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You have to understand that Thomas Friedman is an avatar of ineptitude. I can't possibly outdo Matt Taibbi's take on his recent book, so I'll link it.

But let's look at why this effort is doomed to failure. Friedman recommends it, so that's strikes one, two and three already. If Friedman said pants were convenient and comfortable, you'd be best advised to buy a kilt. He has such an incredible track record of being utterly wrong about everything imaginable.

Serious reason: It's centrist. According to voting records meticulously compiled by the right and the left, the voters will elect, at any given time, virtually no moderates whatsoever. If you're a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican, your legislators tend to vote, contrary to popular griping, 80% to 90% in line with your views. What people are really bitching about when they claim the parties are the same is that they're not getting their way, which is the whole point of the system.

The only reason we have moderate legislators is because some states happen to be evenly split. There is no centrist "base" for a centrist party to draw from, not in the US, not anywhere. There is no base because there's no ideology for them to get fired up about. An ideology can rest on a vision (e.g. progressivism) or principles (e.g. conservatism), neither of which centrism has.

The major parties duke it out to try to win the best compromise they can get for their base and centrism is a reaction to this. It is effectively saying that, somehow, they can arrive at a better compromise without the uncivilized process of duking it out. But to believe that you can arrive at that compromise without the fighting, you have to believe that people with passionate beliefs don't really mean it or you have greater insight than pretty much everyone or, as proof that establishment types can be conspiracy theorists too, shadowy figures are stirring them up to further their evil ends.

And, as the parent avers, it's already not terribly centrist. Most of these "non-partisan" organizations drift towards liberalism over time, the exact reasons for this dynamic are hard to pin down, but it happens all over the place.

why is it that at economic peaks we always end up with the same 4% unemployment rate

The published unemployment rates don't mean much. The rate can fall while employing fewer people, due to workers abandoning the workforce or accepting 'underemployment.' That phenomenon is keeping contemporary unemployment figures lower than they probably should be according to this non-Murdoch source.

There is a more meaningful measure called the Labor force participation rate. It is a general measure of the state of the workforce; a simple ratio of workers to jobs. Since 1970 exposure to foreign labor has reduced the earning power of US workers. As a result the US household has put to wife to work to cover the shortfall and the Labor Participation Rate has grown rapidly. Today most households require two working adults.

Whether this is a good thing or not and what effect this has on the notion of 'family' and child-rearing is an exercise left to the reader. I note poor scholastic performance of US students, despite huge education budgets.

At one time a father could earn enough to support a household. A student could fund an education without debt. 12% of the US wasn't being fed by the Federal Government. This ended when the container ships from Asia started appearing.

Your 4% misses a few things.

Why is it that both parties always sell out for the worst aspects of the opposite party?

Well, the thing is, they don't. Plenty cross over, with politicians from the 'opposite' party voting for an issue you agree with.

How about this. The parties have become carticatures. Very few people are purely 'republican' or 'democrat', 'left' or 'right', 'conservative' or 'liberal'. They simply identify with the 'closest' party.

Heck, there's left/right ratings out there for senators. Some democrats are further 'right' than some republicans.

Texas's (D) Stenholm scored a 45, while Iowa's Leach(R), scored a 55 for their: ADA's rating(a blatently 'liberal' organization)
Method for score: 20 votes chosen as the 'most important'. If you voted their way, you got 5 points. If you didn't, you got 0(IE abstinations count as 0 points). I have some serious problems with their methodology.

Govtrack rates Miller(D,GA) as further right than many republicans. Meanwhile, Collins, Chafee, and Snowe could be called 'Rhinos'(Republicans in name only).

...to win viewers/readers from FOX News. There's a Newsweek piece about it this week.

[CNN president Jonathan] Klein is making revolutionary changes at the cable network--scrapping signature broadcasts like "Crossfire" and "Inside Politics," shaking up his morning-show ensemble and his prime-time producing staff, and creating a new international news show at noon. These are only the first steps in a broad overhaul plan aimed at getting the pioneering and once dominant cable news network out of a seemingly perennial second-place finish, far behind Fox News.

And before anyone complains, you may be interested in at least considering:

http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Med ia.Bias.8.htm

which finds, in part

Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist.

and

Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table 8), the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last.

Given that the conventional wisdom is that the Drudge Report and Fox News are conservative news outlets, this ordering might be surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the mainstream press is liberal. The results of Table 8 show that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and CBS Evening News are not only liberal, they are closer to the average Democrat in Congress (who has a score of 74.1) than they are to the median of the whole House (who has a score of 39.0). [...] the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times. [...] Our results contrast strongly with the prior expectations of many others. It is easy to find quotes from prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no systematic bias among media outlets in the U.S. [...] The main conclusion of our paper is that our results simply reject such claims.

Please note:

These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample. (emphasis mine)

It makes me sad when people can't tell the difference between NEWS and OP-ED. Do people also have that same problem with the editorial page of the New York Times? Or just, say, Sean Hannity on FOX News? Is it acceptable to judge the news gathering and reporting capability of the Times by exclusively evaluating the content of its opinion page?

Further, one of the prime measures this report uses is the scoring for members of Congress by Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the self-described "nation's oldest liberal lobbying group".

Now, some might say that comparing news to members of Congress, be they Democrats or Republicans, isn't an effective measure (especially if you believe there is virtually no real difference between today's politicians). But at least take time to consider the report.

Various FOX News "watchdog" groups are a dizzying array of alleged inaccuracies in FOX News opinion and editorial shows, with almost nothing in actual N

Outstanding post! A breakdown/elaboration of blanks's points:

What do you expect from a country where education and intelligence is not a "High priority"? "? Education is competition, meaning tomorrow's educated students, who become business men could be your next big competitor.

The end result of the 'pass the failures' attitude toward pre-college scholastic achievement. The USA has, in the broadest of terms, a populace that can barely read the newspaper, don't know their way around a map of the world, can't remember the facts for key moments in world history, and watches inane sitcoms on television paid for by often inane commercials that constantly interrupt them at every carefully crafted plot point cliffhanger!

And as everyone knows in the USA people don't matter, Big business does.

Here are the two best examples I can come up with to support this assertion:

Even the USA government couldn't get Microsoft broken up into smaller companies during its antitrust suit with the software giant. Maybe, deep down inside, if they were successful, they would have screwed up the world economy as a result--part of which provides their operating funds. Hence, in the end, nothing happened. Microsoft is still in one piece and business is conducted as usual....

Look at the bipartisan political system in the USA: two sides of the same corporate-funded coin. Essentially, if you are not a 'Republicrat', you don't matter in the USA political process--your 'wasted votes' for third/alternate parties do little more than to motivate the two dominate political parties to fine-tune their platform and message in order to get the votes lost to dissent at the next election.

Yes business's would not be around if people couldn't buy their products, so they (we) get paid just enough to buy their products. And for those who can't afford it, that's what credit cards are for.

John Kerry wants to raise the minimum wage in the USA to $7.00 an hour. I am sure big business will fight against this to keep their labor costs low and their profit margins high as they have been since the last minimum wage hike in 1997. What 'burns me up' is how it is legal for restaurants to pay its waitstaff LESS than the minimum wage with the diners subsidising the waitstaff's wages with their tip monies to make up the difference--a process ripe for deception and uncertainty. Years ago, I used to work as a dishwasher at a now defunct restaurant chain so I've personally heard some of the 'horror stories' that revolve around tipping. I fully expect that if Kerry's minimum wage hike is passed into law, big business will simply raise their prices to get that money back as they have in the past ('passing the added costs on to the consumer')--a simple case of greed and inflation at work. A much better idea would be for the working poor who earn poverty level wages to be exempt from all forms of taxation except maybe monies paid into the Social Security system....

Because of years of greed and inflation, we now have a proliferation of credit card and home equity loan offers by mail, TV, and radio and 'payday advance' firms 'everywhere' that will loan you money for a short time at usurious interest rates.

We are losing a battle, not just with the rest of the world dealing with education, business, ethics(?) but a battle of bettering ourselves and giving our children a chance to survive in the future.

The USA, for the most part, is a 'microwave' society. Only matters of national policy, national defense, or college level education are planned out more than three months in advance--if that! Everything else is temporary and subject to change at a moment's notice due to societal and market forces within its borders. As a result, we now have:

- poorly educate

One word: Democrats.

The pre-bust Real fortune was used to finance the US Senate candidacy of one Maria Cantwell, D-WA, former 'Senior Vice President of Consumer Products at RealNetworks':

http://cantwell.senate.gov/about/index.html

ADA 100% Liberal Voting Record, 2001
[PDF DOCUMENT]

PS: All the RIAA and MPAA types that you people hate so much are Democrats [what we out here in fly-over country would call 'Limousine Liberals'].

Neither organization would consider McCain's 2001 year to be "highly conservative." The American Conservative Union rates senators on this page. A higher rating means more conservative. For example, Arizona Republican John Kyl scores a 100 (very conservative) while California Democrat Barbara Boxer scores a 0 (very liberal). Senator McCain scored a 68 in 2001. In 2000 he scored 81 and his lifetime rating is 84. He is obviously becoming more liberal by these ratings.

McCain wasn't the lowest scoring Republican, as Sen. Spector from PA and both the Maine senators scored lower. McCain also scored higher than any democrat, the most conservative of whom is GA's Miller, with a score of 60. For reference, Sen. Lott scored 96 and Sen. Frist scored 100, while Sen. Daschle scored an 8 and Sen. Kennedy scored 4. So, by ACU standards, he is one of the more liberal Republicans in the Senate, though he should not be called a liberal.

The Americans for Democratic Action have a similar system, but they score it oppositely: a rating of 0 = very conservative and a rating of 100 = very liberal. You can see a .PDF file of the 2001 ratings on this page. Sen. McCain scored a 40, higher than the lowest Democrat (Sen. Miller of GA) who scored a 35. By ADA reckoning, McCain was tied for the most liberal Republican Senator (with Spector (PA) and Sen. Snowe (ME)).

His Stances and choices usually support what the Democrats want, and often exceeds their wildest dreams.

Give us some examples.

The McCain-Feingold-Cochran Campaign Reform Act. This act was assailed by many conservatives as being unconstitutional and giving incumbants free reign in their campaigns.

If you take a look at some american gov't books
you might be able to figure that out for yourself. If you aren't making millions of dollars, if you aren't catholic, don't like school prayer, don't care about woman's rights, education, non big bisness then why the hell do you want to vote republican? We have a republican senate and house, the judges are 4 conservative 5 liberal and you want to through in a republican president with an ultra conservative vp? Are you some sort of priest that owns a big buisness and makes lot of money? Here is some evidence.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/e98/e1296.htm
At last time I checked I wasn't for letting people go that are breaking antitrust laws.

http://www.democrats.org/recor d/positions/index.htmlThis is the democratic issues yes they are from the democratic site but I couldn't find an American Gov't book online to give me the details needed.

This is from the rnc and isn't nearly as good about talking about the issues at hand. They just talk about al gore and not them selves except that bit about the epa.
http://www.rnc.org/newsroom/issues
The following link is for the primary campaining
http://www.adaction.org/voting.html