Democracy vs Despotism

I recently stumbled upon a 1946 film created by Encyclopaedia Britannica discussing the difference between democracy and despotism.

I highly encourage everyone to watch it if they consider themselves practitioners of liberty. It is eerie to see the GOP pushing policies and ideas that were seen as despotic 65 years ago.

Credit PZ Myers.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Today, I applaud my senator, Scott Brown, for his decision to support the repeal of DADT.

Solving our Budget Woes

The New York Times has an interesting feature that allows one to pick and choose various proposals in order to balance the budget.

I tried it out for myself, and this is what I got.

I encourage anyone reading this to try it out for themselves and share one's results here.

The Entitlement Spending Question

If the new Republican majority in the house wants to fix our budget woes, one of the first things they need to tackle is entitlement spending. Unfortunately, Speaker Boehner has no plans to reduce entitlement spending (or increase revenue to pay for these entitlements). Instead, he is proposing a vote on restoring cuts to Medicare made by last March's Healthcare reform bill. Looks like the GOP will not offer any new libertarianism, but rather leaves us with more of the same old Bush-era conservatism.

Credit David Frum & The New York Times

Thinking ahead to 2011

Well the Democrats lost their House Majority, but retained their majority in the Senate. While I am upset that this probably means we won't have any progress in regards to solving the problem of global anthropogenic climate change, I am excited that we may balance the budget for the first time in a decade (even longer than a decade if you discount the use of Social Security Trust Funds in the general budget). Hopefully the GOP will not resort to their old tricks that plagued us for the six or eight years they were in control. Hopefully GOP constituencies will not be exempted from budget cuts. Defense spending, entitlement spending and agriculture subsidies should not be immune from these cuts even if the GOP is reliant on old rural voters who tend to like agriculture subsidies and entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.