This is not a "progressive" site in the way that most people use the word. We are not interested in joining the club.
We are sometimes Liberal, sometimes Libertarian and occasionally Conservative in our thinking. Part of the reason the United States is in trouble is due to fuzzy-minded, supposedly progressive, thinking.
Before the Iraqi war started, there were people who pointed out that the Muslim world does not hate us for our freedom, they hate us for what we have been doing to them. It was an appeal by liberals/progressives to hawks - an appeal to consider what we have been doing and how it affects others in the world.
It's time for progressive thinkers to consider the possibility that they are hated, not because of their good hearts, but because too many of their solutions were stupid and had fatal flaws. And if you refuse to identify those flaws, you never get to fix them.
Too many progressives tried to cram their solutions down other people's throats. Too many solutions operated on the economic principle: No cost is too high as long as someone else is paying the bill.
OSHA was supposed to insure that no one got his hand caught in a meat-grinder. It did not have to include unending regulation, such as the requirement that all toilet seats must be 18 inches above the floor.
And after a while, the backlash wiped out the good that OSHA had done. Currently a number of workers suffered significant lung damage from a butter-mimicking chemical called diacetyl. OSHA wasn't there for those workers. By making themselve the enemy of business, they eventually took themselves out and were no longer able to help anyone.
Even bad solutions develop their own constituency. Once you set up a bureaucracy to solve a problem, change becomes very difficult. No one wants to lose position or power just because the solution isn't working.
To be completely fair, some of the time the conservative objection is not to a failed solution, it is to any solution at all. And some of the time, the reason for the failure is that liberals compromised with conservatives and did not fight for a real solution.
So now we have a backlash by conservative writers like Mona Charen. She has a persuasive hard-hitting set of criticisms which hit at all of the weaknesses of liberal programs. It looks like a knockout. But when you take a close look at her arguments, they are a mixture of valid criticism and a set of plausible conservative beliefs that are just as fuzzy-minded as the worst of liberal thinking.
Today there is no real debate, and no movement toward real solutions. In the political world, it's not about solutions, it's about winning and losing.
It's time to look at our world - and our political system - and our economic system - and decide what is wrong and how it can be changed.
If we set up more regularitory agencies, maybe they should be created with a kind of Ombudsman - a director of Common Sense.