This is my take on the lyrics for a song to dedicate to Hillary. Please do not criticize me too much for the amateur job but I had to share with someone.

Just a midwestern girl, livin in a crazy world
She took the midnight train goin anywhere
Just a country hick, born and raised down in the sticks
He took the midnight train goin anywhere

I recently picked up Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope". I have not finished it yet, but he makes no attempt to explain what he means by 'the audacity of hope'. The first chapter, Republicans and Democrats, reads like a screed straight from the New Republic summarizing all the platitudes that pundits have been making about polarization in the last few years. He praises Reagan effusively, not only Reagan's optimism but also his authoritarianism and traditionalism, before sheepishly stating 'I admit, I am a Democrat.'

This continues in the next few chapters. He tries to act like an impartial observer who can see both sides, yet he always comes down on the liberal side at the end. Obama seems like a liberal who doesn't know he's a liberal or tries to pretend that he is not in order to make himself seem more reasonable.

Why do people rely so much on the U.S. Constitution? I have seen comments on this site that have said, to effect, “only one thing is non-negotiable: the Constitution” and diaries that have based their whole premise on “defend the Constitution”; President Bush is said to be an evil, evil person because he “violated the Constitution.” Heck, we might as well all pack our bags now and head over to the Constitution Party.

This, treating the Constitution as a sort of sacred document, a civil religion, is stupid.

http://elections.us.reuters.com/

The problem is that's not the case. From the perspective of the Bush administration, stopping a North Korean nuclear test is not the top priority. Preserving the purity of conservative ideology is.

Sound familiar? It should. From Iraq, to Stem Cell research, to protecting the Constitution, to bipartisanship, to habeas corpus, everything... common sense, patriotism, science, human decency, the rule of law... all the building blocks not only of this nation but civilization itself, have been thrown out for the sake of protecting the purity of conservative ideology.

This is called insanity. And it is why all sane people- liberals, moderates, and conservatives, must now unite to take back our country ASAP!

Recently, this was pointed out about the posters at RedState:

Often I don't agree with what they have to say, but compared to LGF or drudge, several posters there are very intelligent, caring, and patriotic Americans. They just happen to be conservative republicans.

I agree, that RedState is a less shrill and more "caring" than the likes of LGF or drudge. No snark at all. So what do these relatively more caring conservative republicans have to say about the situation in Darfur? Surely they would not oppose intervention to stop a genocide? After all, that was the justification for the  ongoing War in Iraq, right??* All that stuff about how Saddam gassed the Kurds and killed millions weren't just convenient talking points, right???

I believe that similiarly, to understand why the Democrats will retake Congress this year--at least the House, you have to look at the long term nature of American politics and how that balance has been upset in recent years.

Russia's quiet and peaceful Karelia Republic became the center of massive riots and pogroms last weekend. Residents of the town of Kondopoga gathered on the town's square and smashed market stalls and cafes belonging to natives of the Caucasus. Three people were killed in the attacks.

Recently, members of the Bush administration have compared the GWOT to World War II, the Cold War, and the Civil War. The purpose of these comparisons is to convince the American people that the same basic dynamic, and thus the same basic solutions, are called for in the GWOT as were called for in these earlier struggles. I believe this is a mistake, and a grave one, arising out of one basic characteristic of the GWOT: In this 'war', the position and therefore the goals of the enemy are fundamentally different in nature from those of the enemy in the previous struggles referenced.

Traditionally, each side is fully in control of its own territory and seeks to damage the other as much as possible to gain advantage.

Of course the media picked up on this story as the girl in question was white and photogenic and so they naturally felt an opportunity for exploitation. The perpetrator, who has been convicted of assasult twice and spent three years in and out of prison for violating parole, is not the focus of the media's attention or anguish.

This incident was featured at least twice on Bill O'Reilly's show, both of which ultimately for the purpose of victim-blaming. While it hardly behoves falafel Bill to give him any notice, victim-blaming comes up so often in rape discussions and has been going on for so long that I wrote a long, awkward essay against it, for which I ask for your feedback.

The Bush administration will impose sanctions on two Indian firms for selling missile parts to Iran, government officials said yesterday, acknowledging privately that the secret decision should have been shared with the House before it voted this week to support U.S. plans to sell nuclear technology to New Delhi.

Like a petulant child hiding his report card from his parents, the White House has again showed how much it respects the representatives of the people... hmm don't you think they might want to know about this before agreeing to violate the 30-year old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty for a country whose firms might transfer the technology to Iran?

~[-1.12, -3.67]~

I assume this refers to the person's political compass score. The political compass is a model of a political spectrum designed to be

an alternative to the originally French one-axis (Left versus Right) model, that has been widely adopted over the past two centuries

The name comes from the website I linked, which features a questionnaire which will rate your political views on two axes: Economic (Left-Right) and Social (Authoritarian-Libertarian).

I try to ignore the Middle East. I really do. I wrote an essay on it back in 1998, when I was in 10th grade. The essay was well liked by my English teacher and won me a nomination to Who's Who in American High Schools, which I never followed up on.

In any case, after the whole Israeli Palestinian thing turned into a clusterfuck circa 2001, I decided to simply lose hope and stop caring. I never had a dog in this fight. But really the point of my 10th grade essay still stands, as far as can be told by myself.

Again the President has put special interests ahead of the national interest, a special interest which in turn puts the rights of cells against the needs of actual people.

But what was more disturbing was the syncophant manner this was covered by the AP article I read. I chose to do a brief quantitative analysis of the article.

The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.

The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.

There is just something that disturbs me about 4thepeople's diary. If the word nigger is so powerless, why write a diary defending it, and why do 1000 people respond? There's something deeper going on here.

Please, please please, follow me over the fold

While other countries-- not only Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Finland, Argentina, Israel and in pre-Republican times, Russia, China, France, and Spain-- but also nations whose independence is new, such as Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Turkey, and the Philippines, many with heavily Muslim, conservative populations, have?

First let me show why, when stripped of its glittering generalities, an argument solely about his so-called "Overton window" is simplistic, incomplete, and un-profound. Then I will expand on the point thereisnospoon beings to touch on, and lay out a specific but simple A--to--B strategy about how we can both move the dialogue to the left and win elections.