GOOSE AND GANDER, DEEDLE AND DUM

Democrat Barack Obama is about to acquire all the omnipotent powers that conservatives relinquished to President Bush as part of his “war on terrorism.”

The power to

• arrest people, including Americans, as “enemy combatants.”

• Indefinite detention.

• Torture.

• Isolation and sensory deprivation.

• Rendition.

• Military tribunals.

• Denial of due process and trial by jury.

• Suspension of habeas corpus.

• Secret judicial proceedings.

• Use of hearsay and tortured testimony.

• Warrantless searches. '

• Signing statements.

• Spying on Americans. '

• The power to ignore constitutional and statutory constraints on presidential power.

• The power to invade and occupy foreign countries with no congressional declaration of war.

President Obama, the man they are convinced is coming to

• take away their guns,

• increase their taxes,

• spend more money than even President Bush,

• has ties to terrorists,

• has a Muslim name, and is

• friends with a radical Christian preacher,

will wield all the same dictatorial powers that they relinquished to President Bush.

WHICH WAY FORWARD

How will the GOP react to a multi-cultural, internationally-minded, pragmatic liberalism?

by ratcheting up the

• anti-gay, '

• prohibitionist,

• neo-racist paranoia

represented by Palin, Perkins, and the gang.

go back to the critique of

• of managed economies,

• of industrial policy,

• of debt and "progressive" taxation

that helped restore conservatism in the 1970s.

NEOCONS IN 2012

http://crooksandliars.com/node/24023

Petraeus will quit his job and turn into a full-on political machine. He's a darling of the right, and if you witnessed any of his briefings you know that he will love being in the limelight.








Darling of the Right? Would that it was that simple. Petraeus is a 100% certifiable, verifiable, Neoconservative. Can you imagine he and Netanyahu running the mid-east Caliphate?

WHY THE GOP LOST

The GOP lost because

• two unpopular wars,

• manifest corruption and

• managerial incompetence,

• a collapsed housing market that resulted in a 20-50 percent crash in the home values for most Americans, and

• a financial crisis that threatens world prosperity and

• has reduced the value of the average American’s stock portfolio by about 40 percent.

e.e. palin

Gah!

Nothing
(specific right now.)

Sitting here in these chairs
that
I’m
(going to be) proposing

BUT

in working with these governors who

(again on the front lines) are forced to

AND

it’s our privileged obligation
to find solutions
to the challenges facing our own states

(every day)

being held accountable,

NOT being just one of many
just casting votes
(or voting present every once
in a while, we don’t
get away with that.)

we have to
balance
budgets (we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets)

and tens of thousands of employees
in our organizations.

REGARDING BOB GATES

“(Huey P Long) would tell how patent medicine men used to concoct a mixture to sell to Negroes as a hair-straightener. The makers called it ‘high popalorum’ or ‘low popahirum,’ depending on how they manufactured it. They made the first by tearing the bark of a tree down, and the second by tearing the bark up. Governor Long said, “The only difference I’ve found in Congress between the Republican and Democratic leadership is that one of them is skinning us from the ankle up and the other from the ear down.”

Regarding Obama keeping Bob Gates on at Defense for some indeterminate period of time, Bob Gates is a Scowcroft guy and this signals the alliance between the Brent Scowcroft wing of the Republican Party - in foreign policy terms referred to as the "The Realists", and the Democrats - referred to as the "International Interventionists" Both groups are ditching the neoconservatives.

Scowcroft didn't endorse McCain and this wing of the Republican party sealed the deal when they had Colin Powell endorse Obama. Scowcroft has been an important player, far in the background and not for public consumption, in this political season. Chuck Hagel is very close to Scowcroft. He and Powell are close too. He's the guy who brings all this stuff together.

It's also worth knowing that Scowcroft has also been involved in a multi-year rearguard battle against the neocons in the Bush administration. He famously published an editorial in the WSJ against the war in Iraq prior to the invasion and he has been involved in key efforts to block sundry wars with Iran, etc.

Obama's Gates' decision is a clear and unambiguous signal of this de facto alliance with the Scowcroft/GOP foreign policy world.

The Old Establishment Republicans, main street Republicans, country club Republicans, secular Republicans the Rockefeller Republicans and the much of the Goldwater Republicans have ditched the crazies - the Neocons and the Palenites. They have no choice, the Party and the country is bankrupt.

Obama has moved to the right to facilitate this new American political alliance and quite possibly a new politcal party. The Palenites will go the way of the Know Nothing Party of the 1840-50's

The false dichotomy which is the American two party system and other similar political arrangements (Venezuela, for example) collapse into the singular entity which they really are in times of crisis. The foreign policy, economic and political elites of this country are rapidly approaching the mother of all crisis'and must circle the wagons. Partisanship and ration cards are a bad mix.

Times like these provide a unique and rare opening for a real left-wing political alternative to arise against the two-winged US Property Party. Of course, it also provides a rare opening for a real fascist alternative.

PALIENATION

from Andrew Sullivan

The Palin nightmare also happened because a tiny faction of political professionals has far too much sway in the GOP and conservative circles. This was Bill Kristol's achievement.

It was a final product of the now-exhausted strategy of fomenting fundamentalist resentment to elect politicians dedicated to the defense of Israel and the extension of American military hegemony in every corner of the globe. Palin was the reductio ad absurdum of this mindset: a mannequin candidate, easily controlled ideologically, deployed to fool and corral the resentful and the frightened, removed from serious scrutiny and sold on propaganda networks like a food product.

This deluded and delusional woman still doesn't understand what happened to her; still has no self-awareness; and has never been forced to accept her obvious limitations. She cannot keep even the most trivial story straight; she repeats untruths with a ferocity and calm that is reserved only to the clinically unhinged; she has the educational level of a high school drop-out; and regards ignorance as some kind of achievement. It is excruciating to watch her

BROTH OF SHOE

We live at the end of the second Robber Baron age. The first Robber Baron age ended October 29, 1929. That economic system was referred to as "Liberalism".

The current Robber Baron age started September 11, 1973 when the CIA murdered Salvador Allende in Chile and Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics began the rape of the Chilean economy. Since that time, no economy has been spared and now it is our turn. In our era the economic system is referred to as "Neo-Liberalism" most everywhere in the world. In the US it is called Reaganomics, Thatcherism, Supply-side economics or Trickle-down economics.

The man who codified Liberalism, which is really nothing more than unregulated capitalism, was Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations.

One of the hallmarks of "(Neo)-Liberalism" is unregulated markets. According to theory, unregulated markets allow Adam Smith's "invisible hand" to operate and thus maximize wealth and economic well-being for all.

What unregulated markets do, in fact, is create wild, uncontrolled speculative bubbles. This is the perfect environment for sharks to operate. They borrow virtually unlimited and unregulated money and use that money to blow the bubble up. The mania of the bubble eventually gets everyone invested. When the last sucker is in, the bubble begins to burst. The sharks not only get their cash out - which is really your cash - but they sell short which drives the decline further, faster and deeper. Markets crash, wealth disappears.

If I am not mistaken, the first bubble of our era was the dot.com bubble engineered by the Bill Clinton administration. Many of those bubble engineers are currently on Obama's short list.

Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations is a fraud for many reasons but lets start at the top - competition. Smith posits that in every market there are millions of competitors, non who are able to control the market. This is not true. There are not, for example, million of farmers, there is an oligarchy. Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, ConAgra, Monsanto. Every market has its own oligarchy. The first thing they do is get rid of competition. The second thing they do is buy a Senator from Illinois who sells out our major food crop to them for ethanol production and then gives them huge handouts (subsidies from the public purse) for their trouble.

Even if you have a brand new idea and a brand new market and you find a Venture Capitalist, the VC guys always ask this: "What are the barriers to entry for potential competitors?" The Grail they were seeking, you see, is quite simply monopoly. Competition is for losers.

Thomas Edison made this fact perfectly clear in a statement to the New York Times in 1892, explaining why he sold out to GE. "New stuff selling for ordinary hardware prices, due to competition. Not getting as big a return as I'd like". Bill Gates is the example for our era.

The Adam Smith Wealth of Nations Reaganesque myth/hustle is ever thus: risk-taking; self-made; beholden to no one; bold; unafraid of possible failure; eager to compete on the level playing field, may the best man win, et cetera, et cetera -- one has heard all this dribble a million times. This is a lie.

The Reality: they hate competition worse than the plague, and when they fail, they run to the government for a handout.

And the government, with both halves having been bought out long ago, feels their pain with the public purse which you, the working class, will replenish with your taxes.

And now we find yet another industry mis-managed by greedy, self serving individuals seeking profit by building environment-destroying, gas-guzzling SUV's which is now seeking taxpayer money to rescue themselves from the folly of their ways, not so they can produce a social product with true utility, but so they can first of all, pay themselves outrageous bonuses and then continue doing what they have always done.

Since we are going to buy it, then we own it, and the only rational thing to do is nationalize that bullshit, re-tool the assembly lines and manufacture buses, trains and the construction vehicles needed to re-build our nation's infrastructure. Throw out management and let democratically-run worker's councils to manage the industry.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on, class analysis is knowing who is there with you.

TRADITIONALIST VERSUS REFORMERS

David Brooks lays it out. Brooks tells us that the Traditionalists win for the near term future.

• Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists.

• Republicans from the coasts and the upper Midwest are largely gone.

• Traditionalists have the institutions. Over the past 40 years, the Conservative Old Guard has built up a movement of activist groups, donor networks, think tanks and publicity arms.

• not yet an effective Republican Leadership Council to nurture modernizing conservative ideas.

• There is no moderate Club for Growth, supporting centrist Republicans.

• Any publication or think tank that headed in an explicitly reformist direction would be pummeled by its financial backers.

Finally, Traditionalists own the conservative mythology.

• small, heroic movement marching bravely from the Heartland into belly of the liberal elite.

• anybody who deviates toward the center, is a coward, and a sellout.

The Traditionalists

• GOP strayed from the true creed.

• George W. Bush was a big-government type

• John McCain was a Republican moderate

G.O.P. should return to its core ideas:

• Cut government,

• cut taxes,

• restrict immigration.

• Rally behind Sarah Palin.

Major voices are

• Rush Limbaugh and

• Sean Hannity

Plus an alliance of Old Guard institutions

• Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform,

• Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and

• Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Traditionalists are pleased that the election wiped out some of the party’s remaining moderates

The Reformer

The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government.

• The Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety.

• They tend to take global warming seriously.

• They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party.

Conservatives have to

• appeal more to Hispanics,

• independents and younger voters.

• They cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West Coasts.

The Reformist view is articulated most fully by books, such as

• “Comeback” by David Frum and

• “Grand New Party” by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam,

as well as the various writings of people like

• Ramesh Ponnuru,

• Yuval Levin,

• Jim Manzi,

• Rod Dreher,

• Peggy Noonan and,

• at the moderate edge, David Brooks

TOO BIG TO STEAL

"WELCOME TO THE WHITE HOUSE, BARACK. IS THAT THE NATIVE HAT OF YOUR PEOPLES?"

"DO YOU MEAN THIS ISNT THE NEW MAID?"

MILITARY KEYNESIANISM

• US defense spending rose 72% over the course of the Bush Administration, from $381 billion in 2000 to $671 billion in 2008.

• President-elect Obama is expected to continue that trend, as he has vowed to increase the size of the military’s ground forces.

• Secretary Gates sees it as a bargain, if anything, compared to the $700 billion “stimulus” package pushed through last month, saying “If you want to talk about a stimulus package, the defense budget’s not bad and obviously a lot of jobs around the country depend” on military spending.

THIS IS WHAT I ALWAYS PRAY, I'M LIKE, OK, GOD,

“You know, I have -- faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator's hands -- this is what I always do. I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it's cracked up a little bit, maybe I'll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don't let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door.”

BY 8 MILLION VOTES

What with fishy business in Alaska, Georgia and elsewhere, it is worth noting that despite any and all shenanigans, Barack Obama's lead has now pretty much hit eight million votes over the hapless John McCain.

As of a 11:45pm EST Saturday update at CNN, the popular vote stands at

Obama 65,425,954

McCain 57,426,297

for a lead of 7,999,657

UNPACKING PALIN, PICKING ON PALIN, PALINALIA

from Mark Lilla, THE PERILS OF POPULIST CHIC



John McCain's choice was ... the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.

[during the last] 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. [t]heir function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself.

AFTER EIGHT LONG YEARS, REPUBLICANS ARE VOTED OUT

TERRORIST FOREHEAD BUMP

TWO PARTY

"The two parties have combined against us to nullify our power by a ‘gentleman's agreement' of non-recognition, no matter how we vote ... May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either the Republican or the Democratic Parties." -- W.E.B. DuBois (1922)






"[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."







“(Long) would tell how patent medicine men used to concoct a mixture to sell to Negroes as a hair-straightener. The makers called it ‘high popalorum’ or ‘low popahirum,’ depending on how they manufactured it. They made the first by tearing the bark of a tree down, and the second by tearing the bark up. Governor Long said, “The only difference I’ve found in Congress between the Republican and Democratic leadership is that one of them is skinning us from the ankle up and the other from the ear down.”





Now Obama of course was not my first choice, any real ideas and serious candidates for true change were as usual ostracized by the movers and shakers of our corrupt two party dictatorship that serves to protect the oligarchy and the warfare state. Hell, the truth is that I was seriously contemplating sitting this one out entirely just to make a political statement, then I was going to vote for Nader or Cynthia McKinney until the idiots in charge of the McCain campaign decided to put that phony homespun moron Sarah Palin on the ticked rather than someone with a clue just to appease the blood sucking parasites that are the GOP base. - Ed Encho

PROP HATE

Oppression is oppression, whether on grounds of skin-color or sexual orientation or national origin, isn't it? Neither condition is "voluntary."

...impose their form of religious bigotry (what else to call it when the oppressors reach for Biblical justifications for their outrages?)

IT WAS A PETER WATKINS FILM

And yet, I find this election campaign to have been an impressive testament to post-modernism's limits. The post-modern candidate was Palin:

• a hologram of cultural resentments,

• crafted to win votes through image, propaganda and untruth.

And yet we saw right through it. Fact mattered in the end, didn't it? And truthiness finally lost.- Andrew Sullivan


You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time

-Abraham Lincoln

THE THREE MOST CRITICAL TIMES IN THE HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY

..

..

NEOCON FUTURE

from Matthew Yglesias

The author of "The Contract on America" or The Alaskan Babe

[T]he view is that Gingrich offers a “constant stream of ideas, an important commodity in a party that appears to have run short of ideas during the Bush years.”



I’m not really sure how key ideas are to conservative political revival. But what Gingrich offers doesn’t really qualify as ideas. Instead, call them “ideas.” Instead of thinking about ways to solve problems in people’s lives, Gingrich is good at offering ways to package predetermined special-interest priorities as solutions to things that arise. As an opposition gambit, I think this probably works fine. It’s good for raising money, so it ensures that you can stay in the game. And it gives you talking points to go on TV with. Eventually the governing party will screw up, and in you’ll come. But at the same time, the considerable shortcomings to this approach as a governing philosophy is precisely what brought the GOP to this point — it leads to catastrophic screw-ups that prompt massive public disapproval.

MEDIA REFORM, ZAPATISTAS AND RAHM EMANUEL

According to the Media Reform Information Center nearly 100% of the news being reported to you is controlled by just 5 huge International corporations!

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly.



In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.

They decide virtually everything in your life…whom to vote for, whom to vote against, what to buy, what not to buy…and on, and on, and on. They have an agenda, you are not it.



One reason we were given a choice this year is because there is a major war in the US Oligarchy, the Neoconservatives supported by Murdoch's News Corporation versus the "Old Establishment" supported by General Electric's NBC.

In a future World there will no doubt be many history books written about how these 5 corporations were able to direct the lives of over 300 million American people while overseeing their total destruction.

This year huge numbers of people were motivated by the ideas of hope and change. They voted for things like the end of warfare and social and economic development. They did not vote for Rahm Emanuel, Jane Harman and Dennis Ross. Jane Harman is in line for Homeland Security and Dennis Ross is in line for chief architect of a looming Iranian War. The only one missing is Steny Hoyer. These are the Neoconservatives in the Democratic Party. The only difference between them and the Neoconservatives in the Republican Party is that they can take us to total war quicker and smarter while making us even dumber.



The American public opinion has been roused from its slumber. It knows how to get its information from sources other than the corporate media. It must not be lulled back to sleep.

Al Giordano, long time Subcommandante Marcos and Zapatista chronicler returned from Mexico to chronicle Barack Obama's presidential campaign and has one of the few websites that explicitly recognizes the above stated fact, see here. This may seem an odd combination, but Subcommandante Marcos and Barack Obama are both organizers in the Saul Alinsky model, as is our own local ACT (Allied Communities of Tarrant County). Giordano, obviously, sees similarities between the two and sees Barack Obama as a solution for the problems of the citizens of the United States. Subcommandante Marcos is about helping the Mayan Indians take back their lives, their economy, and their country, he would never place someone like Rahm Emanuel is a position of power. The cynicism is striking.

It was Rahm Emanuel who created our current NAFTA/Neoliberal/ supply-sider/ trickle-down economic nightmare and as an unintended consequence, the very Zapatista movement for which Giordano became famous following around in the jungles of the Yucatan and the mountains of Chiapas.



Al Giordano has a complete and ingenious rationalization for the Rahm Emanuel pick, see here.

I fervently hope Giordano is right, I bet he's not.

25 PEOPLE IN A FIVE-BLOCK RADIUS OF TOM FRIEDMAN'S OFFICE

It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.

THE CYNICISM WAS TOO DEEP, TOO STUPID, TOO OBVIOUS

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy. - Peggy Noonan

An empty vessel designed to

• activate the right-wing Christian nut base and

• capture the votes of disaffected Hillary feminists and working-class single mothers, and

• make the male Reagan Democrats vote with their fantasy instead of their brain

AMERICA'S CRIMSON STAIN

Counties that got bluer and counties that got redder since Bush 2004

REPUBLICANNIBALS

They waited a while, hoping it might work, but we're now seeing a tsunami of old-school Republicans endorsing Obama. The tragic truth - that their old Republican Party has been taken over in a secret bloodless coup by the Christian Zionists - has finally hit home (the comment thread on my original posting is one of the wildest - not to mention longest - ever, consisting of a discussion of the "the famous BRZEZINSKI SOROS FACTION" - ! - for which I am apparently covering, and back pain health advice). Don't feel sorry for them: they made their deal with the devil in order to obtain the votes they couldn't get as their policies were so far from the class interests of 95% of the voters. Poor old McCain - who didn't even know Palin when they selected her for him - is left with the sinking realization that she is not even campaigning for him, she is campaigning as a future talk-show host, Senator (she'll re-take the seat that the crooked and convicted Ted Stevens is about to lose), and, eventually, Christian Zionist President of the United States (or so they wish). Isn't it curious that the culmination of the destruction of Barry Goldwater's Republican Party occurs on the watch of John McCain, who was practically Goldwater's adopted son?

A very big Republican loss would be very good for the United States, not because the Democrats will be much better (they won't), but because it will entail a complete reevaluation by the old-school Republicans of the fundamental nature of their party, and the forced removal of the Christian fruitcakes from mainstream American politics.

THIRD WORLD STANDARDS

Without factoring in the whole American electoral process, which barely meets the standards of any self-respecting third world country;

• networks calling the elections before all states close their polls, (against the law in Canada),

• paperless unverifiable votes,

• Repugnant disenfranchisement of poor, young, black and frequent-mover voters, and

• hacked computer tabulating programs; and also,

• the media going on about the "Bradley effect" and

• some faked opinion polls showing McCain almost even with Obama,

JEB REGARDING GEORGE

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said the party should take four primary steps:

• show no tolerance for corruption,

• practice what it preaches about limiting the scope of government (“There should not be such a thing as a Big-Government Republican”),

• stand for working families and small business,

• and embrace reform.

TALKING LIKE A MEXICAN PRESIDENT

I was at my sushi bar tonight talking with the chef and long time friend, a young greencarder from Zacatecas. This young man carries a sadness with him that is measured in the miles from his family's "rancho", his face lights up when he talks about the washing machines and Nissans that he sends back home to Zacatecas.

In our "Obama" conversation, he finally said, "Obama talks like a Mexican president, that kind of talk is the reason why I am here". Bingo! Obama stalks the land with two empty buckets, hope and change. Their emptiness is part of the hustle. You fill the buckets. Well, now the talk is over. We will soon know if he delivers like a Mexican president.

HOW OBAMA SPLIT THE EVANGELICAL VOTE

I am somewhat surprised to see evangelical bishop T.D. Jakes, 51, providing political analysis on MSNBC on election night.

He founded The Potter's House, a 30,000 member church in Dallas, Texas, a non-denominational mega-church.

He said things like this during the evening,

Our national demographic has metamorphosed into a darker-hued population, which is changing how America plans for the future. The cultural dialogue and language are changing. Political parties, churches and corporations must rethink how we go forward and with whose needs in mind. Without question, Obama's Administration will reshape the good-ole-boys' club we have seen for centuries, altering the political terrain, and it may very well spawn new hope for the disenfranchised.

Half way through the evening I found myself thinking that GE was trying to create a kinder and gentler replacement for James Dobson


James Dobson in his letter from 2012 says,

“In 2008 many evangelicals thought that Senator Obama was an opportunity for a ‘change,’ and they voted for him. They simply did not realize Obama’s far-left agenda would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently…[allowing] the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression.”

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, says,

"The important evangelical vote this time is the black church. Black churches are evangelical. They’re voting overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. The most important evangelical vote is the black evangelical vote, not the white evangelical vote. When we talk about the evangelical vote, you’ve gotta talk about evangelicals of color.

GARY HART

The nation is fed up with neoconservative imperialists, radical fundamentalists, and failed supply-siders.

There have been five large governing ideas in American history: the Founders created a federated republic on an unprecedented scale; Jefferson believed in a transcontinental nation; Lincoln asserted national unity over state's rights; Roosevelt established a national community; and Truman confirmed that security was international in scope.

538.com

BIBLE SPICE

"You know if there is a role in national politics, it won't be so much partisan,"
"My efforts have always been here in the state of Alaska to get everybody to unite and work together, It certainly would a uniter type of roll"

She added that she's only interested in uniting the "real America" or "pro-America type areas" that love Jesus.

Regarding regrets, "...more hours in the day so we could've gotten around to more areas of our country.


The state of journalism today, the world, for the blogosphere, the 2-3-hour news cycles, where just too much is reported based on gossip and innuendo and things taken out of context, I'd like to help in that effort also because I have great respect for the world for journalism."

Paraphrasing Gerald Ford

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.

As we bind up the internal wounds of (the Bush/Cheney administration), more painful and more poisonous than those of (any other time in our history), let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.

A NEW MIDDLE

[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." - Gore Vidal

In recent years the GOP has become a party in which a right wing foreign policy elite has manipulated the voting power of a "base" increasingly made up of small town, rural, white, faith driven activists oriented towards "issues of conscience" such as; abortion, gay marriage, gun control, etc.

The neocon and nativist/rural factions of the Republican Party may be too deeply entrenched in power to be removed from control.

The more tantalising question is whether the rise of the Obamacons signals a lasting political realignment. In 1980 the rise of the neocons—liberal intellectuals
who abandoned a spineless Democratic Party—was reinforced by the birth of working class “Reagan Democrats”.

LIBERTARIAN WING

Andrew Sullivan
David Friedman
Scott Flanders
Andrew Bacevich

The biggest brigade in the Obamacon army consists of libertarians, furious with Mr Bush’s big-government conservatism, worried about his commitment to an open-ended “war on terror”, and disgusted by his cavalier way with civil rights.

And it's not just blogger Andrew Sullivan. Milton and Rose Friedman's son, David, is
signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father's cause. Friedman is convinced of Obama's sympathy for school vouchers

Scott Flanders, the CEO of Freedom Communications--the company that owns The Orange County Register--told a company meeting that he believes Obama will accomplish the paramount libertarian goals of withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the Patriot Act.

They believe that he has surrounded himself with pragmatists, some of whom (significantly) come from the University of Chicago.

You can find similar sentiments coursing through the Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich's seminal Obamacon manifesto in The American Conservative. He believes that the war in Iraq has undermined the possibilities for conservative reform at home.

In nearly every quarter of the movement, you can find conservatives irate over the Iraq war--a war they believe transgresses core principles.

NEOCONS

Francis Fukuyama
Kenneth Adelman

But the army has many other brigades, too: repentant neocons such as Francis Fukuyama, Kenneth Adelman, who once described the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk”, decided this week to vote for Mr Obama mainly because he regards Sarah Palin as “not close to being acceptable in high office”.

Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative theorist, recently told an Australian journalist that he would reluctantly vote for Obama to hold the Republican Party
accountable "for a big policy failure" in Iraq. And he seems to view Obama as the best means for preserving American power, since Obama "symbolizes the ability of the
United States to renew itself in a very unexpected way."


NATIONAL REVIEW

Jeffrey Hart
Wick Allison
Larry Hunter

it has even penetrated National Review, the intellectual anchor of the conservative movement. There's Jeffrey Hart, who has been a senior editor at the magazine since
1968 and even wrote a history of the magazine, The Making of the American Conservative Mind; and Wick Allison, who once served as the magazine's publisher.

Professor Emeritus Hart can be described as an Obamacon, in his past, he worked for conservatives as prominent as former President Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley.
As former President Nixon’s speechwriter, Professor Hart wrote Nixon’s famous “Law and Order” speech.


Take Larry Hunter, who helped put together the economics passages in the Contract with America and served as chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
He concedes that Obama is saying the wrong things on taxes but dismisses it as electioneering. Of far greater importance, in Hunter's view, is that Obama has the
potential to "scramble the political deck, break up old alliances, and bring odd bedfellows together in a new coalition." And, what's more important, he views the
Republican Party as a "dead, rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of Weekend at Bernie's, handcuffed
to a corpse." Unless the Republican Party is thoroughly purged of its current leadership, Hunter fears that it "will pollute the political environment to toxic
levels and create an epidemic that could damage the country for generations to come."


POLITICIANS/FAMOUS PEOPLE

Colin Powell
Chuck Hagel
Susan Eisenhower
CC Goldwater
Christopher Buckley
Douglas Kmiec
Michael Smerconish
Megan McArdle
Christopher Hitchens
William Weld
Gov. Arne Carlson, MN


Their ranks, though growing, feature few famous people. But looming on the horizon are two big potential Obamacons: Colin Powell and Chuck Hagel. Mr Powell is now a four-star general in America’s most surprising new army: the Obamacons. a Republican senator from Nebraska and one-time bosom buddy of Mr McCain has also flirted heavily with the movement, though he has refrained from issuing an official endorsement.

Reports listing additional Obamacons do not add up to tides of conservative Republicans leaving their party. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker
is a Democrat who entered government in the Kennedy administration.

Susan Eisenhower, grand-daughter of the Republican President and great general, who introduced Mr Obama at the Democratic National Convention, has also explained: Why I'm Backing Obama - WP.

CC Goldwater has a piece up on HuffPost. I know that, strategically and politically, nothing trumps the Powell endorsement. But there is a lot in her piece which bears repeating: Being Barry Goldwater's granddaughter and living in Arizona, one would assume that I would be voting for our state's senator, John McCain.

Christopher Buckley, the son of the conservative icon William Buckley, who complains that he has not left the Republican Party: the Republican Party has left him.

legal scholars such as Douglas Kmiec, and conservative talk-show hosts such as Michael Smerconish. And it is picking up unexpected new recruits as the campaign
approaches its denouement. Many disillusioned Republicans hoped that Mr McCain would provide a compass for a party that has lost its way, but now feel that the compass has gone haywire.

Megan McArdle has been voicing support for Obama on her blog, endorsing him on Super Tuesday.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and
socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship.On a related note, former Massachusetts governor William Weld has just endorsed Obama. Because of his tolerant stances on abortion, gay rights, and medical marijuana, Weld was hyped in the early '90s as a libertarian Republican. As he swelled the state budget and passed new regulations, he started to look more like an old-fashioned liberal Republican instead.

On Thursday, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson endorsed Obama at the state capitol. “I think we have in Barack Obama the clear possibility of a truly great president,” he said. “I would contend that it’s the most important election of my lifetime.”

BUSH ADMINISTRATION

Scott McClellan, a former spokesman for President George W. Bush, also endorsed Obama Thursday. USA Today reported that McClellan told CNN in a taping to be
aired this weekend that Obama has “the best chance of changing the way Washington works.”

REAGAN ADMINISTRATION

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor and former Solicitor General in the Reagan administration, to the list of Republicans supporting Obama.

In a surprising rebuff of an old friend, former White House chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein said today he was abandoning his support of John McCain and instead
would back Barack Obama for president.

Duberstein, who worked for President Ronald Reagan, told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that his vote was influenced by another good friend, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

This dashboard map is based on the Real Clear Politics poll averages from Sunday night. If America's vote mirrors these polls, Obama would get 353 electoral votes

(Note: A new poll out overnight moves North Carolina's poll average to an exact tie, putting Obama's total at 338 Monday morning.)

THE GEORGE WALLACE WING OF THE PARTY

Sarah, I love you for having revealed unto the media the snarling heart of the beast that is the base (and the soul) of the Republican Party. Yes, you have the lipstick and the heels, not to mention the calves and bosoms, that send Republican men into swoons, but you have more; the pit-bull snarl that rouses your supporters to cry out, “Traitor!” against Obama, and “Kill him!”

...George Bush kept those folks in their kennels

...But now the beast is loose.

...The Republican Party freed the slaves ... The Democratic Party became the party of segregation in the South and the second home of the Klu Klux Klan.

...Lyndon Johnson is the pivotal figure, ...he knew that if he pushed through the Civil Rights Act his party would lose the South for a generation.

...The Republicans saw their opportunity. They pursued the Southern Strategy, wooing resentful whites with great success.

...That pillar of the Republican Party is crumbling.

...Along came John McCain.

...Not quite capable of running as a true Know Nothing himself, he chose someone who could: Sarah Palin. She does it well, and in so doing, shows us, clearly and simply, who they really are.