Today on The Current

[james_davis_nicoll]

Diane Francis argues that it would be best for Canada to abandon our health care system, to adopt a native relations system even more brutal than the one we have, and embrace a sky-rocketing Gini Coefficient while inextricably tying ourselves to an unstable nation forever flirting with government shut-down and default.

On balance, I am against this. Their crazification factor outnumbers Canada more than two to one.

She also advocates policies known have contributed to gendercide in China.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The US political apparatus has still not completely recovered from the legacy of the slave system and resentments left over from the US Civil War. Some of the bad effects are constitutionally locked in, giving some of the worst people in the world effective veto power over everything, regardless of national majority sentiment.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I was quite relieved to find she was not the Diane Francis I used to know.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

"I have no idea why Canadians look south and don't recoil in horror. We're ugly, and we're that particular kind of ugly that knows it and revels in it."

Actually, we do. We're just too polite to do it where you can see us.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

A few months ago I saw a Confederate flag on a lawn in rural Ohio, and said "Oh, come on" so hard I almost drove off the road.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

I've been off LJ so long I briefly looked for a Like button.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here's an illuminating article, mapping the districts whose representatives are driving the move for the shutdown and looming default:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html?currentPage=all&mobify=0

These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.

Most of the members of the suicide caucus have districts very similar to Meadows’s. While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.

The current mechanics of Congress are such that this 18% of the country are able to manipulate the House Republicans as a whole, and, on that basis, shut down the entire government and threaten default. Basically, the Crazification Factor has been endowed with veto power.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There's a guy who likes to drive around Haverhill, Massachusetts with a Confederate battle flag and a US flag flapping behind opposite sides of the cab of his pickup truck.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

"How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him."
- Pauline Kael

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

No, it's not time, you're not ripe yet.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

There are American politicians who would oppose it because they are unaware that Canada is not already a state.

[noelmaurer.typepad.com (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, hell, no. I have read a Nixon Administration memo on this very point. B.C. and Alberta, that's it.

But since I am pugnacious, I will point out that if Canada joined the U.S., Canadian policy preferences would be adopted nationally within two electoral cycles; possibly one.

And then Canadians would enjoy economies of scale, which seems to be why Canada consistently lags the U.S. in terms of real median income. A bigger and happier Canada! What's not to like?

Other than the fact that we, sadly, won't have you for precisely the reason pointed out in the second paragraph above.

[noelmaurer.typepad.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah. What he said. If the readers are really interested. Which I strangely suspect they are not ...

[noelmaurer.typepad.com (from livejournal.com)]

The full story is here:

http://noelmaurer.typepad.com/aab/2011/08/disgraceful-canadian-initiative.html

It isn't the Turks and Caicos. That was talked about, but never really got serious. Unlike the Bahamas, which would have happened had their not been a disgraceful racial panic in Canada.

[noelmaurer.typepad.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yes. Exactly.

Canadians have an overinflated sense of their historical racial tolerance. Heck, some of them have an overinflated sense of their current racial tolerance.

Of course, Americans do too. It's yet another similarity between us.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I have to take serious exception to this. You really wanted to use there and not their.

[noelmaurer.typepad.com (from livejournal.com)]

Uh ... yes?

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

>> Their crazification factor outnumbers Canada more than two to one.

James' dry understatement form of wit continues to amuse us.

>> the US is full of ideas that don't scale to 320 million people and nonetheless have been scaled that way.

And, to complement this, there is a selection of ideas that WOULD scale that high and would improve things, which are being resisted here with various forms of viciousness by loud non-majorities.

--Dave