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Ricochet at 10: America in 2010
We’re almost through our 10th year around here. Wow. Who would have thought it? It was a much different world back in May of 2010 when the first Ricochet Podcast went online and was followed by a website that the founders envisioned would be more civilized because everyone would have “skin in the game;” even if that “skin” was nothing more than the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
What was roiling us back then? Well, according to Time, the #1 story that year was an environmental disaster in the Gulf: the explosion of the BP drilling rig, “The Deepwater Horizon.”
But in politics the top story was undoubtedly the passage of ObamaCare and the backlash that came with it in the form of the Tea Party movement. In their year-end review Time lamented that the Tea Party types were “chasing a socialist poltergeist” and the press was still hanging on to the notion that ObamaCare was going to expand health coverage to an additional 32 million people and “would in the long term trim costs.” How’s that working out for you?
Well, Joe Biden, who at the signing ceremony turned to President Barack Obama and proclaimed, “This is a big effing deal!” recently admitted on the Iowa campaign trail that it sucked. “There are two ways people know when something is important, ” said the former Vice President. “One, when it’s so clear when it’s passed that everybody understands it – and no one did understand Obamacare – including the way it was rolled out.” It’s been ten years and now the talk is “Medicare for All.” A big effing deal indeed.
As for the Tea Party, their struggles are the other side of that coin. Sent to Washington to control spending and reverse ObamaCare, they ran into a roadblock of their own: House Speaker John Boehner. It wasn’t that Boehner didn’t sympathize with them but he didn’t understand them. He also believed they didn’t understand how Washington worked. Eventually, a lack of communication and Boehner’s penchant for secret negotiations with Obama would do him in. Now the fiscal conservatives are in full retreat. The public debt has ballooned and so has the deficit.
Among other stories that made Time’s Top 10 list that year was the continuing frustration with the war in Afghanistan and America’s “Islamaphobia.” The frustration with the former hasn’t eased much, and as for the latter, if anything the press is convinced we’re even more irrationally racist than we were back then. Because another story on that list was Arizona’s attempts to control its international border with Mexico. Had the Supreme Court not gutted the law on the basis of Federal supremacy, who knows if an outsider candidate would have been able to make such hay out of the unchecked stream of illegal aliens just a few years later?
Rounding out the list was another issue that still manages to make blood pressures rise on the left: the Citizens United ruling. As we enter the 2020 campaign the Left is still railing against it and raising funds off of it. Being against free speech and being against the ability to criticize candidates is a strange shibboleth for a party that is simultaneously claiming that the current occupant of the White House is thisclose to destroying the Constitution and declaring himself President-for-Life. But cognitive dissonance in politics is certainly nothing new.
Time’s Top Ten Political Stories of 2010:
- The BP Oil Spill
- The Rise of the Tea Party
- Obama’s Quagmire: Health Care
- Obama’s Quagmire II: The Economy
- U.S. Islamophobia
- McChrystal and the War in Afghanistan
- Arizona’s Strict Immigration Law
- U.S.-China Tensions
- The Arrival of the iPad
- The Supreme Court Sides With Citizens United
10 years goes by in the blink of an eye. Remember how Ricochet was pushing the Encounter Books Broadsheets? I paid for a couple of those. They were great.
Edit: not broadsheets, broadsides. And they still have ’em!
In January of ‘10 New Yorkers were upset that the smallest cup of coffee at Starbucks was raised to $1.85. With city and state taxes that drove the price to $2.01. That penny, judging by the article in the New York Times, was the equivalent to “everyone is now going to die.”
Been a fun 10 years
Agreed! There were a few moments here and there when the site was…excitingly non-unanimous…but it’s always been a superior online clubhouse.
Special props to the author of this OP for the clever animation blending the 2010 and 2020 logos. The slight rotation of the slanted “o” reminds me of the late, locally lamented demise of 20th Century Fox. One local showbiz artist made a point of the distinctive narrow center of the “o” in Fox.
Former Member Foxfier gave me two full boxes of Ricochet business cards with the original logo on them. I have much of one box left. Might someone want them, or some of them?
Those “Charter Member” badges are awesome! I want one.
How much are they?
Very, very expensive. First you have to build a time machine…
How long does it take, finish to start?
Four logos in just 10 years?
Is this a sign that Ricochet spends too much on management consultants?
;-)
I miss the Long Goldberg Steyn podcast.
Ok. Good job.
Not to nitpick (who am I kidding) … but if Ricochet was founded in May 2010, we’re not about to begin our tenth year. We’re about to finish it, and begin the eleventh!
I heard about Ricochet when Peter and Rob appeared on a podcast I used to listen to. I can’t remember the name, but it was a weekly roundup of conservative-leaning stories, with a stable of regular commentators including people like Glenn Reynolds and Austin Bay (remember him?). They came on and plugged Ricochet; I checked out the website, but it was the podcast that really drew me in.
It was the early days of the Obama administration, and I remember rather enjoying finding this community and feeling like I was part of the loyal opposition. But it was a pop-culture comment thread that finally prompted me to join, just so I could contribute my own opinion about something. Honestly, I tire pretty quickly of politics, but what keeps me around here is just the chance to hang out with a group of people who see the world roughly the same way I do. Well, sort of the same way. Some of them.
One of our more inspired titles, no?
Ricochet had one, to start out with. Quite often, something would go wonky with the comment processor, and you’d see people apparently reply to a comment that hadn’t been published yet. It was quite disconcerting. I don’t thing the time differential was enough to get @markcamp a badge, though. Looks like it would need to be about five years to do that.
Duly noted and fixed!
All this time I thought I had only died recently due to tax cuts, net neutrality, leaving the Paris climate accords and/or the Iran deal, and now I find out I’ve been dead since 2010 due to a penny increase in a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I’ve never even been to Starbucks!
Although the shock at learning any size Starbucks coffee only cost $1.85 before tax might actually do me in.
Yeah, it’s been an interesting ride! I like my stinkin’ badge well enough to not complain. Maybe it will intimidate the relative newbies, but it wouldn’t affect me if I were them. If this is some trick to bestow some level of elite status on me, just to see what it feels like, well played!
I was inspired to go back to my first posts. Suffice it to say my writing has improved since then. And my God, things have changed haven’t they?
I was just beginning to recognize how feckless our Republican crew was.
It was also quaint to read the comments on my posts of Rob Long and other Rico-elites.
Later, I will post a link to one of those early posts in this comment section. Most of them hold up pretty well. Although I have to say to my old self, you were soooo naive!
In 2011, Mike Murphy was a regular on the podcast. For ten years I’ve been saying essentially the same thing, though now it’s in very different circumstances. Some people never learn! I humbly include myself. When will I learn it’s a lost cause?
But it doesn’t matter anyway! We won this debate with three years, and likely 8 years of DJT. Murphy is rich, but out of the game entirely. Absolutely irrelevant.
http://ricochet.com/208712/archives/useful-republicans/
Same for me.
same for me
also same
Same.
You’ve a great mind, it seems.
Morning Franco,
Your rant criticizing Murphy, and Frum and Brooks was a work of art! It is my loss that I hadn’t joined when you posted your Murphy dissection, I came in in 2012. Part of being old is to worry about how culture has changed, that is speaking for myself as a geezer. But the election of DJT was more unexpected than the fall of communism, so perhaps it is not a lost cause. If roughly half of us knew that our traditional leadership was if not overtly corrupt, it was so bad that we needed to elect Trump to come in and as Peter says “break furniture”, then much of our population sees that our leaders have failed and we need to take a different direction.
I didn’t realize it was that long. Congratulations! We ought to have a celebration in some way. Maybe we could invite all those NeverTrumpers who left. :-P
I am putting in a Bug request.
I joined in 2011 and those badges are stupid.
Well said. I tire of politics too. My following of politics has been on a steady decline over the years. It’s so fruitless.
One of my proudest moments on twitter was getting blocked by Mike (R’s need to be more like D’s) Murphy.
With few exceptions, due to travel or illness, I have logged onto Ricochet at least once a day since August of 2010. The “thrill of the new” may have worn off, but this is still the smartest website I’ve ever found. And like others have said before me, it’s not just the politics that keeps me here. In fact, politics is falling further off my “give a damn” list every year, it seems. But the posts on culture, movies, religion, and the like will keep me here, hopefully for another decade.
As a tribute to the recently departed Buck Henry, co-creator of Get Smart, I’d like to say, “Missed it by that much!”
The owners of this site should take you out to dinner! ;)
I would enjoy that a great deal!
They’d make great bookmarks. Do they have someone’s name on them or just the Ricochet logo? I love the original logo and still don’t understand why it was changed. Seems like it got worse with each iteration.