with Jerry Narron saying it.

…becomes a conservative on their first day of power.

But they worried a lot about instability. For good reason, really, when you look what was going on at the time. The United States has lasted over 200 years, which is pretty impressive. Like new businesses, new countries often don’t last long.

A political scientist I know describes the U.S. as an ocean liner. It’s very, very stable, and won’t tip over, but getting it to change direction is slow and difficult. Which could suck, if there’s an iceberg ahead.

Parliamentary systems, like many European countries have, are like speedboats. They are nimble, they can turn on a dime…and they can flip over and kill you.

Their revolution was about controlling their political and economic destiny and not watching all of the resources that the “new world” had to offer be shipped back to the British Empire.

I say the “new world” was offering resources to the colonists more than a little facetiously. The intentional displacement and murder of indigenous people, and the unintentional and at times intentional disease-based genocide of these first peoples opened up vast tracts of some of the most fertile land in the world. Half a million African slaves later, this part of the Americas was on its way to becoming a booming colonial power.

Our “founding fathers” saw the opportunity for prosperity, grabbed the dominant political (liberal humanism) and economic (market based capitalism) ideology and took off running.

And here we are more than 200 years later dealing with the same system that has always depended on violence and military intervention, always been in or between crisis, and always not worked for the majority of the people in the world.

which is why Jefferson loved an “Agrarian Democracy”. If you’re rural, you’re not meeting and getting pissed off with a bunch of other folks.

Now that I’m learning about how Milosevic and Tudjman started the fall of Yugoslavia in one of my classes…man, mobs are scary as hell. Get a bunch of people in an enclosed space, start a fight between two of them, and watch all hell break loose.

MANIFEST DESTINY BITCHES!

Actually, Paulson looks like the goat at the moment.

But it’s early yet.

I think this bailout is going to go down as an epic fail. One that will reflect poorly on Paulson, Bush, Bernanke…and McCain, Obama, and everyone else who voted for it.

…this is going to make the Great Depression look like a picnic.

Seriously, it hasn’t even begun yet. I know everyone’s hoping this is the top of the 7th. But it’s probably more like bottom of the 2nd. Or maybe the singing of the national anthem.

for fear that 50 million other people might do it too.