{"id":1748,"date":"2003-10-14T09:38:55","date_gmt":"2003-10-14T16:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2003\/10\/emergent-mythology\/"},"modified":"2003-10-14T09:38:55","modified_gmt":"2003-10-14T16:38:55","slug":"emergent-mythology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2003\/10\/14\/emergent-mythology\/","title":{"rendered":"Emergent Mythology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tEmergent Democracy advocate Mitch Ratcliffe explains his objection<\/a> to the Davis recall in an effort to deal with my claim that the recall was in fact a model of democratic action:<\/p>\n

\n

There’s nothing wrong with recalls or the initiative process in a widely informed society. When there are very few sources of news and they militate with political groups to elect someone who reads scripts but doesn’t speak extemporaneously, they leave something to be desired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Arnie is another moron, like that Bush fellow who stole the 2000 election from that smart Gore fellow, and the voters are uninformed owing to our paucity of news sources, which today include just about every news outlet on the planet, and the blogs, etc. Fine. Now what would we ignorant citizens know if we were as well-informed as the Emergent Davis boosters? This:<\/p>\n

\n

…the budget crisis is the result of Pete Wilson’s misguided energy deregulation policies and collusion by the Bush Administration with the energy industy, not to mention the Bush Administration’s general failure in domestic policy leading to the bankrupting of the states <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now to Ratcliffe’s credit, he didn’t make this up; rather, he’s citing a well-traveled meme that you can find on any number of far-left blogs, news organs, and talk radio shows. The only trouble with it is that it’s complete crap. The State of California did sign $8B in long-term electricity contracts after Davis finally stepped in and tried to deal with the rolling blackouts of 2001. But these contracts were financed by bonds to be paid off my utility rate-payers. So when the legislature dealt with a $38B budget deficit, these bonds weren’t part of it – they’re off the books.<\/p>\n

So yeah, if Ratcliffe were “informed” he probably wouldn’t have voted for Davis as he did, and if everyone were informed, it would have passed by acclamation. <\/p>\n

On his other point, I haven’t noticed any states going bankrupt. California’s budget deficit exceeded the total deficits of all other states, and you clearly can’t blame that on Bush. Unless you’re “uninformed”, of course.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emergent Democracy advocate Mitch Ratcliffe explains his objection to the Davis recall in an effort to deal with my claim that the recall was in fact a model of democratic action: There’s nothing wrong with recalls or the initiative process in a widely informed society. When there are very few sources of news and they … Continue reading “Emergent Mythology”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-sc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}