I have to agree with you, stonecutter. I am deeply ashamed and appalled that it has come to this. And having taught college students in that part of the country you will only fly over, I can verify, at least through my limited experience, that the oligarchy's assault on education (because a well-educated populace serves the interests of democracy, but not theirs) has worked out very well indeed. The young people I taught couldn't write and had no critical thinking skills, and indeed, many of them were bigots. One of them, I remember, refused to read the assigned Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, because he said it had nothing to do with him (!?*$#**!!*#*).

But apparently, even someone privileged like Pelosi, who has probably been educated in some of our best schools, also suffers from a complete lack of critical thinking skills!

Widespread idiocy makes heroes of the Limbaughs and the Hannitys, but she bends over backwards trying to accommodate their followers. It is stunning.

It is not "too big of a dick."

It is "too big a dick."

When it comes to grammar, you need to get all of your dicks in a row.

Sorry about that. I really just wanted to use my lame "dicks in a row" joke there.

These heinous clods write:

The initiation of judicial proceedings against individual Americans is too attractive a means of striking at the United States

Does it occur to these jackasses that they are talking about countries that, of all those across the globe, are the most culturally and politically aligned with us--countries whose philosophies provided us with the foundations of our government and laws and whose men and women made up a large part of our ancestry?

Does it occur to them that if our European friends are "striking" at the US, then maybe something is motivating them other than, say, hating us for our "freedoms"?

I guess the simple idea of justice is outside the field of vision for these two great thinkers, puffed up as they are by their proximity to imperial glory.

I have a friend in the biz.

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/8066/catchacheneyif4.jpg

Oh, please.

I took a quick look at Goldberg's main page on the Atlantic. His evaluations include these:

Glenn Greenwald is hysterical.

Chris Hedges is excitable.

but

David Gregory is deeply spiritual.

Goldberg just loves his BFF, David Gregory. Oh, if only Glenn and Chris could rise to the levels of decency and goodness evinced by that great truth seeker, David Gregory.

One thing we can credit the Roves of this world with giving us is a vast increase in linguistic confusion and a deliberate making into slippery signifiers of words such as progressive and liberal.

Back in the day, before I learned anything about Saussure's signifier and signified and the constant shifting between the two, I, and the people I knew, used progressive to indicate a viewpoint that was to the left of liberal.

But then Rove and Limbaugh and people of that ilk spent years shifting the meaning (in the US) of liberal from a term that referred to a political stance with a generally understood set of core values to a four-letter word, uttered with a sneer, that was redolent of all the unmanly qualities of cowardice, capitulation, and weak leadership.

Democrats became fearful of labeling themselves with the term, and then--what do you know!--we had Hillary Clinton, in the primaries, referring to herself as "not a liberal, but a progressive."

So it seems our old term progressive has been harnessed by corporatist "centrists" (oh man, yet another slippery signifier) as an appropriate label.

George Orwell tells us a lot about the political value of such slipperiness.

Do I dare to eat a peach is from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Where the narrator also says, "Do I dare to disturb the universe?"--which I think is probably the idea behind the allusion.

Who Moved My Cheese?

as it was created to persuade the workers that they need to learn to adapt to any and all bullshit that the fat cats throw at them.

This POV seems to be what a lot of these oppositional arguments really boil down to.

Good point. I think part of this comes from their discomfort with ambiguity. They have a tendency to look at knowledge as a fixed entity.

This aspect of their ideology is manifest in their educational policies--their backwards cookie-cutter approach to testing, etc. Critical thinking is not a valued outcome in their systems.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has lost its argument that a potential threat to national security should stop a lawsuit challenging the government's warrantless wiretapping program.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco on Friday rejected the Justice Department's request for an emergency stay in a case involving a defunct Islamic charity.

Yet government lawyers signaled they would continue fighting to keep the information secret, setting up a new showdown between the courts and the White House over national security.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, claimed national security would be compromised if a lawsuit brought by the Oregon chapter of the charity, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, was allowed to proceed.

Now, civil libertarians hope the case will become the first chance for a court to rule on whether the warrantless wiretapping program was legal or not. It cited the so-called state secrets privilege as a defense against the lawsuit.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/27/court-rejects-obama-bid-t_n_170690.html