TOC Ready Room 19 Oct 2021; *UPDATE*

[Updates added at the bottom. – JED]

Greetings, readers.  This is the inaugural edition of the TOC Ready Room, which will be an open thread and drop-by briefing space in the spirit of the ready rooms used by military aviators.

My experience being with U.S. Navy ready rooms, the feature image is of a ready room on the carrier USS Constellation (CV64) used by a squadron from Carrier Air Wing 2.  The image is tagged as being from March 2003, when Constellation was on her final operational deployment supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.  (The CVW-2 patch is visible on one of the flight jackets, incidentally.)  Constellation was decommissioned only a few months later, in August 2003.

On a carrier, the ready room is used for planning and squadron briefings, but also serves as a gathering space subject to availability.  It’s the center of squadron life during underway periods and deployment.

The Ready Room posts will be added at least once a week,

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Want hope and a future? Deregulate.

Readers, I was actually, in effect, composing a new post when I responded to Reader of Excellence “jgets” in a comments exchange at TOC today.  Rather than spending time tweaking this further, I will simply post it to get it out there for discussion.

Reader jgets posited the following:

[Apropos this link, suggesting a higher tax rate on the top 1%.]

More ideas like the above from the 1%, a steady reduction in government expenditures and entitlements, a smarter tax policy for the upper middle class, a modest tax contribution from the now untaxed middle class, a token contribution from the working poor, and maybe we’ll get out of this financial mess.

Can the Republicans make a compelling message outta that moving towards 2016?

Er, no, Obama didn’t win the debate last night

We’ve reached a watershed here, where we either live in our own heads affirming reality, regardless of spurious inputs from demagoguery or sentiment, or we give up on reality and let demagoguery and sentiment take over at the decision table.  Did the president pull off a performance last night, in terms of sounding passionate and full of conviction?  To some extent, yes.  Does that mean he won the debate, or even achieved a draw with Romney?  No.

The mainstream media immediately launched a volley of positive soundbites about the president’s performance, but frankly, they were going to do that anyway.  As long as Obama didn’t collapse on the stage, they were going to say he had his mojo back.

The problem is that in order to sound passionate and full of conviction,