Has anything changed ? When are you liberal types ever going to stop blaming everyone else and actually do something besides talk talk talk?
A few things have changed for the better, but you don't turn an economy this large around on a dime. When you've got a bunch of whackjobs (Glenn Beck and anyone else stupid enough to listen to him) teabagging themselves it makes it challenging to have any rational discussion.
I'm not a liberal, tend to vote split ticket and am more of a Teddy Roosevelt type. Like TR I've become fairly anti-conservative though. Of course, conservatives would probably call TR a liberal/socialist/communist now too, even though he was relatively moderate. I take an engineering approach to things, which makes it easier to shift through the BS, particularly with conservation subjects like those Jimbo wandered into.
As for doing something, I have. I've cut my electrical consumption by over 50%, nat. gas by about 20% so far, and gasoline by nearly 50%. The spate of droughts I had while living in the South have prompted me to target 50% water reduction...hope to hit that soon. And I haven't changed my lifestyle noticeably to do any of this. It makes good economic sense whether one is independent, liberal, libertarian, moderate, conservative, or whatnot. It's too bad that conservatives can't figure the easy stuff out. Efficiency is a competitive advantage, NOT a disadvantage.
What I've noticed over the last decade was the
conservatives blaming everyone else for their inability to govern responsibly or intelligently, calling independents and everyone not the to the right of Cheney, "socialists/communists/liberals." They still won't suck it up and admit their mistakes. No, it's all FDR, Johnson, Clinton, Lincoln, Gore's fault.
Sometimes they try to lay their failures at Dubya's feet and disown him, never mind that they fully supported him for 8 years and he did their bidding the whole time. Two wars the conservative Chickenhawks screwed up, we still don't have Osama (Clinton came closer to getting him than they have), and they wrecked the economy and the Federal budget with clueless supply siding. Their energy policy and approach to healthcare were twin disasters that helped finish off the domestic automakers. We narrowly avoided a Great Depression...and then only by doing the opposite of what conservatives suggested. If McCain had won and followed Gramm's "mental recession" economic advice we would be in a full blown depression.
The irritating thing about the Democrats to me is that they are way too timid about fixing the things that haven't worked and need to be remedied. Their main mistake is listening to the business/banking/fossil fuel/conservative interests that have created this mess with short term thinking. Until I see some real reform and regulation as well as actual transparency in our markets, I'll keep my money out of them. If conservatives get their way it'll never happen and the markets will remain as broken as they have been for the past decade.
But, hey, I encourage conservatives to stop talking and actually walk-the-walk. Voluntarily give up your Medicare and Soc. Security, accept no veterans benefits, no unemployment. You don't want to participate in any of those socialist programs, do you? It's only fair, your conservative paragons spent the funds from them on other adventures, so you should foot the bill of the folk you selected. If the 20-25% core conservatives did that we could begin erasing their accumulated budget deficits.