You couldn’t be blamed for turning away from this title. After all, you probably read, listen to, or watch the news every day. In the last couple of days we’ve been reminded of more flooding in the Midwest, wildfires in California, the stock market’s continued decline, record prices for crude, the mortgage crisis with Congress tied in knots, and all of that is without mentioning Iraq or Afghanistan. If all of that is not enough to depress you, then maybe you need to see a psychiatrist, or else chuckle at Lord Acton’s words below.

A few times this year bloggers got the wild hair to start talking about the potential we have to bring more people to our government by making Congress more 2.0 friendly.

Stoller went off about the Franking Laws that are out of step with reality back in March and I've not stopped thinking about it since then. Well, in reality I had been thinking about it before that back when Obama's campaign announced that it would make the Chief Technology Officer a cabinet position.

The tragedy in Utah should open Americans' eyes. While one hesitates to bring up politics at the moment, there's overwhelming evidence that this disaster is a microcosm of how government works under the Republican worldview -- corrupt, hyperpoliticized, instinctively anti-regulatory, and "pro-business" to the extent of risking human life. Intellectual honesty requires we face facts even in unpleasant times. And so a little story, which I urge you to pass on -- especially to friends who aren't already on "our side" of the issues...

The first in a series detailing, in decreasing order of importance, what I feel needs to be done to move America back to the progressive ideal. Cross-posted from Brad's Brain

For fiscal year 2007 the United States is spending $439.3 billion dollars (pdf) on the military, specifically the department of defense. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But this figure's a little misleading. First we need to factor in what is being spent in Iraq, which for some reason doesn't get included in the "military spending" figures. It's supposed to be around $110 billion, but some say it will be higher. Still we're not there. The CIA and various other "defense" operations are unconstitutionally protected from disclosing budgetary figures. They are all funded from what's called the "black budget," and it's estimated at around $1.1 trillion a year, a complicated number because it's not merely subtracting known expenditures from total revenues. (Read the report for more details on this.) So all told we spend around $1.6 trillion dollars a year on our military apparatus. It's long been known that we spend more on the military than all other nations combined, but that's without the black budget. With that factored in, we hold a 3:1 advantage.

Republicans are the flag-wavers of low-cost citizenship, but if you look back at 30 years of neglected infrastructure, you may notice that most of the Democrats who managed to get elected played more or less the same game. The last Democratic national candidate who threatened to raise taxes on everybody was Walter Modale, and he only won one state in the general election. The people don't want to pay for the blessings of citizenship, and politicians of both parties are just riding the wave of irresponsibility.

The failure of the I-35 Bridge in Minneapolis was an obvious failure of infrastructure, of deferred maintenance, of it’s not in the budget for this fiscal year. But over looked is the fact that this is our second warning not our first. The levees failing in New Orleans was an identical failure. The warnings were well known and just like the I-35 Bridge and hundreds of others they fell on deaf ears.