Does it seem a little nuts to be talking to people about running for the town offices here in February? With the primary likely in September and the general in November? With this winter tenaciously clinging to us, are you ready to be thinking about next Thanksgiving dinner? Well, maybe, but as you can see in our stories last week and this, the candidates who have declared already have clearly been thinking about it for a while. And if your mind is made up, well why not start talking about it? After all, it’s spring training, the hot stove league of speculation is over and it’s time to take the field.
The thirst for democracy never sleeps.
It somehow seems as if the inevitable Rubicon is being crossed as official Washington appears ready to plunge off the next fiscal cliff. The exquisitely tortured logic that has allowed our government-at-loggerheads to create the artificial deadline for making what seem to be deep, illogical cuts in spending mirrors the last fiscal cliff in that it is a self imposed punishment for failing to act in a logical way, that is, coming to an agreement on how things ought to run. The last two times, the cliff was averted at the last minute, but there seems to be a determination to see what will happen with the lemming-like plunge. It is surely a political gamble on everyone’s part, with Republicans betting they won’t get blamed if the sky doesn’t fall. And it will fall, for some, but perhaps not in a way that everyone will notice immediately, as the consequences of these actions tend to play out over months and years, before they become clear. And usually by then, it’s too late to do anything else but set up another illogical self-imposed punishment for inevitable failure.
Thus emboldened, will House of Representatives Republicans, who we, hereby officially blame for remaining in the OEOD (Oppose Everything Obama Does) mode, allow us to plunge off the next fiscal cliff, the threat of a government shutdown late in March by failing to lift a debt ceiling to pay the bills they’ve (with considerable Democratic help) run up? If we go off that one, we won’t have to wait for the consequences.
The saddest thing about what’s happening over at the Daily Freeman (see page 4), aside from friends and colleagues livelihoods being unmercifully squeezed by a large corporation that keeps cleverly shuffling the bankruptcy deck to wring a few more nickels out of its distressed properties, is that were it a stand alone enterprise, that is, owned by a single entity that ran it as its business, it would and could be viable fiscally. But it’s not for sale by itself and appears to be caught in a spiraling death grip, with no white knight in sight.