I would add that the executive branch has been figuring out ways to get more power pretty much from the beginning of the Republic, with crises fueling the power grabs. Usually, Congress gets some of its power back some years after the crisis passes.

The problem is that for various reasons, Congress isn’t always very responsive to the needs of the country, and the needs are more pressing in some senses than perhaps they were in the beginning.

Maybe the citizenry should demand a Voter Bill of Rights.

Article One: Freedom from being forced to choose between two dreadful candidates when the temperature is higher than 90 degrees.

Article Two: Candidates cannot talk about their childhood beyond attesting that they had one.

Article Three: Candidates are required to list all the really serious issue disagreements they have with their party. If they reach six, they should find a different ticket.

Article Four: Less talking about mosques.

Article Five: More cat stories.

I’ve thought this for some time. I’ve read quite a bit in history and although the reasons that the Roman Republic gave way to the Empire are not exactly analogous to our situation, there are nevertheless similarities.

Rome had a government designed to prevent tyranny and to govern a city state. It worked well enough as they dominated Latium and later the whole of Italy, but it began to break down as they ended up conquering the entire Mediterranean region and beyond. (I won’t comment on the lack of a city police force in the Republican period, but it’s amazing that a city that size lacked one.)

What Augustus did was to reorganize the government, preserving the forms of the Republic while gutting its substance. He basically turned Rome into a monarchy, with a civil service responsible to him rather than to the Senate. At the time, that may have been the best that could be done with an empire, and not all that dissimilar to what the Persians had done centuries earlier.

This “principate” phase of the Empire lasted for a couple hundred years and then began breaking down because of other pressures, both internal and external, and was replaced with a “dominate” phase under the Diocletian reforms in the late third century CE.

I’ve been thinking for the last decade or so that the US is doing much the same thing. We have a government designed for the late eighteenth century to handle the fears of a group of newly independent states of any one region or person dominating the government. Our constitution, designed at a time when the population was just under 4 million people, was almost immediately amended to fix some glaring issues, but in the main, lasted until the civil war, when we then got the 13th and 14th amendments, fixing some civil rights issues, though we still have some problems there.

But our population is now over 300 million. Instead of 13 states we have 50. Instead of being a largely agrarian nation hugging the coast of a continent, we are now an empire occupying a large swath of a continent and economically and militarily dominating the planet.

Leaving aside the question of whether these are reasonable things for us to be, our form of government doesn’t seem to be working all that well at addressing the issues of the decade.

I’m not in favor of a revolution, because lots of people suffer during them and I and those I care about would likely be among them. I’m not in favor of a new constitutional convention because I don’t think we have the statesmen that we were damned lucky to have in 1787. We would end up with an even worse system than we have now, I fear.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I would suggest that we could start with a reformation of Senate rules to make it more responsive. The House of Representatives has gone through periods of being dysfunctional and has come out of them with rules changes. I think the same could be said of the Senate.

But a deeper problem is that we have no way currently to handle informing the public. Our current news media including the Internet, aren’t serving us well. Information gets out, possibly better than it ever has, but it is drowned in a sea of hogwash. How do we get a media that actually informs people so that decisions are made based on reason instead of inflamed emotions?

I don’t know. I could go on, but I’m tired.

Newt Gingrich writes:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

In this context, “double standards” means that the United States maintains a more pluralistic attitude toward religious minorities than Saudi Arabia does. Now, you could make the same kind of argument about any repressive policy in a place like Saudi Arabia. If women are not allowed to walk around freely in Saudi Arabia, then men should not be allowed to walk around freely in the United States!

I love it!

Chait goes on to make more points following this, and the post is worth reading in full. (Gingrich’s original comments are also worth reading just because they are so typically Newt and so typically absurd.

BTW, I’ll just say that I’m no fan of Islam or, indeed, any organized religion, but Cordoba House is a very good name. The heyday of Muslim Spain is a good example of a time and place where, for a brief time, Islam was a tolerant religion.

My existence on the internet might be with my real name, but my suspicion is that the vast majority of people are creating Avatars of themselves on the internet, untagging Facebook photos and writing blog posts to fit the image they wish to project. Weigel is jobless because he chose not to maintain the avatar.

There is probably quite a bit of truth to this. I have chosen not to use names other than my own and not to have any avatars of myself on the web. If you find “khuxtable”, “kahuxtable”, “Kathryn Huxtable”, etc., it’s either me, or someone else with my name or initials. (There are several Kathryn Huxtables online. I was the first, since I was working at a university when the internet expanded.) If you find a different sort of name, it is not me.

I’m unlikely to pay for this in any real way unless we turn into the Republic of Gilead, in which case I’m heading for Canada.

I’ve chosen not to tag photos or to join lots of groups online, but that’s more because I find the associations resulting from them to be annoying.

“In one short decade we have been reconditioned to be entertained by the most private areas of other people’s lives. We’ve become the family dog who’s allowed to eat anything that falls on the floor, and the press is the little kid in the family who keeps dropping food.” Aaron Sorkin

Sorkin’s larger point is about the Newsweek brouhaha about gay actors playing straight characters, which I, personally, have no problem with. I think Sorkin has the right of it.

We, as a culture, are obsessed with reality TV and celebrity gossip. We spend way too much time thinking about, or even just being informed about the lives of people we don’t know and shouldn’t care about.

Sorkin mentions Sandra Bullock’s divorce, which I admit I have heard of. (I had no idea that there was a current person named Jesse James, though. Strange.) He’s right. We shouldn’t care much about what happens in Bullock’s life, unless we know her or are her friend. Yes, I know, most religions do say we are each others’ keepers, and I tend to agree with that, but in the case of someone so unconnected with me I’ll leave it to her friends to worry about, and also the laws of our country.

I don’t care that Rock Hudson was, or Neil Patrick Harris for that matter is, gay, except insofar as their being closeted or out tells us something about our society. I never met Hudson and am unlikely to meet Harris. They’re both fine actors. That’s the only material point.

Now to contradict myself, partially. I don’t tend to watch Mel Gibson movies, partly because he’s a homophobic jerk, but mostly because there’s a point of view expressed in the movies that I don’t care for. (Yes, I’ve seen Braveheart.) That’s one example among many.

And I don’t object to outing closeted gay people when their public actions are causing great harm to the LGBT community. I think that kind of hypocrisy is despicable.

But the larger point remains, only partially obscured by the fact of human existence being a messy thing. I think it’s rare to be able to make blanket judgments of actions that could be taken in an abstract situation.

Anyway, these are just some random thoughts on the subject, based on seeing Sorkin’s article and seeing several people lift the same quote I did from it. In closing, I leave you with Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
    Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

I’ve been taking a few days off celebrating the US entering the realm of civilized nations, at least a bit.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/excellent-description-of-difference.html

It’s a good description of the main policy difference between the current Republican and Democratic parties.

If anyone here truly feels fiat currency is worthless then feel free to give me all your money.

I’m fine with that. If anyone here truly feels that fiat currency is worthless, then feel free to give me all your money.

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/12/29/time-to-profile-engineers/

Most of the terrorists have been engineers.

As a non-engineer, I have no problem. (First they came for the engineers…)