Month: June 2015

John James and Dale Olsen were both very unhappy with the Supreme Court decisions of the last couple of days. James provided a litany of America’s troubles (blaming them on Obama of course) without even mentioning the Reagan/Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, or seven years of Congressional obstruction. Olsen lamented the “damage. . . to our souls”. Both hinted at the election of 2016 being a kind of Armageddon for conservatism. Actually, the conservatism represented by these opinions doesn’t even have a soul. It has survived on a “them against us” ideology for decades, which has vigorously resisted every positive initiative and fostered nothing but negative obstructionism, prolonging the recession and putting America even further behind. The election of 2016 does, indeed, represent one last critical hope to avoid conservative control of all three branches of government: Congress, Supreme Court, and the presidency. Our next president will determine either the intensified polarization of the court, or a return to its Constitutionally-mandated impartiality for decades to come.

“Race made Reaganism possible”. So said Paul Krugman in a June 25, 2015, commentary. Previously, probably in 1962, when the country was finally waking up to the scourge of racism that had plagued the southern states since Reconstruction, southern whites needed a symbol to identify their resistance to the very notion of equality of the races, so they chose the Confederate battle flag. Previously, the flag had not been widely displayed except in museums. Then LBJ’s great Society was enacted and desegregation became the law of the land, but this “Great Society” was a set of laws that were never accepted by Southern whites. So, when Ronald Reagan came along with his anti-government message, here was the perfect champion for the cause of bigotry throughout the South. States that had been Democratic for generations suddenly became Republican and have remained so ever since, with “the flag” as a symbol of their determination to resist everything “federal”, and Ronald Reagan as their cheerleader. So the scourge of racism begat the scourge of Reaganism.

For Carly Fiorina to target the “female vote” assumes that women will vote for her because she is a woman. This assumption is probably no more valid in her case than it is for Hillary Clinton. The presidential election is not a gender war, and gender is certainly no assurance of fitness for this most high office. Fiorina’s belief that “American women are better served by conservative ideals” fails to account for the slim chance, extremely slim, that conservative politicians are likely ever to do anything of benefit to women. It is just not in their DNA.

{I strongly suggest that you publish the entire script, not a transcript, of the president’s eulogy for pastor Pinckney}
One need not become a “godder” or be “born again” to get religion, so to speak. You only need to accept that there is something unseen, unheard, but felt, that exerts a positive influence on the way people think and act. Even a confirmed atheist can sense it. No definition is needed, no ritual, no identifiable verbiage. It is just a feeling of connectedness with the rest of mankind. And seeing how the people of that Charleston church have reacted to an unspeakably horrible event inspires me to think a kind of “religion” will find its way into the hearts of many wouldn’t be caught dead in a regular church.