Rhetoric. Palin. Gore. Bat. Obama. Imsaguy - I can haz funny. The Low Road to Victory. Triumph of the Authoritarians. Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical. For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ``Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon.
But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ``imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra. What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Small typo, big headache. Glum Democrats Can't See Halting Bush on Courts. It Wasn't All Bad. This column was written by Katha Pollitt. All year long it's been one piece of bad news after another, but now it's time to put on the rose-colored glasses and list some of the good things that happened in 2005.
I had to e-mail about fifty people to come up with these items, but that's OK. Keeping you cheerful is part of my job. I mean, the war could be wrong, but the Iraqi elections could still be good. So fill that glass half full with whatever and...and...well, just drink it. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. How The Christian Left Can Get It Right. A close friend recently lamented in conversation that the Republicans have stolen God. Maybe, I said, but at least we still have Jesus.
While many on the righteously religious right say theyve found him, the story of the Jesus theyve found is the one theyve written themselves the one in which a vengeful Jesus wields his cross as a sword and a shield. Thats not the Jesus I know, nor the one known by many Americans, irrespective of their political affiliations. I personally know at least a dozen Republicans who voted against their party in last Novembers elections in part because they recognize this. They recognize that their party has been hijacked by those whove taken scissors to their Bibles and cut them so severely that their version now begins with the Old Testament and ends with Revelations, with little resembling Jesus teachings left in between.
Americans who consider themselves Christian can be generalized as thinking about Jesus in one of two distinct ways. Dems Force Closed Senate Session. In this photo provided by ABC News, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., appears for an interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC's "This Week," in Washington, Sunday, Oct. 30, 2005. AP Photo/ABC News The Senate is now back in public session after more than two hours behind closed doors. The unusual private session was prompted by Democrats unhappy that Republicans haven't investigated intelligence used by the administration that led to the war in Iraq. Immediately after returning to public session, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts says Republicans have "agreed to do what we agreed to do. " Democrats forced the Republican-controlled Senate into an unusual closed session Tuesday, questioning intelligence that President Bush used in the run-up to the war in Iraq and accusing Republicans of ignoring the issue.
"They have repeatedly chosen to protect the Republican administration rather than get to the bottom of what happened and why," Democratic leader Harry Reid said. (DV) Bageant: A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals. If you are reading this it is very likely that you are a liberal, maybe even an outright screaming burn down the goddam country commie -- in which case I say, Come sit by me comrade! (Especially if you are a blonde.) Like most lefties you probably live in an urban area, or someplace with reasonable cultural diversity. More than likely you are educated and can read this without moving your lips. Maybe you even live in the freethinking Peoples Republic of Berkeley, or bustle along under the fabled lights of Manhattan where you can see independent films and buy such things as leeks and soy milk at your grocery store. I, however, live in a town where it is easier to find chitterlings, ponhaus and souse in the grocery store than a leek and where Smokey and the Bandit still plays to packed movie houses year after year.
Is it possible for a higher class of person to live in American places like Winchester, Virginia? To be poor and white is a paradox in America. Dont laugh, youre next! Jeesh! A Liberal's Education. AP Images/Jacquelyn Martin Generational fairness has been a big theme of the austerity crusaders, whose most strident advocates tend to be financiers and business titans of substantial net worth. Yet their calls to radically reduce social investment out of a sense of generational equity diminishes the prospects of young people. The true generational injustice has little to do with the projected public debt and everything to do with the real crisis going on right now. Today’s young adults—especially 20- and 30-somethings with young children—face shrinking opportunity and growing insecurity.
The fate of today’s infants and toddlers is inextricably connected to that of their millennial--generation parents. Two-thirds of children under the age of 5 are raised by parents younger than 34. More than three years after the official end of the recession, more than 5.6 million 18- to 34-year-olds want a job and can’t find one. And Baby Makes Broke The Generational Earnings Gap Advertisement Comments. Specters of Militarism, Nationalism Haunt Independence Day - by Jim Lobe. As U.S. citizens mark their annual celebration of patriotism, the Fourth of July holiday, they might do well to also ponder the specter of two other "isms" that threaten the Republic's durability and strength raised by two important books published over the past year. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, by Financial Times columnist Anatol Lieven, warns that the U.S. polity is turning its back on the civic patriotism of the "American Creed" of liberty, the rule of law, and political egalitarianism in favor of an "American antithesis," a radical and vengeful nationalism that recalls the worst tendencies, and mistakes, of Wilhelmine Germany just before World War I.
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, by retired Army Col. Published by Oxford University Press, both books offer some of the most trenchant and original criticism of the trajectory of U.S. foreign and military policy that has surfaced since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.