Wingnuts

Wingnuts

A new book "Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America (Paperback) ~ John Avlon (Author)", describes the ideas and people that the author feels are "A wingnut is someone on the far-right or far-left wing of the political spectrum – professional partisans, unhinged activists, and paranoid conspiracy theorists". As this may be a subjective evalution, I am looking into a more objective measure of these catagories.

• Wingnut Idea: An idea that is supported/believed by 5 to 15% of the population. (Note: I define an idea that is supported by less than 5% as just crazy and by over 15% as just unpopular or not)
  
  
• Group Wingnut Idea: A Wingnut idea that is supported/believed by twice the percent of a specific group. (note: If the group is small, e.g. 1/nn-th of the overall population, then the percent should "nn" times as large.
  
  
• Wingnut: A person who supports/believes 50% of the wingnet ideas.
  
  
• Group (partisan) Wingnet: A person who supports/believes 50% of the wingnet ideas of one specific group.

{TBD}

Working across the Isle

In the spirit or working across the isle I note some suggestions that might be interesting.

• Schedule monthly 2 hour open, Televised, sessions between the president and the legislators in which they could discuss the issues and proposals that are important to them and the country. There is a first report, "John Cornyn: No thanks to President Obama Q & A" that it may be difficult to establish this.
  
  
• Bring the Medicare and the Social Security proposals of the Republican Budget to the floor to have them voted upon. As I understand it:
  
• 1. The proposal on Social Security is to move toward a Defined Contribution system, whose return might be based on stock market performance, rather than a system that pays a specific income, and if it is like the previous Bush plan, makes the Social Security system worse off for decades until the current generation dies off.
     
  2. The proposal for Medicare is to provide vouchers for un-regulated insurance purchases and these vouchers are to increase at 50% the rate of the cost of health care. Thus, if one assumes that the administrative cost of private insurance is 25% or so, and that Medicare is paying say 70% of the cost of medical treatment, then at year 1, this will reduce the amount of health care for the Medicare Patient by roughly half and then reduce it more as time proceed

Also see:

• Republican Solutions (January 29, 2010)
• Liberal analysis of Republican 2010 Budget
• Dems Push Election-Year Resolution Against Privatizing Social Security