I'm Back, Baby!

It's been a couple weeks since I have contributed to this blog. Real life kind of got in the way for a bit. I really wanted to comment on the NBA Draft where I was almost entirely correct (only missing in that Patrick Patterson snuck in at the very end of the lottery at #14 - still 8 picks behind Epke Udoh). See here for my previous posts with predictions.

I've taken notes on several other MSNBC moments that I wanted to comment on but may not take the opportunity now. But maybe I will (even if they are no longer necessarily timely). Let me start with this which I believe is maybe already over a week old:

There are many things that annoy us here at Furriners. Very prominent on the list is Republican politicians using the phrase "the American people want..." or, of course, "the American people don't want..." whatever it is. Often they use that phrase to describe simple platitudes that are agreeable enough and are often meant to insinuate that Democratic policies are keeping the people from the laudible end (example: "the American people want to be kept safe"); sometimes they use it in a way that is vague and open to interpretation (example: "the American people don't want Big Government". Perhaps not... but, obviously, we all have our own threshold for what constitutes "big" government. And even in that example, these people who don't want Big Government are, nevertheless, typically the same people who want government to decide how every pregnancy should conclude (i.e. with a live birth) regardless of the woman's preference).

Sometimes a Democrat will also presume to speak for the American people. Such was the case on The Rachel Maddow Show on June 24 when Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said this:

What this oil disaster - if you can find a silver lining at all - has resulted in is the American people coalescing and beginning to recognize that we have to ween ourselves off our dependence on oil - not just foreign oil - but oil. And pass legislation that will help us invest in renewable energy sources... that is the key to our long-term energy needs.

Are there poll numbers that support this? I mean, I'm sure if you ask some generic question of the masses, they'll agree we should reduce our dependency on oil... but I don't know of any evidence that the American people are willing to make any sort of sacrifice to make this happen! Is there some swelling of grassroots support for a carbon-tax that I don't know about?

If I recall correctly, Thomas Friedman considers it a given that they only way you're going to get Americans to embrace alternative forms of energy is to make it cheap and easy to do so. Thus, unless there is a game-changing technological breakthrough in the near future, the only way it will become cheap and easy (and "cheap", in this case, I mean only as a relative term because, of course, energy will actually cost more than it currently does) we're probably looking at both putting a price on carbon and the need for the federal government to massively invest in infrastructure (modernizing the energy grid and, yes, perhaps building many more nuclear plants). Do tax raises and increased government spending seem like something the American people want? Unlike John Boehner, I don't like to speak for the American people, but I will say that I don't see it.