construction site controlling traffic makes $27.00 an hour, now you tell me if I m missing something here, cause my Dad sure was unclued on the concept.

Another LOL.

You know what? I think my comments would make a great op.ed piece so i am going to post it as a story, thanks for the comments guys

It is about time we had some straight talk on now public. You all have articulated in your own interesting and outrageous ways what the truth is as I see it in my own warped manner.

I had the opportunity to be that hippie, smokin, anti-war demonstrator, not in that order mind you. Thank goodness my wife was sane and produced three healthy kids that have found their own paths. All we did was encourage them.

It is a sad state  of affairs that blame, guilt, and victim are all cards that are being used to avoid the truth rather then looking into the mirror and seeing the entire calmity unfold.  We are the pain. blame and victim we project on to others.  Hurrah for the "get over it" voices. They are refreshing and desperately needed especially now.

Localism

So what's the solution of

The crumpled housing mass

And the dollar destroyed ?

Lets send corporate brains

And their inventions into the history void  ?

If you asked me,  then give me "human" back

And make it focal 

I'd nod my head and say

De-corporatise the world

Make conscious care , share pants

And give back power to the leg of the local . 

THE PANTS ECONOMY

Ahh the Underwear Gnomes do indeed have missing pant-steps and so do we all . That is the uncomfortable panting-shadow of it inside us .. However we have trusted and been thrusted into corporatism which promised wealth and dominion and its payments have been fantasy economics, "frills" (I had to get that in ) and a public bail out of a system that in itself questions the whole social and economic system . But what do we do  ? We subsidise a Pants economy compulsively .

SUB PRIME PANTS :

Need, socially and politically ,  was put under a corporate thrall and not shared as social conscious responsibility and the elite invented their own values at the bottom of societies to enrich themselves and to hook others into "their shared dream" ..  People sucked it in without the means to really  "be the enriched" - because they too "wanna be rich" .. Fantasy economics based on the rich mans dreams became currency and borrowing to do that - works for the few not the many  - the sub prime crisis embedded this weave of human needs and fantasy ....Behind every set of pants there should be some organic values and real human form rather than fantasy and no collateralising bollox ..

Rather than locally supported housing schemes pump primed by Govt and financially engineered to give some sense of realistic ownership by increments - you had the corporate way and the poor were seen as a market .. How humanly disgusting. But also how humanly unconscious of us all not to see and want to be informed of our brother and sisters plights for housing and a sense of ownership over their own lives .. Frankly driving people into property owning slavery payments for life is mad and inhuman in the 21st Century ..

There's also more shadows that the pants-economics  are casting over us all - questions of who has most leg-in them .. Clearly some elite people are wearing100 pants for every one of some of ours  ...

However should an elite corporatised human shape have all the pants and give you a scrappy pair of plastic ones that have holes in them and are slavishly paid for ..

Who gets what and why and how we solve that is the big question, and it always was .

THE PANTING GHOST  : Tribe Of Ass

I walked on Time's savannah 

With skin and all  bare ass 

Then I discovered the weave of grass

And from its seeds dwellings came

And I kept and bred the local game

You joined me and we formed a tribal core

We saw another and discovered war 

We joined again ,  lost care and pity

We made a Warlord of the city 

Around him his kin were honeyed up

Like great jawed walking golden ants 

They bit the rest of us to money bloods

And took our shared out pants 

Now they've banked the remains of grass

And we walked into nowhere 

So pantless , ancient and

Bared : 

The final tribe of ass .....

Yes, it is not just the left that doesn't know "Step 2". That is why the Republicans are still dead.

They are all "free traders" and "free marketers". That is, they are LIBERALS IN ECONOMICS.

We don't have the wealth we need to take care of ourselves in the health care field. We are just rearranging the Titanic deck chairs on this issue.

We need to work here for our own nation, our national community. Save ourselves first. Corporations have a license to operate because the pursuit of their desire for wealth helps us. When they off-shore production to make more money, we lose the tax benefits, the communities and the rest.

The Reagan-Bush Family Republican Party is dead. Now the "Radical Chic" Democratic party is committing Hari-Kari right in front of us.

Roy - there's another point too with corporate system delivery - it can crush local innovations - and its self interest as you say can be come detached from the county of its origins .. Added to this is the cheap fossil fuel scenario which brings goods into the reach of all more cheaply - yet the price has been stable communities being buckled by the raw capacity of shifting production about willy nilly ..Cheap oil is the lubricant of so much ease of shifting productions and I for one will be glad when it ends because maybe then we'll see a limit to that ease of shifting about production and realise the need again for local social stability in everyone's community ..You note too that we over-consume - I hope that will end if oil gets more expensive ..     

Globalism is an example of  the perverser side of  economics which will destroy many people and lives . And,  its kept alive by cheap oil.. A stable people-first economy seems like an ideal but more than likely we will be forced into human local scales again and re-humanised politics again that are cuttingly realistic for human local stability - after all "Global" has come to mean rapid shifts of money and capital and production but it can only prosper for so long on part paradoxes like "credit"  (non existent money)   - as we have seen .. As a poet though I might say  in South Park - ofcourse ..

There was a giant finger

Pointing from the sky

At the money system , its pants and  its eye

And it gave the soul a rhyme

"You have warned yourselves

You cultures of wish,  and of sub-prime .. "

.

Interesting point. Ease of movement destroys meaningful necessary boundaries. It is the dark side of "Matrix" that the Internet egomaniacs didn't get.

I think the cure lies in conscience and responsibility, and not in creating (which we can't anyway) pricier oil. 

With good tariffs, we can control the movements of wealth and neither steal nor be victims of theft.

What a great thread here going with your story Roy.   It has got some great contributors here

including yours.

 Go Barry !  Write more..let it flow.

Yes ... But a common culture of an empathic sort which has uniform values of conscience is only slowly evolveable and in that sense is left within the mass wiles and chances of global neurotic Self-isms which of course capitalism from the time of Edward Bernay (Freuds mass marketeering ad-manipulation relative)   has thrived on .. 

Its a tough equation to crack and to live in ...

I think so long as the Global market can operate on cheap oil there's no real mass incentive to think differently for most people .. Control could be more possible if a resounding catastrophe were to happen bigger than the one we have witnessed and it shattered the faith in the over-consumption current global model .  Somehow,  I intuit with my old bones,  that is likely ....Limitless power has not been created and demand for food and life is on the increase on a limited amount of space....

Thanks for the post Roy ..

I have all those Edward Bernet (sp?) clips from "The Century of the Self". Do you have them, too?

Yeahhh I've seen a couple online - they are very good and chilling too - .. I recall Vance Packard's book too :  "Hidden Persuaders" - which discussed his work and others  my god it was an eye opener which opened less eyes than it should have done ..

Edward Bernays  (there's an "s" )  see wikipedia  (maybe there's more than one spelling Roy) 

We like to think we "own" our own mind but Vance Packard showed convincingly we are heavily acted upon by media and even strongly shaped - mainly by the reservoirs of early unmet needs  being plugged into . "Lost Narcissisms" ,  that are relived inside the promises of more status embedded as images within products .. The advertising agencies are not stupid ... Like the Century of the Self vids indicate we have also been mass manipulated by politicians schooled in Bernays logics of crowd manipulation ..

I can't believe it. I was such a Vance Packard fan as a kid. Read at least three of his books. I have all the "Century of the Self" clips downloaded and stored on the computer.

What about Lasch's Culture of Narcissism? Read that one?

I assume you like Jung. How about Gurdjieff and Castaneda? Reich? Done any primaling/bio-energetics stuff?

Freud's weakness is that the "Savior" is the conscious mind. We "control" the Id, and, in the end, he and Jung had to break because when you get into what the Unconscious really is, there is that element of the Occult, and religious meaning.

(off topic - going on-topic  )  Its been a long time since I read books really but some of the last one were " Prisoners Of Pain" and other stuff by Janov .. No I have not read Lasch's stuff ... Reich yeah some time ago ..  The biggest breakthrough thinker-feeler was Janov I think  and he remains for me a serious stepping stone that joins together what "consciousness" is  and how its mediated by the storage of factors like  "pain" and unmet need"  - i.e. unconsconciousness . More potently he taught me how to manipulate those equations and see into them and appreciate their great tragedy in all of us .

Jung is fascinating and his thinking points to the shadow existences of image-laden archaic constructions in everyone - Loved him to bits  (as they say) but then I would because as an artist etc,  an "inner realm" of thought and feeling - with the occasional soul insight jumps and travelling by empathy  warp is an aboriginal dream-time necessity .. The concept of weaving feeling and dreams in and out of current realities is what makes us human . We like to think we are "objective" - yet we are really inter-subjectively relational in Time and Space coloring consciousness from unconsciousness and its shapes as we go along..

I agree about Freud - at least partly . He missed the other element of the mystical because maybe he could see it led to so many other neurotic unconsciously laden entanglements. I think his way was incredibly useful but also "head-bound" ultimately and misses the possibility of what's transcendent in us - that area where we can experience  some freedom and a powerful sense of both organic connection and "integration" into time and space ..He did not see ID as partner and friend .  Liberating the unconscious through empathy and re-connections brings a deeper gift (at a painful price) of  seeing all times and places inside oneself ... However that journey is different is everyone and partial-insanity is also the price sometimes - where the Self cannot join and integrate its distresses ..

This is why we have a PANTS economy -- its a macro form of bad threads and crap sewing and over-control from the top that seeks dominion and ego enrichment - but its what most of us support because there's a lost quality in us -  and it often gets screwed by political liberalism -  Care .. Care for community and people at its best is organic and practical . I see a lot of false-care in the UK mental health systems which I monitor and what I want to see is ways that fit people not bureaucrat thinking ... There's the problem in societies - head-bound bureau mechanics are not good - support for the individual anywhere must mean sustainable local economies and somehow evolving to that by a realization that there are boundaries and limits  which protect everyone . "Global" is ambition at elastic overstretch ready to break itself - I intuit .  Maybe paradoxically we'll create the right bureaucracies under common control  when we see who we all are in a local social and economic sense and protect that .. We need each other locally to be STABLE .. 

Poem :  THE GOD OF SUB PRIME RHYME

The God Di-oxide pumps

From a billion new puffalo rumps

And evaporation sucks

And the wind wears tossing leather

And throws its rain bullwhips out

And the child aboriginal chants in you

There's no deep heart as common glue

There's a hole in the common soul

And an economy made of pants and rants

And about that there's no doubt .... 

Yeaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ..    (winks)

Wonderful comments, rants, insights. The whole enchilada. Since there appears to be a matrix filled with changing realities that we can plug into at any time or interest are we not deluded into believing that the reality our cultural infestation has created allows us to fall asleep into a place where only the anomaly dare treads? WAKE UP the minor birds cried out in Huxley's world to remind us of our hypnotizing cultural impediment to the "truth" of the nature of our contracting world.

Our narratives that join, change, expand, contract and at times transcend even our own imaginations occasionally surprising us with a WOW moment. A flash into the world of amazement and possibilities. An eternal sense of things. Ever expanding and forever possible even within the limits of our finite body that generates all the juices necessary to experience it all.

Our freedom appears to be in fact nothing more or less then nothing left  to lose. We really have nothing in the everything we are blessed with. hold on and let go or god or something. As one great poet said, "there is something happening here but you dont know what it is, do you Mr. Jones.