Drinking Liberally will be at The Shanty on 4th Ave. Thursday evening begining at 6pm. This week we are having Steve Farley, former candidate for Tucson City Council and transportation activist, to speak about the regional transportation initiatives. So come on down if you want to get educated about transportation, slap Steve on the back … Read more
I just completed an interview with Francine Schacter, who is running for the Democratic nomination for CD 8. I have to write up the interview and transcribe my notes and recording. I will have the full interview up shortly. I invite any representatives or staff from the Latas, Giffords, Rodriguez, or Leister campaigns to contact … Read more
I recently added a link to the Arizona Daily Star’s forums to my right sidebar. I think that such a place could be a useful for community discussion of important public issues, and some candidates for public office are posting there regularly. I chose to recieve daily updates of new forum postings, and one of the posts which caught my attention was one by CD 8 Democratic candidate Dwight Leister.
I certainly agree with his underlying premise – that money is corrupting our political values – but I suspect that Dwight may be taking the give and take of politics rather too personally. Certainly, he needs to focus on things like grammar when addressing the public in an open forum. I haven’t met him personally, so I am not going to form any firm opinion of him based only on a forum posting, and I urge you not to do so either. But I will say that Mr. Leister needs to be concerned to present an air professionalism that does credit to what I am sure is an earnest and informed desire to serve the public welfare.
Oh, and if you are going to call Gabby Giffords a political whore who is frolicking on a bed of special interest money, just come out and say it Dwight; it serves no one to thinly veil one’s imprecations under a barely plausible veneer of deniability. After the jump, Dwight’s post without editing:
Despite the ideological trope that capitalism is somehow the natural
state of human economies, and that any government regulation risks
causing the ‘invisible hand’ of the market to bitch-slap us all, the
truth is that capitalism depends entirely upon a very complex body of
law and social norms. Without the proper legal incentives to channel
self-interest into benefiting society, Wall Street begins to behave
like La Costa Nostra with better tailoring.
In the aftermath of the massive corporate failures that have
characterized the past several years, it is easy to overlook that those
failures where not due mainly to criminals doing illegal things, but to
ethical people doing business as usual. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global
Crossing and other now infamous business failures were only the
rottenest apples in a bad barrel; not aberrations, but an extreme
example of what we have allowed to become quite representative examples
of the massive and widespread failure of corporate governance.
OK. I give in. Friday Dog Blogging has become such an entrenched and venerable institution that I can no longer resist. But I am one-upping… I am blogging not only cute doggies, but doggies WITH adorable kids. How can you resist? You just have to say, "Awwwww…." Don’t try to resist; you could hurt yourself … Read more