"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

Jeff Breckenridge: You got a dollar?

Josh Lyman: Yeah.

Jeff Breckenridge: Take it out. Look at the back. The seal, the pyramid, it's unfinished, with the eye of God looking over it, and the words annuit coeptis - he, God, favors our undertaking. The seal is meant to be unfinished, because this country's meant to be unfinished. We're meant to keep doing better. We're meant to keep discussing and debating. And, we're meant to read books by great historical scholars and then talk about them...

This discussion comes at the end of the West Wing episode "Six Meetings Before Lunch". Breckenridge and Lyman are talking about a book Breckenridge has written an endorsement for, which argues that Black Americans deserve reparations for slavery. The White House wants to appoint Breckenridge as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, but Lyman (the WH Deputy Chief of Staff) is dreading a confirmation battle where he has to defend a nominee who supports slavery reparations. They spend much of the episode debating the issue of reparations, at the end of which Breckenridge points out that no amount of money can make up for kidnapping an entire civilization and selling them into slavery. He doesn't support monetary reparations, not because it's too much but because it's too little--handing over a sum of money would be too easy, too simple to wipe out a wrong of such consequence. But he believes the issue still needs to be debated, so people will think about it, and so people will never again do something so awful.

There are many things that I love about my country. One of them is that it's a work in progress. It began with a revolution, and it's never looked back. We keep growing and changing, making mistakes and trying to overcome them. Some of us (I like to think most of us) keep trying to make it a better country with every generation, while preserving the things we've done that were right all along.

Two points here. We cannot ever, ever afford to make the same mistake twice. One of our saving graces is that we learn from our mistakes. We have to keep doing that. So we have to always remember our past, not through a haze of hagiography, but with a clear-eyed, honest gaze of serious self-appraisal. History, people: good history is crucial to the functioning of democracy. You have to know where you've come from to know who you are and where you're going.

The other is this: debate is important. Debate is healthy. It makes us struggle to defend what we believe in, so as to make sure we still believe in it. But it has to be honest debate. One of the cancers of our political system is the readiness with which many of our leaders are willing to lie in order to persuade people to support them. Tolerance is one of the cardinal virtues of our society, but we need to be intolerant of those who seek to lead us with lies, to fashion a political mandate with falsehood. There is no place in American government for those who are not prepared to be honest with the American people, and we need to make that clear to those who want us to elect them to office.

Thanks to wcg for the link.

Where your stimulus dollars have been going.

"To do lots of good things that have definitely been getting Americans back to work" is the short answer, it appears to me.

If only the White House would do a better job of making sure people know about this sort of thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/washington/04contract.html (may require free login)

About all I can say is 'Yep.' The use of contractors by US government stems almsot entirely from pressure for 'smaller government' that comes at the same time as calls for more and broader services from government. The result is not small or less government, of course, but government that is less accountable and less open and, ultimately, more expensive and less motivated to act in the public interest. Despite having spent many years working in various government contracting firms (or perhaps because of it), I feel that everyone would be much better served by making the government workforce *larger*, restricting contracting to smaller and much more short-term projects, and providing realistic incentives for youn people to consider government service as a career. Government service should not be a sinecure, but it should be remunerative, and it should be seen as a valuable and contributive role in society.

It should also be tough to get into. I've seen a lot of incompetence blandly accepted, especially but not exclusively at lower levels, because it was acknowledged that a government job was 'all that some people can get'. Sorry, but no. Providing government services to fellow citizens should be a fuilfilling job and it should be one with standards.

I also think that we in the US need to look hard at ways to push government down to the lowest levels possible. What services can be carried out by state agencies that are currently done by federal ones, and what by local authorities that are done by state ones? I am not a great believer in the federal system (by which I mean having a single nation composed of semi-autonomus states witht heir own separate legal and tax structures), but since we've got it and it isn't likely to go aawy, let's make better use of it.