I am so mad right now I don't know what to do.  For those unfamiliar with me, I live in a small, conservative, republican town in Georgia.  I just had a HUGE argument with my next door neighbor.  After seeing my new shiny Obama sticker on my van, she launched into an attack on me that was unprovoked and very unsettling.  She asked me why he couldn't say the pledge of allegiance to which I replied, that is not true.  I then explained the details of various lies and smears.  She continued to bring up every smear out there from the pledge to the swearing in on the Koran.  I told her she needed to check her facts as these had all been disproved.  She then asked, "So if he is a Muslim, and did swear on a Koran, then would you still support him?"  I explained that I would support him because a person's religion is not an important factor to me.  Which is when she said, "I hope if he gets elected, that he is shot and killed within 24 hours!"

^{Cross posted on
The Economic Populist -
A Community Site for Economics Freaks and Geeks}

Failure in war can be a bad thing.  Failure in business can be a personal loss, and in some instances a detriment to the economy.  With the recent calamity hitting the two largest mortgage lenders, not to mention other large American business concerns, it seems to a select few that failure is indeed a viable and good option.

A gamble with very high stakes is being openly promoted by adherents to a free-market orthodoxy.  These individuals, gaming on anger and the perceived loss of utility of these given enterprises, are pushing the public onto this wager.

Some of you here might know of me/my ideology, others not. In any event this diary has been a long time in formulation so I hope it makes some sense. People have been asking me for my thoughts on this topic and so I hope it does make some iota of sense.

I have given the issue a lot of thought.

What makes a conservative "different" from a "progressive" To me there is not one answer that could cover every and all situation since of course not all progressives nor are all conservatives the same. But I do think there might be an overarching theme, something that might cover the chasm of what separates the two groups.

Sure, some on the progressive side will say "Conservatives are evil, evil I tell you" that is how they differ from us... well those on the right will answer with "Progressives? They’re anti-American evil-doers" and be done with it. Case closed. Or is it? I do not think so. Even if everyone on one side thought everyone on the other was evil there has to be a reason for it.

<More after the break>

One of my frequent themes is how easy it is to show that the Republican Party has not only betrayed America, our children and civilization... but also any decent interpretation of conservatism.  Gradually, skilled propagandists (with some inadvertent help from intemperate liberals) have drawn our conservative neighbors to redefine their movement --

-- away from prudence to utter recklessness
-- away from fiscal responsibility toward the full suite of gamblers' rationalization.
-- from waste-not belief in efficiency to wastrel slovenliness
-- from home-first skepticism to international meddlesomeness and adventurism
-- from belief in the rational and palpable to mystical arm-waving
-- from a grounding in science and pragmatism to utter disdain for fact-driven reason

And so on....

We know that many of our neighbors are uncomfortable with the outcomes.  While the GOP core circles the wagons, they are losing many citizens who still retain a glimmer of rationality...

...continued...

.

What can I say, I like this guy. No, I'm not crazy, nor have I suddenly sold out to the gang at Swindlers' Inc (aka the current Republican Party).

http://gr360.blogspot.com/...

I enjoy reading the Corner on the National Review Online because it's always good to get the other side's perspective, and they have some intelligent and thoughtful writers working for them.

Larry Kudlow is not one of them.

Kudlow's specialty is linking economic news to political events in such a way as to prove the correctness of conservative ideas about the economy.

George Cook of the African American web site  letstalkhonestly.com discusses whether political correctness has gone to far

The speaker is Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events. Human Events was reportedly Ronald Reagan's favorite newspaper, unquestionably conservative.
Babbin was also a deputy undersecretary of defense in President George H.W. Bush's administration. According to him, the notion that we should stay in Iraq to build democracy there--is a lot of hooey!

The bad news is, he wants us to invade Iran.

For some reason -- maybe because it's summer in Arizona; maybe because I'm having a mini-midlife crisis -- I'm re-reading a lot of books I liked in high school and freshman college. This includes the novels of Ayn Rand and Kurt Vonnegut, an odd couple by any yardstick.  

There is only one upside if John McCain does get elected president: we will have lots and lots of stuff to write about. Look at this, and you’ll see what I mean. McCain comments for one, single, solitary week could—by themselves--generate volumes of passionate political commentary:

I'm glad Phil Gramm was candid enough to tell us that he thinks that the citizens of America are the problem, not the horrific mess that the GOP's made out of the economy since the Bush administration took over. And I think Phil Gramm had a point with his "we've become a nation of whiners" crack today. Unfortunately for Gramm, it's not the point that he was trying to make--it's a fact about democracy that Gramm and other conservatives just don't understand.

Thanks to Party Girl185 (via Youtube), for those who missed, didn't see, or only saw snippets; here is the entire 7 minute, two part interview, broadcast on Access Hollywood yesterday.
Remember, there will be two more segments tonight and tomorrow.

You better pay attention, if you want to see this wonderful family again (the video is after the break). Check bottom/update for New M.Obama video.

Barack Obama said this morning (on the Today Show), after being asked by Matt Lauer, about any criticism, that

"we got carried away, it was a mistake, and we won't be doing it again".

Here's the text. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/... Video is below.

I certainly can't argue with Senator Obama's decision (after all it's his kids), but I thought what he did was great, and any criticism (which I really didn't hear), was ginned up by his opponents who lust to define his as some "exotic", scary, unpatriotic American.

The Nation has a fine article by E. L. Doctorow entitled The White Whale.  It is his keynote address to the April 2007  joint meeting in Washington  of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of "The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society."  This theme is at the center of the failure of a significant portion of our society to recognize the bankruptcy of the Bush administration as far as ideas are concerned.  There is a deep side to this and Doctorow is one of the only people I know about who sees it so clearly. Look beyond the break and see what he has understood so well.

Every year I attend a BBQ held by a friend of the family.  Her name is Deborah and sadly is a big-time Republican, though oddly enough not so much a conservative (well socially at least).  Now her late father and my father go way back, fought together in North Africa in WW2, so these people are practically family. Well, as mentioned, she holds an Independence Day BBQ cook out every year, and my father goes out of respect... and a free meal. Outside of me, sometimes, he's the only other non-Republican at these things.

Chris Satullo, a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, made the suggestion in his column the other day that, instead of Fourth of July celebrations this year, we should sit in quiet contemplation of the plain fact that our country over the past seven years has engaged in torture, indefinite detention without charges, rendition, and other unspeakable acts.  It was a clear and provocative call to stand up for liberty in the face of fear, for honest criticism of our leaders as an act of patriotism.

We have betrayed the July 4 creed. We trample the vows we make, hand to heart.

Don't imagine that only the torturer's hand bears the guilt. The guilt reaches deep inside our Capitol, and beyond that - to us.

Our silence is complicit. In our name, innocents were jailed, humans tortured, our Constitution mangled. And we said so little.

Today, Satullo wrote a follow-up column, explaining the authoritarian response to his initial offering.  

As I mentioned in Part 1, when you’re a teacher, your planning periods are really defined by who has a planning period with you.  Sitting in the teacher’s work room, your conversations can range from cooking to sports, and depending on the person, even hot topics like religion and politics...sometimes both together.

So it should be no surprise that my conservative teacher friend and I have had many conversations about many different things.  However, we’re both pretty interested in politics...as such, the topic comes up more than a few times.  This time, though, the topic revolved around the students at our high school, and high school students around the nation.  Today’s topic was the abstinence movement.

Now, I know that there are a number of folks here who think I am just a run of the mill troll, and on the surface of it, this would seem like just another troll diary.

But bear with me, and suffer through another one of these diaries that I write.

I work with a large number of conservatives in my DoD job, and we have had some interesting exchanges over the past week or so.  And they got me thinking a little bit...

Jesse passed into nothingness this morning.  I plan to memorialism his death by drinking beer, smoking ribs, making potato salad and settling in for an afternoon of brainless TV watching after doing a couple of chores.

A few chuckles and chortles during that period might be coming, but that's about it.