[In response to “In defense of conduct at ‘town meeting.'”]
I would submit to you that the founders of this country preferred representative government because of exactly the kind of behavior that video depicts. (Emphasis added.)
Perhaps you could enlighten us to which “major laws” you’re referring? Presumably, you refer largely to the TARP financial rescue packages and the bailouts. I think it’s even more instructive to ponder what kind of “breathtaking” consequences there would have been had congress and the fed merely sat on their hands. Say, the possible collapse of the global financial system? At the very least, an extraordinarily severe and prolonged economic depression.
That’s how interconnected these institutions were. That’s how much systemic risk many of these largely unregulated investment banks undertook in the housing bubble. But don’t take my word for it. Those aren’t my words. Ask Ben Bernanke. Ask Hank Paulson. Ask Alan Greenspan. The very apostles of laissez-faire, deregulated markets, forced to recant their credo almost overnight.
No one likes bailouts. No financial institution should become “too big to fail” but once the house is ablaze, you don’t stand there and preach about fire prevention or bemoan the amount water it’s going to take to put the fire out.
Remember when Paulson let Lehman go under? Remember when congress equivocated on TARP? What happened? Credit froze and the stock market tanked. While in conservative la la land, it’s been the same tired rant against taxes and spending it’s always been, the grownups have been dealing with an economic meltdown of monstrous proportions.
So, deficits my @ss. It’s a concern, but far from the most pressing matter in the greatest financial crisis of our lifetimes – at least. The stimulus was much needed as well and you can be happy that we now appear to be experiencing a(n albeit so far largely jobless) recovery.
Frontline has an excellent documentary on the financial crisis at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/view/
[You say] “Without exception, the bills passed by congress haven’t even been read by the majority of people voting on them!”
So which is it? Unread without exception or unread by the majority? And how do you know that members of congress aren’t reading the bills?
Citizens ARE angry, and justifiably so. Congress and the Socialist-in-Chief have rammed through a “stimulus” package that was thousands of pages thick, that mostly doesn’t start happening until 2010 and later, but piles astronomical amounts of unpayable debt on our children and grandchildren. The Socialist-in-Chief took over and destroyed GM and Chrysler (not that they were in great shape). And now the Socialist-in-Chief wants to “fix” health care, to the tune of mutliple trillions of dollars in additional public costs…
If fixing health care is so important then by God the idiots in Washington should take the time to do it right and NOT ram something down our throats like they did with the bank bailout and the “stimulus” and the GM/Chrysler takeovers. People have obviously started to figure out that unless we raise our voices and scream at the top of our lungs we are going to get raped…