Maybe it's inappropriate and messy but standing in the middle of your burning house and shouting to the firefighters to put it out is pretty stupid. The best thing we can do with the Federal government is pretend it doesn't exist. It's like the crackhead in your family who's always crying for you to give them another chance.

Please, leave it in the ever-lenthening Whitney thread.

Give me a break. Peak Oil? While San Francisco demolishes public transit and tries to make the entire city conform to the demands of a bunch of SUV driving suburbanites? Please give me a break. This city is rapidly becoming just like every other suburb in the country: completely designed around making car ownership completely convenient and entirely necessary.

If they were serious about the impending oil crisis, they'd be cleaning up their own backyard instead of issuing feel good proposals that do absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

The title reference is to the fact that so-called "conservatives" have now come full circle and completely reversed themselves.

Used to be, in an America where the Constitution reigned supreme, conservatives pointed out the enormous value of state's rights to our federal system. In particular, they pointed to abortion, education and healthcare as examples of issues that should be resolved at the state level. Supposedly, this claim was grounded in a belief that the states better represented the "will of the people" in complicated issues where various communities had differing points of view.

Now, we see the essential "con" in their screeds, as they claim that healthcare is better resolved by the national government. Conservatives have no respect for "state's rights", they just want to prevent progress on issues of import to the average citizen.

States' Rights has always been the cry of the party not in power, and which party spouts that line changes immediately and abruptly each time the electorate swings. (It can even be inconsistent from issue to issue.) It's a simple question of power: those in charge want to keep as much power as they can, and those not in charge want to scrape out as much power as they can from the edges. The principle of the matter is simply left as talking points in canned speeches which mean nothing.

So, A. Leonard thinks "big" issues need tackled at the federal or international level. Brilliant. We'd better get an international police force to do some enforcing too.

He wants the government to save us with a big solution. The bigger the government the bigger the solution. The idea of individual people taking responsibility for their own actions and their own future is just so --- wrong!

Historically, we've had lots of big issues that were handled at the state level long before the feds stepped in. Take slavery for example. Sometimes, the people, speaking in a million voices, bring about big solutions that the government won't address. For example, the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was no government mandate, just a huge demonstration and party that couldn't be shut down.

San Francisco is doing the right thing. So what if they pay the price and other people benefit. Someone has to step up first. We tend to call those people role models.

As for A. Leonard - don't expect much. Is he the guy who works at home, whose wife works at home, and whose child needs day care because the parents lack the will and fortitude to raise him? I guess the solution there is government child rearing. Preferably federal.

ummmm....what? I'm really curious.

Hate to break it to you, but states' rights have been severely curtailed since the passage of the 14th amendment and then the New Deal. Although we have 50 laboratories for solutions in this country, states are not very good at tackling many problems, especially when the legislative self-correcting process breaks down because minorities (not racial, just minorities in a numerical sense) cannot elect representatives to solve their problems. Feds have to step in all the time to fix states' screwups.

On the other hand, more power to CA and SF for taking matters into their own hands, since it may well later influence the federal government to really do something.

It was illegal in quite a few states before the civil war. The federal mandate made it illegal in the rebel states first and in the union slave states later.

Tyler,

So you're saying that having states decide whether or not to have slavery is a good "solution"? That's a pretty extreme attitude, n'est-ce pas?

i think the problem was that slavery needed to be ended (moral and economic reasons), and the states didn't do a good job of doing that. same goes for segregation, the depression, voting, sodomy laws, women and minority rights, etc. How, pray tell, could the states deal with the depression?

Of course, i'm talking much more about civil rights than economic realities. Although many people argue that the New Deal was the dying breath of states' rights economically, in spite of Lochner being overturned. Some even refer to SC jurisprudence from that era as a revolution or the unwritten amendments to the constitution, because the commerce clause was extended beyond any original understanding of it at the time of its ratification.

But in terms of civil rights especially, states generally don't unanimously move towards increasing people's rights. Sure, "crazy" states like Massachusetts gave blacks the same rights as whites since the revolution (see Boston Massacre, Crispus Atticus), and Wyoming was the first to give women the right to vote (around 1900), but many states prefer to continually maintain their status quo instead of moving ahead with the times, and the Federal government has to step in. ( see Brown v. Board of Education I and II, Lawrence v. Texas, Reed v. Reed, Frontiero, Roe v. Wade, Miranda, etc) That's what the 14th amendment (equal protection and due process clauses) is all about, in spite of people trying to sneak around it and curtail it (see Slaughterhouse Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education II).