MOLLY IVINS: "AUSTIN, Texas -- Either the so-called 'lobby reform
bill'
is the
contemptible, cheesy, shoddy piece of hypocrisy it
appears to be ... or
the
Republicans have a sense of humor.

The 'lobby reform' bill does show, one
could argue, a sort
of
cheerful, defiant, flipping-the-bird-at-the-public
attitude that could
pass
for humor. You have to admit that calling this an
'ethics bill'
requires
brass bravura.

House Republicans returned last week from
a two-week recess
prepared to vote for 'a relatively tepid ethics bill,'
as The
Washington
Post put it, because they said their constituents
rarely mentioned the
issue.

Forget all that talk back in January when
Jack Abramoff was
indicted. What restrictions on meals and gifts from
lobbyists? More
golfing
trips! According to Rep. Nancy L. Johnson of
Connecticut, former chair
of
the House ethic committee, passage of the bill will
have no political
consequences 'because people are quite
convinced that the rhetoric of
reform
is just political.'

Where can they have gotten that idea? Rep.
David Hobson,
R-Ohio,
told the Post, 'We panicked, and we let the
media get us panicked.'

By George, here's the right way to think of it.
The entire
Congress lies stinking in open corruption, but they
can't let the media
panic them. They're actually proud of NOT cleaning
it up.

The House bill passed a procedural vote
last week 216 to
207,
and it is scheduled for floor debate and a final vote
on Wednesday --
which
gives citizens who don't like being conned a
chance to speak. Now is
the
time for a little hell-raising.

Chellie Pingree of Common Cause said,
'This legislation is
so
weak it's embarrassing.' Fred Wertheimer,
president of Democracy 21 and
a
longtime worker in reformist vineyards, said: 'This
bill is based on
the
premise that you can fool all of the people all of the
time. This is an
attempt at one of the greatest legislative scams that
I have seen in 30
years of working on these issues.'

Come on, people, get mad. You deserve to
be treated with
contempt if you let them get away with this.

I'm sorry that all these procedural votes
seem so picayune,
and
I know the cost of gas and health insurance are
more immediate worries.
But
it is precisely the corruption of Congress by big
money that allows the
oil
and insurance industries to get away with these
fantastic rip-offs."

Every presidential election since 1980 has had a Bush or a Clinton on a major party ticket. And the pundits say we're likely to see a Clinton atop the next Democratic ticket.
Unlike the last seven presidential elections, I dream of a 2008 contest that is Bush- and Clinton-free. Our country needs new leadership and fresh ideas beyond the realm of just two families.
Of course, influential political families are as old as the Republic. Our nation's first vice president and second president was an Adams; his son was our sixth president. A Republican Roosevelt dominated U.S. politics at the turn of the 20th century; a Democratic Roosevelt, his distant cousin, was even more dominant decades later (joined by our country's greatest first lady, a Roosevelt by birth as well as marriage, who toiled for human rights for years thereafter.) Then came the '60s and the brothers Kennedy...but both John and Robert were killed before the age of 47.
Those earlier eras were marked by hope or social progress. By contrast, the Bush-Clinton era is marked in many respects by political regress and decline. And as major national problems fester, neither Team Bush nor Team Clinton are willing to seriously address them.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not in any way equating the Clintonites with the extremists in today's White House. No one comes close to Bush recklessness and fecklessness. But I believe that until we sweep away the Bush-Clinton era and transcend narrow Bush-Clinton debates (and non-debates), we won't be able to put our country back on the road to social progress."

New York Times: "College is still probably a good idea, but everything you need to know about America you can learn in high school. For example, if you want to understand American class structure you'd be misled if you read Marx, but you'd understand it perfectly if you look around a high school cafeteria.
The jocks sit here; the nerds sit there; the techies, drama types, skaters, kickers and gangstas sit there, there and there. What you see is not class in the 19th-century sense, but a wide array of lifestyle cliques, some richer, some poorer, but each regarding the others as vaguely pathetic and convinced of its moral superiority. Similarly, when it comes to politics, high school explains most everything you need to know. In 1976, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Commentary in which he noted that our political affiliations are shaped subrationally. He went on to observe that especially when we are young and forming our identities, we make sense of our lives by running little morality plays in our heads in which the main characters are Myself, the hero, and My Adolescent Opposite, the enemy. 'Forever after,' Wolfe writes, 'the most momentous national and international events are stuffed into the same turf. The most colossal antagonists and movements become merely stand-ins for My Adolescent Self and My Adolescent Opposite. 'If My Opposite, my natural enemy in adolescence, was the sort of person who seemed overly aggressive, brutish and in love with power, I identify him with the 'conservative' position. If My Opposite, my natural enemy in adolescence, seemed overly sensitive, soft, cerebral and incapable of action, I identify him with the 'liberal' position.'"