I'm doing my individual part. I think there are enough genuine reformers out there to represent a high single digit percentage of the population.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/26/did-george-w-bush-offer-to-officiate-at-a-same-sex-wedding/

Yeah, but he wasn't the only chef gooning the soup. By which I mean, don't over-credit any one bozo.

He deviated from the Big Government script how, exactly? I confess to all of the sins of being insufficiently critical and voting for him. Serves us right, the current mess. Now, let us reform.

I guess that's somewhat interesting from a logistical standpoint. And the regional politics of the Great Satan helping out the Saudis have some fun nuance. "Bush believed he was doing the right thing" is probably trivially true, but, again, omits an awful lot of Shiite/Sunni developments.
Which is, again, not meant as anything sort of an apologist play for W. And you can keep the brother, too.

don't have a magical fix. My latest pet theory is that, at a Federal level, there should be a specified number of politicians. Rather than state-by-state, gerrymandered-district-by-gerrymandered-district, shit should be direct. Is there 3% of the US population who are pot-smoking tree-humping eco-dweebs? Then 3% of the politicians should be from the Nature Molestin' Party. Sure, we wouldn't have the 'hope and change' of meaningless party swaps over individual seats. We might get locked into some terrible shit if the majority of the country are, in fact, clueless assholes. But it'd be better representation.

A much "simpler" change (in terms of concept, not ease of execution) would be to go re-learn the concept of Federalism and take a bunch of power away from the Federal government and give it to state and local ones. The less the Federal government has responsibility over, the less harm unaccountable Congresscritters can do.

Hey, at least I, for one, had learned my lesson by 2012.

Nah, I'm not nearly rad enough to drive an AMC Pacer. My car is just a nice, low-miles Miata.

Also, these days, Vanilla Ice is a general contractor / house-flipper. Not a bad gig, to be honest -- once I'm making enough money I'm maxing my tax-deferred investments, I indeed might try acting like him.

If anyone's knowledge of history and sense of proportion is so bad as to even put GWB on this list, then go full tilt boogie and say he's worse than the rest, combined.
I'm not here to accuse GWB of being some kind of saint--he was another brick in the wall of Progressive decline, in my opinion--but I've really lost interest in trying to communicate with the kind of idiots who would juxtapose GWB and Adolf. Or Barack and Adolf, for that matter. It's so stupid, I can't even

You poor, naive fool! A Charter merger with Time Warner would inevitably degrade Charter's customer service to Time Warner's level, not the other way around.

My 25-year-old Mazda* has a tape deck, and I'm perfectly happy with that. (Okay, I do have a minor quibble that there's no line-in port, but that's no big deal. At least it doesn't have a CD player instead; if that were the case then I'd actually have to get an aftermarket stereo.)

(*Don't knock it; it's very much on the "classic sports car" end of the spectrum, not the "old junky econobox" end.)

See it's not a conspiracy involving the "taxi lobby", in fact it's to protect us from them.

Let's be honest here: there's no reason why it can't be a little from column A and a little from column B.

As to comedians being better at the news... no. Comedians are as good at science as they are at reporting the news. They talk about what they think is funny and what will get the crowd on their side.

In medieval Europe, it was only the court jester who could, without [much] fear, speak uncomfortable truths to the king.

You've sadly fallen into the trap of thinking the daily show is an actual news program.

You misunderstand me: I'm well aware that it's not. The problem is that the "real" news programs are much, much worse!

2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants.

You missed out on (arguably) the most important factor, which is that suburban sprawl is a gigantic pyramid scheme.

When a developer builds a new subdivision, he not only pays to construct the infrastructure for it, but also spends a bunch of money on building permits and (theoretically) impact fees, which go into the city's coffers. (I say "theoretically" because some particularly short-sighted, pro-development cities might undercharge on the impact fees.)

Those fees are supposed to go towards maintaining and upgrading the rest of the city's infrastructure to pay for the development's impact, but they don't. Instead they get used to balance the budget this year. In a couple of decades when that subdivision's infrastructure needs to be repaired or replaced, where does the money come from? If the city is lucky, it comes from the impact fees of whatever new neighborhood is being built then. If not, then the city is screwed.

The growth of the suburbs really exploded around WWII, so we're just now really starting to see the consequences of Ponzi development. If you think older, inner-ring suburbs are in a bad state now (except for the ones that managed to gentrify, and have all those mid-century ranches torn out and replaced with McMansions), just wait. It'll get worse before it gets better.