Pot, meet kettle

I'm periodically reminded of this old saying when I listen to the propaganda spewed by the Republican noise machine... the latest (and maybe greatest recent) example of the Right Punditocracy's hypocricy was Vice President Dick Cheney's remark to the National Press Club:

"So I had Cheneys on both sides of the family and we don't even live in West Virginia."

I think its funny that the Vice President thinks this kind of comment is okay while his running dog lackeys heave accusations of elitism at Barack Obama. VP Cheney manages thus to prove two things: 1) He himself is an elitist, at least with respect to the people of West Virginia and 2) he has no respect for the people who twice voted his sorry tuckus into the Vice Presidency.

Elitism? Hi pot, here's my good friend kettle.

I'm not writing about gas prices today. It's too damned depressing to think about how much of my net weekly income goes into my gas tank. The economic signals we've been getting lately have been confusing me... unemployment jumped to 5.5%, consumer spending is up... there are two words to define our situation: inflation and recession. It is taking more dollars to buy milk, gas, food, phones, other currencies and economic growth is erratic at best. Let this be a lesson and let us learn from it. People treat the economy as if it were a real object unto itself, while it is actually a thick network of interoperating systems, controlled by other people. When we speak of capital inflow and outflow, these are the results of human interaction - something that seems to be lost on the people feeding us our information.

We need new economic policy, guided by smart policy with a proactive (vs reactive) component of the government to help. Once a problem starts, we can only work to fix it. Our goal should not be to fix problems, but to prevent problems. Allowing the housing situation to develop into a bubble and then explode is proof of the necessity for new policy. We can't afford to be afraid of our government any longer or else we'll cannibalize the system.

-rl