Absolutely. Our government is seemingly corrupt beyond repair. There is no hope of correction through political means. Gonna take the impending income inequality collapse and revolution for change to occur. Shame, but it is what it is.
Was it worse than the time congress thought Al-Qaeda was not a threat to America, and instead thought it was a distraction issue from a blow job scandal?
SO!!! . . . . WHAT THE ***** ARE THEY GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?!?!?!?? Vote them out?? . . PUL-LEASE!! Rocket River
I'd be more interested in knowing the average approval rating for individual members of Congress - I imagine they're quite a bit higher (rightly or wrongly). It's easy to give low ratings to a group but people tend to be much more approving of their actual representative. We won't see any real change until a majority of people lose enthusiasm for their guy (rather than just damning the other guys). I also think the 24 hr news cycle has made compromise impossible, especially on the GOP side, which makes gridlock and grandstanding inevitable. The moment someone suggests something out of line with his or her party, there's a horde of fame-hungry pundits and eager primary challengers ready to pounce with accusations of RINO or other terms that imply a lack of ideological purity. Finally, the primaries appear to have become dominated by the extremists. We're going to see the same blowhards elected so long as the people voting in primaries find them the most appealing.
The major thing is . . .ratings of individuals by individuals that can vote for them. many people tend to think . .. MY CONGRESSMAN IS THE BEST THE REST ARE A BUNCH OF ***CLOWNS!! Rocket River
For most people, "our lifetime" means the time between when they started actually caring about congress and now, which I'd say is on average something like 10-20 years on this board? So in the last 20 years, has congress really changed at all? How much have the positions taken by congress changed? How many of the congressmen have literally changed? Has the actual representation and decision making process progressed to keep in line with what Americans aim for? Would be really interested in hearing your thoughts, because I'm shocked to hear that so many people feel "this" congress is materially different than any other they've known. I had always thought the problem was stagnation more than anything else.
Well, there have been discussions as towards whether IS could manage to smuggle a nuke into the United States, but then I guess the GOP is worse than a nuke, right? As for the OP's topic: one thing I'm going to comment on that I think people need to get into their heads when they complain about politics and government is that people need to start focusing a lot more on local politics. Local politics deals with actual issues, there's less ideological grandstanding because it's not like CNN is going to shove a camera in the face of the courageous Houston City Council filibuster or whatever, and it's stuff that most of you should be more familiar with than whatever grand political theory. Of course, my current job means that I'm working 60 hours a week in local politics, so maybe I just want people to give a **** about me. Who knows?
Worst President of our lifetimes, that's clear -- Barry Obama He was supposed to be a united, and he's shown zero leadership either at home or abroad.
Let's pretend this is true. The President is a disaster - the worst ever maybe. He has no leadership skills, no good ideas and inspires no respect. There is a complete leadership vacuum. Given this scenario, wouldn't you expect Congress to look better by comparison? Wouldn't voters have a higher opinion of Congress? And wouldn't the obvious leadership vacuum give Congress the unencumbered ability to step in and dictate the direction of US policy? So how bad must they be for neither to be the case?
Well if you look at the past several years, this president started out owning both houses of congress and still barely got anything passed because he couldn't convince his own party that his ideas were worth a damn, now it's split so obviously nothing at all is going to get done. With Clinton you had someone who was willing to work with a split congress for the good of the nation, this administration is nowhere near that good. After these elections the Senate and the House will both be owned by the opposition party, I think things will start to move there, but I would expect a lot of vetoing to happen so the gridlock will continue.
No I think a leader makes the people around him look better. A good coach or pg/qb makes the players look better not worse.
That's a fair point but it could be also argued that a good coach or QB/PG can only do so much when the entire rest of the team are scrubs and/or head cases. You can run a beautiful play that gives both Ryan Bowen and Rafer Alston wide open threes, but they're still going to clank 70-80% of them. It seems to me that's exactly what Obama's dealt with - a Congress that simply isn't good at legislating and oddly proud about it. And to make another sports analogy, Obama never truly worked with a truly Democrat controlled house because one of the key majority players (Ted Kennedy) was "off the field" due to illness.
