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October 13, 2005
Playing Fantasy Football is Not Playing Football & Playing Fantasy Government is Not Governing
Watch the video of this post, it is VERY interesting, insightful(?), brilliant(?), and possesses a much higher "fun-factor" than all the writing. ;-)
I don't play any of the online fantasy sports. I have enough trouble keeping up with the real ones, plus participating in a few myself. I do realize however that many people do, otherwise it would not be as big a phenomenon as it is. Fantasy sports are a great outlet for fans. They get intimately involved in players, teams, coaches, maybe strategies, depending on their interest level, but there is no question or confusion whether they are playing the real game or not.
This brings me to our government and especially today's article on the front page of the NY Times and some statistics via Talking Points Memo. First the Times article, which you can find here.
"Deplorable. Disappointing. Outrageous. That is how I feel about it," said the Atlanta mayor, Shirley Franklin, a Democrat, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "The federal response has just been unacceptable. It is like talking to a brick wall."
Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush administration's handling of the temporary housing response. "I am baffled," said Ronald D. Utt, a former senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research organization. "This is not incompetence. This is willful. That is the only way I can explain it."
...the temporary housing program has been troubled since the start, observers say. Instead of setting up as many as 30,000 trailers and mobile homes every two weeks, as of Tuesday, just 7,308 were occupied. Even counting berths on the four ships that FEMA has leased and rooms on military bases and elsewhere, the agency has provided only 10,940 occupied housing units for victims in the three Gulf states.
And at TPM:
Over at the blog of Reason Magazine, Editor Nick Gillespie has posted a list of how much each two-term president increased spending going back forty years.
Specifically, the list measures increases in discretionary spending over five successive budgets, adjusted for inflation.
Here are the numbers ...
LBJ: 25.2%
Nixon: -16.5%
Reagan: 11.9%
Clinton: -8.2%
Bush: 35.2%
What is one to make of this? Consider the state of the Iraq war, the budget deficits, the Federal response to the hurricanes, the tax cuts for the wealthy, the increase of people living in poverty, the number of folks living without health insurance, the international torture scandals, the legal problems within the Republican leadership, Osama still on the loose, and the runaway spending, exceeding the so-called worst of the Democrats. What can one conclude? Is this incompetence? Or is it truly willful? George Bush and his team campaigned on the promise of competency and better management. That has clearly not occurred. If this is a case of willful action on their part to not only destroy government but to take advantage of everything they can along the way, then it is incredibly heinous.
When we elect leaders we give them a sacred trust to act in good faith, to not lie, cheat, steal or mislead us. We elect them to act according to accepted principles of moral, ethical behavior. Granted Clinton had some serious personal issues and was not the most honest on that score, but this administration has betrayed our trust in ways that Clinton never came close to approaching. It is as if they believe they are really playing a game, like a board game of Fantasy Government. They must believe that what they do has no impact on the lives of real people. They are so very, very wrong. This is no game, it is all too real. Far too many of us are going to suffer by their actions.
Posted by Chip Spear at October 13, 2005 12:20 PM
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