As we sit on the cusp of our fall travel and conference schedule, we're faced with a difficult decision today, about what topics to cover.
We'll admit this should have been a momentous last seven days. Five years ago this week, the titans of Wall Street, at the end of the G.W. Bush era, nearly destroyed the entire world's economy with their selfishness and hubris. Five years later, most of those crooks have yet to see a courtroom, let alone a prison cell. And while the rich have effectively recovered from an economic apocalypse of their own creation, virtually everyone else is still hurting.
On Capitol Hill, things haven't changed much either. Members of Congress did finally return from five weeks of shirking their duties to nominally "work" on legislation. However, between the GOP's civil war and the Democrats finding new ways to act like cowards on the budget, nothing much really ended up getting done in our national legislative branch.
The White House didn't fare much better this week. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry - along with their counterparts from Russia - stopped the nation's rush to military action in Syria. That didn't seem to matter to critics, pundits, and members of Congress who couldn't seem to complain enough about where the President was taking our country.
Still, with multiple journeys ahead of our staff members over the next few weeks, what caught our attention most today was a story we noticed late on Thursday, about a journey of an entirely different and wonderful nature.
NASA officially announced yesterday that the Voyager 1 spacecraft officially left the heliosphere of our solar system on August 25th of last year.
The computer, tablet or phone you're reading this on right now is far more powerful than the tiny computer still running the Voyager 1 satellite. Your little machine also communicates much faster, as it takes a message from Voyager nearly seventeen-and-a-half hours to get to back to Earth from its current location aproximately 11.7 billion miles away.
For 36 years, the scientists at NASA's JPL lab in California have tracked the satellite as it recorded some of the most amazing data anyone had ever seen, including images of Jupiter and Saturn. They've been collecting data and troubleshooting a machine that only was supposed to last four years, but continue to find new ways to make old technology perform new tricks.
The journey that Voyager 1 and its sibling have already taken makes the trips our staff members have scheduled over the next few weeks look amazingly painless in comparison, and helps us put into perspective all the negativity we've had to cover this week.
If you can, this weekend, put down the computer, the tablet, and especially the cell phone. If a machine with an eight-track tape for a brain can travel without constant human assistance to the edge of solar system and last 36 years, your gadgets will certainly survive a day or two without you.
While you're taking a break from your machines? Leave your anger with humans behind, too. The people who drive you nuts? Ignore 'em for a couple days. They'll be just as stupid on Monday when you run into them again.
Instead this weekend, focus on the moments worth remembering, with the people and places you love.
We've all got a long way to go yet in life, and the universe is a huge, dark place.
Make the journey worth it.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Holding Patterns
It's been difficult lately, covering the rapidly changing events of the Syrian debate that have dominated nearly every space available for news, while equally important news stories like the upcoming budget battles in Washington or the 'One Percent recovery' have been given short shrift or been buried completely.
Thankfully it appears that cooler heads have prevailed for now. President Obama has sent Secretary Kerry to Geneva, Switzerland today to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to nail down the details of the international group that will remove Syria's chemical weapons. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is calling for caution and patience, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.
Whether anti-war liberals and isolationist conservatives want to admit it or not, the biggest reason the international debate over Syria is now in a holding pattern is because President Obama's threat to use American military force is still very real.
That threat appears to have given both Syria and Russia a pause for sanity - which means we can finally give one of those other important stories at least a little time today. We wouldn't exactly recommend relaxing, though, since it now looks like at least some Congressional Republicans may actually be willing to shut down the government at the end of this month.
In case you missed it, the House Republican leadership pulled their warped spending plan of a Continuing Resolution - a "CR", in Congress-speak - on Wednesday, in large part because of the GOP's own ongoing internal civil war. Without passing a CR by the end of this month, the Federal government will shut down on October 1st. As recent polling has confirmed, if the government shuts down, Americans will overwhelmingly blame Republicans in Congress, as they should.
The key problem, as Jonathan Bernstein noted Wednesday afternoon, is that the extremist tea partiers on the right continue to insist that conditions be tied to the CR that neither Democrats or more centrist Republicans will ever vote for.
As we've warned many times over the last few years, and as Greg Sargent stated perfectly again on Wednesday afternoon, the GOP's internal civil war is eventually going to come to a head - and John Boehner may indeed lose his head, politically, before this round of Republican infighting is done.
Greg goes into significant detail about how the latest budget battles will play out, and we highly recommend you read his column in total to completely understand how paralyzed Republicans in Congress now are. In short, to any sane person, Speaker Boehner's choice of what to do next couldn't be more clear if he had a Tomahawk missile literally pointed at his head.
Either Boehner's going to have to side with mainstream Republicans and a large number of Democrats in the House on any one of a number of high profile bills - or he's going to end up shutting down the government, which will effectively destroy the GOP in the 2014 election, and will certainly destroy him.
The clock is ticking Mr. Speaker. We suggest you take action now. You've been holding up progress for far too long already.
Thankfully it appears that cooler heads have prevailed for now. President Obama has sent Secretary Kerry to Geneva, Switzerland today to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to nail down the details of the international group that will remove Syria's chemical weapons. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is calling for caution and patience, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.
Whether anti-war liberals and isolationist conservatives want to admit it or not, the biggest reason the international debate over Syria is now in a holding pattern is because President Obama's threat to use American military force is still very real.
That threat appears to have given both Syria and Russia a pause for sanity - which means we can finally give one of those other important stories at least a little time today. We wouldn't exactly recommend relaxing, though, since it now looks like at least some Congressional Republicans may actually be willing to shut down the government at the end of this month.
In case you missed it, the House Republican leadership pulled their warped spending plan of a Continuing Resolution - a "CR", in Congress-speak - on Wednesday, in large part because of the GOP's own ongoing internal civil war. Without passing a CR by the end of this month, the Federal government will shut down on October 1st. As recent polling has confirmed, if the government shuts down, Americans will overwhelmingly blame Republicans in Congress, as they should.
The key problem, as Jonathan Bernstein noted Wednesday afternoon, is that the extremist tea partiers on the right continue to insist that conditions be tied to the CR that neither Democrats or more centrist Republicans will ever vote for.
As we've warned many times over the last few years, and as Greg Sargent stated perfectly again on Wednesday afternoon, the GOP's internal civil war is eventually going to come to a head - and John Boehner may indeed lose his head, politically, before this round of Republican infighting is done.
Greg goes into significant detail about how the latest budget battles will play out, and we highly recommend you read his column in total to completely understand how paralyzed Republicans in Congress now are. In short, to any sane person, Speaker Boehner's choice of what to do next couldn't be more clear if he had a Tomahawk missile literally pointed at his head.
Either Boehner's going to have to side with mainstream Republicans and a large number of Democrats in the House on any one of a number of high profile bills - or he's going to end up shutting down the government, which will effectively destroy the GOP in the 2014 election, and will certainly destroy him.
The clock is ticking Mr. Speaker. We suggest you take action now. You've been holding up progress for far too long already.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
The Ties That Blind
For all the horrifying descriptions of the chemical weapons attacks in Syria that President Obama gave last night, his heartfelt and surprisingly brief plea to Americans likely changed the opinion of almost no one. That doesn't mean Americans have become heartless after more than a decade of war, that began this date, twelve years ago, in New York City, Washington, DC, and eventually, a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
We believe that Americans are truly concerned about the horrific deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Syria's civil war. We also think that progress has been made on a diplomatic solution, at a remarkably fast pace over the last few days. Just yesterday, the Syrian government agreed to join the international Chemical Weapons Convention, and hand over their entire chemical weapons stockpile to an international enforcement group.
To paraphrase President Obama though, just making a declaration doesn't actually get the work done.
However, as we noted earlier this week, the United States can not and should not be expected to unilaterally enforce a worldwide standard, when our nation is only one of many parties to that standard. Ethically as well as fiscally, America can no longer afford to be the policeman for the world.
In fact, we'd say the type and level of attention that the world has demanded that the U.S. give since the end of World War II, seems to have blinded many in America to the fact that far too often, we've failed our responsibilities to ourselves here at home.
For example, allowing blind people to have gun permits in Iowa.
That may seem like a joke to some people, but we can assure you, that's a very real issue facing citizens in Iowa right now. If Iowa politicians and voters hadn't been blinded by nearly limitless campaign spending from the NRA - the kind that got two state legislators recalled in Colorado last night - perhaps the citizens of Iowa could have focused on better water management laws. Instead, some state funding is tied up fighting blind people with guns, instead of being used to help handle the massive drought the Hawkeye state is now suffering through.
The distractions of war have also blinded America to the monster our surveillance state has become, especially over the last decade. That most NSA queries of the database broke Federal privacy laws from 2006-2009 is a shocking display of Federal incompetence - one that Americans might have noticed much sooner, if the U.S. wasn't always expected to be the enforcement arm for international law by nearly every other nation on the planet.
None of that even begins to touch on America's current inability to elect sane political representatives who understand simple macroeconomics - like the fact that raising the nation's debt ceiling is simply paying the bills we've already racked up.
Infrastructure, unemployment, education, taxation, inequality, crime - the list of things that need serious attention here at home from all Americans is longer and heavier than most of us even want to imagine. Yet, too often, we've been blinded by our focus on helping everyone else around the world, before we help ourselves.
Americans do understand the Syrian problem facing President Obama, and we'd wager that most Americans - even if they are skeptical - desperately want the diplomatic solution that is being discussed at this time, by multiple nations, to be successful.
That said, America simply can't focus on the rest of the world's needs before our own anymore.
We've already become too blind for our own continued safety.
We believe that Americans are truly concerned about the horrific deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Syria's civil war. We also think that progress has been made on a diplomatic solution, at a remarkably fast pace over the last few days. Just yesterday, the Syrian government agreed to join the international Chemical Weapons Convention, and hand over their entire chemical weapons stockpile to an international enforcement group.
To paraphrase President Obama though, just making a declaration doesn't actually get the work done.
However, as we noted earlier this week, the United States can not and should not be expected to unilaterally enforce a worldwide standard, when our nation is only one of many parties to that standard. Ethically as well as fiscally, America can no longer afford to be the policeman for the world.
In fact, we'd say the type and level of attention that the world has demanded that the U.S. give since the end of World War II, seems to have blinded many in America to the fact that far too often, we've failed our responsibilities to ourselves here at home.
For example, allowing blind people to have gun permits in Iowa.
That may seem like a joke to some people, but we can assure you, that's a very real issue facing citizens in Iowa right now. If Iowa politicians and voters hadn't been blinded by nearly limitless campaign spending from the NRA - the kind that got two state legislators recalled in Colorado last night - perhaps the citizens of Iowa could have focused on better water management laws. Instead, some state funding is tied up fighting blind people with guns, instead of being used to help handle the massive drought the Hawkeye state is now suffering through.
The distractions of war have also blinded America to the monster our surveillance state has become, especially over the last decade. That most NSA queries of the database broke Federal privacy laws from 2006-2009 is a shocking display of Federal incompetence - one that Americans might have noticed much sooner, if the U.S. wasn't always expected to be the enforcement arm for international law by nearly every other nation on the planet.
None of that even begins to touch on America's current inability to elect sane political representatives who understand simple macroeconomics - like the fact that raising the nation's debt ceiling is simply paying the bills we've already racked up.
Infrastructure, unemployment, education, taxation, inequality, crime - the list of things that need serious attention here at home from all Americans is longer and heavier than most of us even want to imagine. Yet, too often, we've been blinded by our focus on helping everyone else around the world, before we help ourselves.
Americans do understand the Syrian problem facing President Obama, and we'd wager that most Americans - even if they are skeptical - desperately want the diplomatic solution that is being discussed at this time, by multiple nations, to be successful.
That said, America simply can't focus on the rest of the world's needs before our own anymore.
We've already become too blind for our own continued safety.
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