Ramblemuse Touch Points

Creating a government that works means having the ability to listen to different viewpoints and negotiate workable compromises.

Creating trust in government comes from actively promoting an open flow of information and discussion. The essential words here are transparency and truth, as used by Stever Robbins in his articles for Working Knowledge on Building Trust and Truth and Trust.

Creating a sustainable future for our children and their children involves being a steward of our land and resources.

Many of us here in California’s U.S. Congressional District 11 feel strongly that Pombo and his ilk fly straight in the face of these values and that they are far better embodied with Jerry McNerney.

Tuesday is the time to be adamant that we deserve better and can create better.

On the massage politics front, I’ve been blogging about how the California Chiropractic Association (CCA) demonstrated that it’s time to pass Proposition 89. Bill Moyers has more to say on the need for public financing of elections — if we want to preserve a democracy.

In another article called In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind, Moyers also notes that the present administration has gone much further in restricting the flow of information than any prior administration.

It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration’s obsession with secrecy. This may seem self-serving coming from someone who worked for two previous presidents who were no paragons of openness. But I am only one of legions who have reached this conclusion. See the recent pair of articles by the independent journalist, Michael Massing, in The New York Review of Books. He concludes, “The Bush Administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it.”

Today’s administration and legislature is not run by the Republican Party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, or Barry Goldwater. Fiscal conservatism has been replaced not by tax and spend Democrats but by cut-tax and still spend Republicans. It is not the party of responsibility and small government but the one of hiding information and dodging the tough questions — or, if you can’t dodge them, of silencing the questioner. As Susan Bottcher put it in the Gainsville Sun, This is not my Father’s Republican Party. Bottcher is not the only offspring of a Republican to wonder at the decline of Republican values. Pete McCloskey, a Republican from an earlier age of statemanship, offers a few words on the costs of apathy.
As I noted earlier,

Tuesday is the time to be adamant that we deserve better and can create better. Don’t kid yourself that it isn’t worth the effort to get out and vote.