AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Conservatives like ican are defending America. If you really want to know who is unAmerican, I suggest you read about Bill Ayers, Obama friend and former weatherman that was dedicated to overthrowing the country, or read about Obama mentor and spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright that regularly ranted against this country and said the chickens had simply come home to roost when 9/11 happened. Perhaps even take a look at Obama himself in regard to being unAmerican, talk, but get out of here with your accusations against patriots like ican.

okie, We all know you have a good memory, because you repeat them verbatim every time you post the same thing, over and over and over and over....

Are you a robot, who doesn't have a brain?

I will keep repeating until the truth of the information sinks in here, ci. If you don't like it, that is your problem, not mine.

I'm the only member of my family who doesn't golf. Maybe I'm just feeling sad at being on the outside, looking in.

Here are some interesting letters to the editor of the NYT in response to a news story about teenagers once again leaning to the left:

To Be Young and Liberal in America

Published: July 1, 2007
To the Editor:

Re ''Young Americans Are Leaning Left, New Poll Finds'' (front page, June 27):

As a professor who for years has spoken on the virtues of liberalism, I find it extremely pleasing to know that young Americans are once again beginning to lean on the left.

It gives me great hope that this new generation will go on to restore what has been taken away from us in the last seven years of the ultraconservative Bush administration and its collaborators in Congress.

While your conservative readers will accuse me of being yet another liberal professor indoctrinating students, it is more important to have voters who support universal health coverage for all, believe that gay marriage and abortion should be legal and that global warming is a serious problem, and finally, willing to vote for a presidential candidate who smoked marijuana, who is a woman or African-American.

In short, these voters will turn our nation into a kinder and gentler place and that is so much better than the current divisive, religion-suffocating, anti-science and war-filled living conditions.

Michael Hadjiargyrou
Stony Brook, N.Y., June 27, 2007

To the Editor:

It is heartening that young people are increasingly interested in politics, especially involving the presidential campaign, as your article suggests.

As a teacher of American history to 11th graders, I hope to spark such an interest. But as I urge my students to become politically engaged, I also wonder what lessons this generation has learned, and continues to learn, from the examples of those in power.

When I was 16, my political models in government were Richard M. Nixon's brazen abuses of presidential authority and the Congressional and judicial actions that assured he would be held accountable for such abuses.

The spectacle of Watergate was my political lesson, and it was compelling. Thus, I learned to be skeptical of people in power -- while revering the very political system that prevailed against those who would violate it.

So I wonder not just what my students and other American teenagers learn from our political leaders today, but also what these young people will remember about politics and government 30 years from now.

Peter L. Donhauser
New York, June 27, 2007

To the Editor:

Wow. An astonishingly high 30 percent of young people think that most of their acquaintances would not vote for a black presidential candidate, and 38 percent say the same about a woman candidate.

It looks as if our nation still has some major problems.

Ben Givan
Saratoga Springs, N.Y., June 27, 2007

okie, Please continue to repeat the same old garbage; it will show others that you are a repetitive bore who doesn't know how to learn new things.

from Salon.com:

Out of all the famous quotations, few better describe this eerily familiar time than those attributed to George Santayana and Yogi Berra. The former, a philosopher, warned that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The latter, a baseball player, stumbled into prophecy by declaring, "It's déjà vu all over again."

As movies give us bad remakes of already bad productions (hello, "Predators"), television resuscitates ancient clowns (howdy, Dee Snider) and music revives pure schlock (I'm looking at you, Devo), we are now surrounded by the obvious mistakes of yesteryear. And it might be funny -- it might be downright hilarious -- if only this cycle didn't infect the deadly serious stuff.

Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the Iraq war showed us the same thing -- and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger -- and yet the new financial "reform" bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing -- and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all over again.

These are but a few examples of mistakes being repeated ad infinitum. In a Yogi Berra country, the jarring lessons of history are remembered as mere flickers of déjà vu -- if they are remembered at all. Most often, we forget completely, seeing in George Santayana's refrain not a dark warning, but a cheery celebration. And the logical question is: Why? Why have we become so dismissive of history's lessons and therefore so willing to repeat history's mistakes?

Some of it is the modern information miasma. Though the Internet makes eons of history instantly available, the 24-7, moment-to-moment typhoon of cable screamfests, blogs, tweets, e-mail alerts and "breaking news" graphics makes last week's news feel old, and last month's news feel positively paleolithic. Add to this reportage that is increasingly presented with zero context, and it's clear that journalism is sowing mass senility.

Politicians also make significant contributions to the problem. With the age of the permanent campaign intensifying and the era of the long-term electoral majority ending, both parties deliberately focus only on the very recent past -- and obscure the larger historical record. From the national debt to poverty to the downsides of American empire, Republicans tell us it's all the fault of Democrats' two-year-old reign, while Democrats blame it on Bush's eight-year presidency. This, even though these emergencies developed over decades.

And then, of course, there is ideology.

With the present so radically departing from our past, history has become a damning package of inconvenient truths -- and those truths are often shunned because they threaten today's most powerful ideological interests.

This is why in the debates over war, economics and taxes, we aren't urged to consider past conflicts; we aren't encouraged to remember that America experienced its most storied growth under the New Deal's aggressive financial regulation; and we aren't told that wages and job growth expanded in the mid-20th century with a top income tax bracket above 70 percent. We aren't reminded of these facts because they threaten the defense industry, Wall Street and high-income taxpayers, respectively -- and those forces exert enormous influence over our political discourse, whether through media sponsorship, political campaign contributions or lobbying.

No matter the issue, this axiom is the same: When money has a vested interest in burying history, history is inevitably buried, ultimately leading us from Santayana and Berra's aphorisms to Albert Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and somehow expecting different results.



David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, bestselling author and host of the morning drive-time radio show on KKZN-AM760.

This one is especially posted for okie and ican, because it's right up their "alley."

Front page news of the San Jose Mercury News today: "GOP strives to stay united." Byline: ""Republicans reject conservative resolution, focus instead on attracting moderates, Latinos."

Hey, guys, what do you think of that? It says the "GOP reject conservative resolution."

So what has your definition of "right" have to do with anything that's real in US politics? How about voters?

C.I., I think the GOP is pretty much out of money. I read somewhere in the last day or so that they're down to $5M to take them through the midterms. Organization seems to be somewhat in disarray as well.

They've been in disarray for much longer; that's the reason why they ended up with GW Bush for two terms, then ran McCain and Palin in 2008. McCain the flip-flopper, and Palin who can't remember which newspapers/magazines she reads.

I don't think Michael Steele is doing them any favors, either. He'll probably be out of a job in early November.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden says he'd make book (if it wasn't illegal) that the Dems will keep both the House and the Senate! Going to be a lively and interesting Fall season!

Gee, I wish I were down to $5M!

On the matter of keeping the House and Senate, I do wish Biden would shut his mouth.

This is a great analysis of the inconsistencies of so-called strict constructionists:

Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia won his seat in Congress campaigning as a strict defender of the Constitution. He carries a copy in his pocket and is particularly fond of invoking the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

But it turns out there are parts of the document he doesn't care for — lots of them. He wants to get rid of the language about birthright citizenship, federal income taxes and direct election of senators, among others. He would add plenty of stuff, including explicitly authorizing castration as punishment for child rapists.

This hot-and-cold take on the Constitution is surprisingly common within the GOP, particularly among those like Broun who portray themselves as strict Constitutionalists and who frequently accuse Democrats of twisting the document to serve political aims.

Republicans have proposed at least 42 Constitutional amendments in the current Congress, including one that has gained favor recently to eliminate the automatic grant of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
Democrats — who typically take a more liberal view of the Constitution as an evolving document — have proposed 27 amendments, and fully one-third of those are part of a package from a single member, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill. Jackson's package encapsulates a liberal agenda in which everyone has new rights to quality housing and education, but most of the Democratic proposals deal with less ideological issues such as congressional succession in a national disaster or voting rights in U.S. territories.

The Republican proposals, by contrast, tend to be social and political statements, such as the growing movement to repeal the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship. Republicans like Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the lead Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, argue that immigrants are abusing the right to gain citizenship for their children, something he says the amendment's authors didn't intend.

Sessions, who routinely accuses Democrats of trying to subvert the Constitution and calls for respecting the document's "plain language," is taking a different approach with the 14th Amendment. "I'm not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind," he said, "but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen."

Other widely supported Republican amendments would prohibit government ownership of private companies, bar same-sex marriage, require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, and — an old favorite — prohibit desecration of the American flag.

During the health care debate, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., introduced an amendment that would allow voters to directly repeal laws passed by Congress — a move that would radically alter the Founding Fathers' system of checks and balances.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who founded a tea party caucus in Congress honoring the growing conservative movement that focuses on Constitutional governance, wants to restrict the president's ability to sign international treaties because she fears the Obama administration might replace the dollar with some sort of global currency.

Broun, who is among the most conservative members of Congress, said he sees no contradiction in his devotion to the Constitution and his desire to rewrite parts of it. He said the Founding Fathers never imagined the size and scope of today's federal government and that he's simply resurrecting their vision by trying to amend it.

"It's not picking and choosing," he said. "We need to do a lot of tweaking to make the Constitution as it was originally intended, instead of some perverse idea of what the Constitution says and does."

The problem with such a view, says constitutional law scholar Mark Kende, is that divining what the framers intended involves subjective judgments shaded with politics. Holding up the 2nd Amendment as sacrosanct, for example, while dismissing other parts of the Constitution is "cherry picking," said Kende, director of Drake University's Constitutional Law Center.
Virginia Sloan, an attorney who directs the nonpartisan Constitution Project, agreed.

"There are a lot of people who obviously don't like income taxes. That's a political position," she said of criticism of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the modern federal income tax more than a century ago. "But it's in the Constitution ... and I don't think you can go around saying something is unconstitutional just because you don't like it."

Sloan said that while some proposals to alter the Constitution have merit, most are little more than posturing by politicians trying to connect with voters.

"People are responding to the politics of the day, and that's not what the framers intended," she said. "They intended exactly the opposite — that the Constitution not be used as a political tool."

The good news, Sloan and Kende said, is that such proposals rarely go anywhere.

Since the nation's founding, just 27 have survived the arduous amendment process, and 10 of those came in the initial Bill of Rights.

Only two have come in the past 40 years, and both avoided ideology. One, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age to 18; the other, ratified in 1992, limited Congress' ability to raise lawmakers' salaries.

Hypocrites!

There are so many negatives going for the republicans, I don't know how they will manage to stay a viable party; they're now inciting hatred against Muslims and supporting intolerance for gays, and they don't have many good republicans running for office in most states - who turn out to be more divisive than bringing people together to solver our problems. Their hate message can't be winning the smart people's votes, and the No Party has no credibility of offering solutions to the many problems facing our country.

I believe about 30% of Americans support the GOP without having much smarts; they have no common sense or have learned anything about America or the US Constitution.

How can they survive?

This has nothing to do with anything, but I just want to let everyone know that I passed my national registration test and am now a nationally certified EMT-First Responder.
I just got the word 5 minutes ago that I passed.

Excellent. Congrats.

Sweet! You can take care of your fantasy team when they go into cardiac arrest the week that the Colts are on bye.

Cycloptichorn

My CONGRATS also; good show!