THE PARAGRAPHS OF THE DAY

Today’s paragraphs – and they are truly fascinating – come to us from an article written by Peter Leyden, who identifies himself, as among other thing, the founder and CEO of Reinvent, a media company.

Here is Mr. Leyden’s view view of where we should be headed as a country:

The next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it. Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can’t get done.

In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago.

In the early 2000s, California faced a similar situation to the one America faces today. Its state politics were severely polarized, and state government was largely paralyzed. The Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

California today provides a model for America as a whole. This model of politics and government is by no means perfect, but it is far ahead of the nation in coming to terms with the inexorable digital, global, sustainable transformation of our era. It is a thriving work in progress that gives hope that America can pull out of the political mess we’re in. California today provides a playbook for America’s new way forward. It’s worth contemplating as we enter 2018, which will be a critical election year.

Well, there you have it folks.  The path to our happiness and success is to eliminate the Republican Party and be run entirely by Democrats.  Hey, look at what a bang-up job they’re doing in California.

Normally, I would laugh this stupidity off and, if still in the mood for this kind of material, look at a few old Mad Magazines.  But it turns out that, according to Joe Simonson’s article at dailycaller.com,  Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, described this article as “great” and shared it on his own twitter account.

Since Dorsey heads one of the most significant communications venues in the country – and since, politically, he is in tune with the people running Google and Facebook – two other major communications venues – this is well worth knowing about.

These are the people who judge what so many of us can and cannot see on their websites.  I strongly suggest you think about that.

But, going back to the article itself, I award Peter Leyden Paragraphs Of The Day “honors” for speaking in such glowing terms of a state where, at this point in the time period he gushes about, more legals are leaving than coming two, and millions of illegals (an estimated 4 million right now, but probably more) are increasingly taking it over.

Try walking through Los Angeles these days without being hassled by aggressive homeless people.  Try walking through San Francisco without stepping on used drug needles and human feces.  Then tell me about the paradise on earth that one-party, Democrat governance has brought it.