The great writer, Thomas Frank, whose "What's the Matter With Kansas?" was an extremely insightful look at some of the complexities and contradictions of modern conservatism, has a new book out, "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule."

In the meantime, he's also got a terrific essay on this topic at Tomdispatch.com, and this part is worth reading more than once:

"...today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

"And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort -- a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the "virtue of selfishness" when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time."

Read the rest of it here.

Religion is a really stupid idea, all in all.

Here's proof:

http://www.reuters.com/arti...

Consider the record: the Bush Administration have proven incapable of rebuilding two countries the U.S. military damaged and occupied at the President's orders.

They not only couldn't rebuild an American city that nature (and the Army Corps of Engineers) damaged, but turned a natural disaster into a man-made catastrophe that has yet to end.

Aand, despite a supposed reputation for being the most disciplined, tough, and focused administration in memory, the Bush Administration has not ever reined in spending and in fact has grown the federal budget deficit to record levels.

The Bush Administration is apparently good at only three things: destruction, looting and getting re-elected.

The brilliant Tom Engelhardt has way more evidence.

This is from Daily Kos, who speaks far more eloquently than I could hope to:

"...the liberal "agenda," in a nutshell, is to ensure the greatest freedoms for the majority while also ensuring that the interests and freedoms of the minority are protected, whomever those minorities might be, when those minorities' ideas of personal freedom conflict with those of the majority."

Read the whole post, here.

Okay, the White House IT "experts" are either incompetent or lying. Which is it?

This IT-email expert points out the numerous problems with the story of the "missing" emails from the White House. He's also careful to point out that it's not necessarily a Bush administration problem...but that there are very troubling ramifications about White House/Administration IT protocol and procedures.

The White House says it can't produce those emails from 2003 to 2005 because either they're not missing--they just don't know exactly where they are--the computers they were on have been destroyed--but they don't say by whom--or--it's just too much work to find them.

Read the whole deal here.

This is a hoot.

Okay, so the Republicants have been criticizing the Rev. Wright for his sermonizing. Well, it's now come to light that...big surprise....individual sentences are being lifted from full sermons, and judgment passed on those selected sentences.

(Not that the con-servative artists would ever do such a thing as that. Heaven forbid.)

Read the whole story about 'God Damn America' here, and the story on '9/11' here.

The Rev. Wright sounds like a fine Christian man to me...one who might just upset the tables in the temple, and threaten the status quo. It's enough to make you convert.

This letter to the editor caught my eye. Let's analyze it so we can make some sense of it. First, here's the letter as it appeared in TBC:

Media creates 'crisis'

True it has cost us a lot of money and true, it has cost the lives of quite a few of our finest young men and a few women, too. Does anyone ever consider what several more attacks on our homeland would cost us, both in lives and material, the cost of reconstruction, etc.?

As for the economy: Are you or anyone at the paper suffering? I do not know of anyone personally who is! Much of this is due to the agenda of the media (liberal media) who hate President Bush and do everything possible to destroy him politically.

If you are honest, you have to agree that the events that have taken place in the world during Bush's administration have presented some of the most serious problems any president has had to face in quite some time! And many of the Democrats have voiced constant opposition to his policies which have shown them to be very un-American and anti-American.

Many of the Republicans today are acting like the Democrats of past years and most of the Democrats today are out-and-out socialists. Their planned actions, should they win the presidency, will mean many more regulations, more entitlement programs, higher taxes, less freedom and the continuation of the destruction of America as we know it today.

This sad state of affairs has been coming on the past 50 to 60 years and the liberal viewpoint of too many of our sick politicians is the reason. Liberalism is the "sickness" that is slowly but surely destroying what used to be a "Great America." Too many people are so poorly informed and uneducated regarding critical matters.

LYNN ANDERSON, Bakersfield

Okay, now let's put this the way it should have been written:

Bush Administration creates 'crisis'

While much fighting still occurs in Iraq, in a war we should never have started in the first place, we have not finished the job in Afghanistan and the Pakistan border, where we were right to have taken up arms against the Muslim extremists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Our invasion of Iraq has cost us a lot of money and the lives of quite a few of our finest young men and women. (Of course, it has cost the Iraqi people far more in lives lost, and most of them are innocent lives.) We have helped foster a breeding ground for terrorism and cost our sovereign nation untold damage in our reputation as our actions do not match up to our words.

Does anyone ever consider what several more attacks on our homeland would cost us, both in lives and material, the cost of reconstruction, etc.? Not that it matters that we still haven't rebuilt the World Trade Center, but I'm sure we could have rebuilt it several times over with the trillion dollars we've spent to date in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than six years after that horrendous tragedy.

As for the economy: it's very clear there are people at the paper suffering. I've seen several stories about less advertising revenue, staff cutbacks and now the outsourcing of the printing ot the Bakersfield Californian. I personally know a number of people who have suffered greatly under the ridiculous economic policies of this so-called chief executive. Unfortunately, he's mostly gotten a pass for seven lousy years from the so-called liberal media that seems to be practically in love with President Bush and have done nearly everything possible to keep him in office, including portraying John Kerry as a war criminal. As media outlets have been gobbled up in the wake of the relaxing of media ownership rules, and large corporations mostly control our media nowadays, it's damned difficult to find anythng true fom what used to be the mainstream media

If you are honest, you have to agree that one event that took place during Bush's administration presented him and his cronies with one of the biggest opportunities to lord over the American people, damage their civil liberties, destroy their economy and richly reward those who foolishly support him. He will be leaving some of the most serious problems any president has had to face in quite some time!

And, unfortunately, very few of the Democrats have voiced any opposition to his policies which have shown them to be very un-American and anti-American, as they have refused to stand up to the Republicans until the American people, in their good sense, began to take back their country in 2006. That helped, immensely, but there is stll much to be done.

Many of the Republicans today are finally acting like the Democrats of past years, showing good sense in supporting reasonable, sensible policies, and most of the Democrats today are finally caring about the people who elected them to represent their best interests. Their planned actions, should they win the presidency, will mean required, better regulations than the ones the Bush government has gutted, entitlement programs that work for the American people as promised, and higher taxes that will unfortunately be necessary to pay for the deficit generated by two terms of Bush.

Even better, we will have more freedom than that of the current administration, and the reconstruction of the America we want and love can begin, finally.

The  sad state of affairs perpetuated by the Bush Adminstration has been coming on the past 50 to 60 years and the sick politicians who have never adopted a liberal viewpoint is the reason this happened. Liberalism is the cure for the "sickness" known as conservatism that is slowly but surely destroying what used to be a "Great America."

Nooneisabovethelaw

Bakersfield

From Dr. Eric Alterman:

Today, the key question about Reagan remains not only unanswered but unasked: How did this childlike fantasist and friend of genocide convince a nation of reasonably intelligent, God-fearing and generally decent citizens to avert its eyes from the heart of darkness that beat beneath Ronald Reagan's congenial smile? And how did that same culture come to rhapsodize the same man today?

The rest of his post is here. If you're a Reagan fan, you won't like it. If you like the truth, you'll like it.

Michael Kinsley is also hard on the Gipper, and rightfully so. Facts have a liberal bias, you know.

When Reagan took office in 1981, federal receipts (taxes) were $517 billion and outlays (spending) were $591 billion, for a deficit of $73 billion. When he left office in 1989, taxes were $999 billion and spending was $1.14 trillion, for a deficit of $153 billion. As a share of the economy (the fairest measure), Reagan did cut taxes, from 19.6 percent to 18.4 percent, and he cut spending from 22.2 percent to 21.2 percent, increasing the deficit from 2.6 percent to 2.8 percent. The deficit went as high as an incredible 5 percent of GDP during Reagan's term. As a result, the national debt soared by almost two-thirds.

John McCain's stagy self-flagellation, on behalf of all Republicans, for betraying the Reagan Revolution when they controlled Congress and the White House at the beginning of this decade, is entirely misplaced. In fact, George W. Bush and the Republican Congress did precisely what Reagan did: They cut taxes, mainly on the well-to-do, but they barely touched spending.

If the Republicans are looking around for an icon to worship, they might consider Bill Clinton. He cut spending from 21.4 percent of GDP to 18.5 percent. That's three times as much as Reagan did. True, he raised taxes from 17.6 percent to 19.8 percent, but that's still a smaller chunk than the government was claiming when Reagan left office. And, of course, he left us with an annual surplus that threatened to eliminate the national debt.

Fascinating stuff about an upcoming petroleum rights auction:

"...the censoring of the Arctic report was typical of the actions of the White House. "It fits a pattern of downplaying, denying, and suppressing climate science at every turn. It's all part of the Bush-Cheney strategy of handing out as many fossil fuel entitlements as quickly as they can in their final months in office."

Full story is here.