How much trouble is America in? A lot.

Two more editorials describe the current state of American politics and its economic ramifications.

1. Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt Here Paul Krugman points to the idiocy of Standard and Poors senseless downgrading of the US treasury debt. It should be noticed that the international stock markets have been all over the map since they opened Monday, and where did money looking for safety and security go? To US treasury debt.
2. The Bad Deal University of Texas professor James K. Gailbraith points out that Obama is not only not a Progressive, he is in fact a conservative who is working league with the American conservatives and with the Pete Peterson Foundation to destroy the American middle class and the two programs that support it most, Social Security and Medicare.

Compare these two well-written editorials with the one Tom Friedman wrote about America's slow decline and you can see that America is in real trouble.

Finding bin Laden - Torture failed but people with a dogmatic mindset still want it used.

Steve Benen has brought together several excellent sources who each clearly disprove the effort by Republicans to claim that the Bush-authorized torture (euphemism - "enhanced interrogation") got the information that led to Sunday's successful raid on bin Laden's Pakistani compound.

Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, threw cold water on the new talking point yesterday, noting that Bush-era torture policies weren't responsible for obtaining the information.

The Associated Press further set the record straight, reporting, "Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation."

Brian Beutler added, "Thus, a big chunk of the rationale for giving the Bush credit for bin Laden's death falls apart. It took officials until Obama's presidency to locate this courier, and well into Obama's second year in office before they found the compound. Only then was the raid itself designed and, on Sunday, implemented."

Joan McCarter has more on this, offering an even more detailed debunking of the argument.

I especially like the fact that Donald Rumsfeld is one of the people stating that torture did not work. My opinion of him increases a little.

I have been trying to understand why the conservatives and fundamentalists as groups are so dead set that torture is the only way to get good information from their worst and presumably most evil enemies. My conclusion is that members of those groups suffer from a dogmatic mindset. They are so certain they are correct that they refuse to listen to facts or objections. Anyone who opposes what they "know" to be true must be evil and plotting to thwart them.

The only reason I can recognize for someone to torture someone else to get information (other than pure sadism) is because the victim of torture is not saying what the torturer wants to hear. The torturers have a dogmatic mindset which refuses to accept that they, the torturers, might be somehow wrong. It is impossible for the dogmatic individuals to consider themselves wrong, so being wrong is not a part of their decision process. Since the torturers cannot be wrong the victims must be. The victims "must" have another, malicious or evil, intent to thwart the actions of the torturers since they cannot be right and contradict the torturers.

"Knowing" that you are right and assuming the victim is saying otherwise simply to thwart the torturer for some presumed malicious purpose of their own (an evil person, in other words.) justifies extreme measures of all kinds to get the recalcitrant evil people to comply. Only facts can prevent such extremism and by definition a dogmatic person rejects contrary facts.

It all comes back to a dogmatic mindset which is very characteristic of fundamentalists (usually religious but includes many libertarians), members of the wealthy social classes who fear losing their wealth because the lower classes take it from them, and conservatives (usually older) who do not want to see the old social order changed.

The fundamentalist - conservative mindset.

Steve Benen asked an interesting question about conservatives. "What did the unemployed ever do to offend the GOP this much?"It's part of the mindset of conservatives and religious fundamentalists. To them everything that happens occurs because someone intended it to happen. To them there are no unintended social forces!

If something bad happens to you it is because you did something to cause it to happen to you. People are not unemployed because there are no jobs. They are unemployed because they don't want to work. Blacks are not kept from getting jobs and held back from promotions. They don't want to work hard enough. Steve lists a number of other such statements from conservatives. This is not something that some crazy person says. It is a core part of both American conservative politics and Christian fundamentalist religion.

And if you cannot observe someone who caused the Earthquake - tsunami in Japan then it occurred because someone wanted it to. The need to personalize this malevolent intent is the source of the god symbol. That symbol represents the great "intender" who must exist when no single person can be blamed for their failings.

Very interestingly these individual guilty parties are always someone outside the conservative - fundamentalist tribal group. They can directly observe that those inside their personal tribal group did nothing to cause many of the bad things that happen to them.

Obviously, though, people who cause their own problems will not stop causing their own problems unless they are punished. God forbid that someone ("the government") should help them avoid the just punishment they are being given for their sins. Helping them will just encourage them.

It's a part of the pre-scientific mindset. Before Isaac Newton there were no recognized absolutely predictably impersonal forces. Everything happened because some person or god intended it to happen.

If you want to understand the conservative - fundamentalist mindset, read "Fundamentalism" by the Sociologist Steve Bruce (2000). That fact about there being no recognized impersonal forces prior to Newton is from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's great new book "The Grand Design." (2010) Warning - the latter is a superb layman's introduction to quantum theory. It's better than "A Brief History of Time."

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Addendum 3:54 PM
Fred is a commenter on the above referenced Steve Benen post. His take on the problem Republicans have with the unemployed dove-tails with mine. Mine shows personal psychology and his shows the sociological workings.

It's not hostility to unemployment, it's hostility to modernity. I see this attitude in the rural area where I live. The best work is for the "haves", the make-do work is for the lower class whites, and the field work is for minorities. By trying to preserve their income level after a job loss, the recently-unemployed are interfering with the natural order, resisting the downward pressure on wages that the GOP's true base seeks. Also, too, the current system imports what should be our home-grown bonded servant class.

The tragedy is that the lower class whites here go all in for this, and wear their difficult lifestyles as a badge of honor in proof of their grit. To see the class system in operation, visit anywhere outside a major city in the Old South.
Posted by: Fred on May 1, 2011 at 1:14 PM

If you want proof of Fred's assertion, look at the county-by-county Democrat/Republican breakdown after the 2000 election. The cities are the bastion of modernity, voting Democratic and the rural areas are Republican. This is especially true in the Old South states and Texas.

The beginnings of an explanation of the tea party as innately American right wing

Rick Perlstein gave the keynote speech at a Berkley conference in October. His subject was the tea party in American political history. Here it is, and it is superb.

I suggest you take notes as you listen.

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Addendum 2:41 PM CST
Also, go read Paul Rosenberg's excellent essay on Oligarchy and party breakdown. Rick Perlstein' talk, above, puts it into an interesting perspective.

What is happening in America politically today may not be an echo or reprise of things that have happened in the past. We may be headed into all new political territory, territory which has previously been explored by nations like Argentina.

Those crazy right-wingers cannot be convinced they are wrong merely by facts

Lane Wallace reports on a study by a group of researchers from Northwestern University, UNC Chapel HIll, SUNY Buffalo and Millsaps College into the problem of Motivated Reasoning. How often have we liberals complained that the right-wing knows the outcome they want and tailor the collection of facts and analysis to achieve the outcome desired before they started? This seems to be the explanation.

How is it that people can cling to an opinion or view of a person, event, issue of the world, despite being presented with clear or mounting data that contradicts that position? The easy answer, of course, is simply that people are irrational. But a closer look at some of the particular ways and reasons we're irrational offers some interesting food for thought.

In a recently published study, a group of researchers from Northwestern University, UNC Chapel HIll, SUNY Buffalo and Millsaps College found that people often employ an approach the researchers called "motivated reasoning" when sorting through new information or arguments, especially on controversial issues. Motivated reasoning is, as UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman put it, the equivalent of policy-driven data, instead of data-driven policy.

In other words, if people start with a particular opinion or view on a subject, any counter-evidence can create "cognitive dissonance"--discomfort caused by the presence of two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at once. One way of resolving the dissonance would be to change or alter the originally held opinion. But the researchers found that many people instead choose to change the conflicting evidence--selectively seeking out information or arguments that support their position while arguing around or ignoring any opposing evidence, even if that means using questionable or contorted logic.

That's not a news flash to anyone who's paid attention to any recent national debate--although the researchers pointed out that this finding, itself, runs counter to the idea that the reason people continue to hold positions counter to all evidence is because of misinformation or lack of access to the correct data. Even when presented with compelling, factual data from sources they trusted, many of the subjects still found ways to dismiss it. But the most interesting (or disturbing) aspect of the Northwestern study was the finding that providing additional counter-evidence, facts, or arguments actually intensified this reaction. Additional countering data, it seems, increases the cognitive dissonance, and therefore the need for subjects to alleviate that discomfort by retreating into more rigidly selective hearing and entrenched positions.

Needless to say, these findings do not bode well for anyone with hopes of changing anyone else's mind with facts or rational discussion, especially on "hot button" issues. But why do we cling so fiercely to positions when they don't even involve us directly? Why do we care who got to the North Pole first? Or whether a particular bill has provision X versus provision Y in it? Why don't we care more about simply finding out the truth--especially in cases where one "right" answer actually exists?

Part of the reason, according to Kleiman, is "the brute fact that people identify their opinions with themselves; to admit having been wrong is to have lost the argument, and (as Vince Lombardi said), every time you lose, you die a little." And, he adds, "there is no more destructive force in human affairs--not greed, not hatred--than the desire to have been right."

So, what do we do about that? If overcoming "the desire to have been right" is half as challenging as overcoming hate or greed, the outlook doesn't seem promising. But Kleiman, who specializes in crime control policy and alternative solutions to very sticky problems (his latest book is "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment"), thinks all is not lost. He points to the philosopher Karl Popper, who, he says, believed fiercely in the discipline and teaching of critical thinking, because "it allows us to offer up our opinions as a sacrifice, so that they die in our stead."

A liberal education, Kleiman says, "ought, above all, to be an education in non-attachment to one's current opinions. I would define a true intellectual as one who cares terribly about being right, and not at all about having been right." Easy to say, very hard to achieve. For all sorts of reasons. But it's worth thinking about. Even if it came at the cost of sacrificing or altering our most dearly-held opinions ... the truth might set us free.

Mark Kleiman describes what a liberal education should do to counter the logical problems caused by motivated reasoning. How do we deal with evangelical religious and ideological political institutions that exist to teach their students to practice motivated reasoning? Because that's exactly what Regent University, Liberty University, the Discovery Institute, the Heritage Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute and other cults all do.

Anti-government teabaggers complain about lack of government public transportation

This is funny. The protesters want the government services and they want them to work right. They just refuse to plan for or pay for it.

Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.

Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.

Seriously.

The Texas Republican on Wednesday released a letter he sent to Washington’s Metro system complaining that the taxpayer-funded subway system was unable to properly transport protesters to the rally to protest government spending and expansion.

“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”

A spokesman for Brady says that “there weren’t enough cars and there weren’t enough trains.”

Steve Benen points out

Apparently, Brady heard complaints from some of his constituents who traveled to D.C. to protest "big government." They were disappointed to discover, however, that the government had done more to satisfy their public-transportation expectations, and now want other government officials to address the problem.

In some instances, Brady said constituents relied on private enterprise -- taxi cabs -- rather than the (ahem) public option. The conservative lawmaker described this as a bad thing. Local officials, Brady said, should have made "a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit" to the public.

Read that sentence again and replace "transit" with "health care coverage."

Is it any wonder that the Bush administration, which was administered to suit the demands of conservatives like these teabaggers, failed utterly to function even adequately? It's irrationalism in action.

The centralization of radio media has led to lack of local control

It has been clear that diversity of programming has suffered greatly since the a few companies have bought up so many local stations and placed them into chains with lock-step national programming. Here is what Amanda Terkel at Think Progress has written about the situation:

Approximately 91 percent of weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and just nine percent is progressive. However, “43 percent of regular talk radio listeners identify as conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and 30 percent as moderate.” Much of this imbalance was created in the wave of consolidation after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which “removed the national limit on the number of radio stations that one could own.”

Central control of the media is inherently anti-democratic. The conservatives are desperate to keep it that way.

America has become a Fascist nation

How bad is the shift in America towards a right-wing authoritarian government? Take a look at this definition of Fascism by Robert Paxton, read the papers or watch TV and you tell me. Fascism is:

"... a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."

Then he gives some details that I will present as a checklist:

"a form of political behavior marked by

• obsessive preoccupation with community decline,
• humiliation or victimhood and
• by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which
• a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,
• abandons democratic liberties and
• pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints
• goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Sara Robinson has presented all this and her analysis of how close we actually are to true Fascism. Her analysis is extremely disquieting, if not too surprising as we have watched the Bush/Cheney administration slide rather rapidly in this direction for the last eight years. She bases her analysis on Robert Paxton's five stages of Fascism. They are:
1. The initial creation of fascist movements.
2. Their rooting as parties in a political system.
3. The acquisition of power.
4. The exercise of power.
5. Radicalization or entropy.

Paxton explains what the stages are, and Sara shows how we have achieved each one. If you have time, start with Paxton's explanation. But Sara's analysis is the most focused on today's America which is suffering through the political illness.

Communism in America has always been extremely unlikely. The barriers here against Fascism, however, have always been much less robust. We are now on the very edge of the precipice.

A window into the conservative political culture - the cutout

The D.C. lobbying firm Bonner and Associates is now known to have sent at least six forged letters to Democratic Congressman considering The Climate Change bill urging the local congressman to oppose the bill. All six known fakes are supposedly from the local branch of the NAACP. But now Bonner and Associates has been caught. So what's Bonner and Associates' excuse?

They claim that the letters were sent by a rogue Temp employee. The Temp has since been fired.

Yeah. Right. A rogue temp employee sent six letters carefully designed to look like they came from the local NAACP or from a local Hispanic group.

Look. This is a standard conservative method of polluting the discussion of real issues that effect real people. What does "rogue temp employee" mean?

"Rogue temp" is shorthand for "The designated scapegoat who is a cut-out to be fired in order to insulate those higher in the organization when something like this is actually tracked back to the organization." As we all know "Scooter" Libby was Dick Cheney's designated scapegoat. Cheney himself was Bush's designate scapegoat. I wonder how deep the stack of scapegoats goes?

Needless to say, if no one spots such fakes and there is no risk to the company of exposure, then the employee who was designated as the scapegoat gets a bonus. Very probably such designated scapegoats quickly get hired at other firms with the concealed assistance of the company that fired them. They have proven their willingness to not only conduct such operations, but also to fall on their swords to protect the higher-ups.

I find it strange that being cynical about conservatives is not only normally extremely accurate, but also that it rarely leads to the very worst and most unbelievable of the ethical and legal atrocities conservatives actually conduct. We non-conservative cynics never seem to be able to match the conservative imagination.

Conservatives do not have an ideology that is easily sold to the majority of people, since the conservative ideology is essentially the idea that the wealthy should rule society and make them richer than before without the impertinence of average people questioning them. They win elections either by buying propaganda or by buying politicians, then fooling the majority of people through the two methods of mass propaganda based largely on fear and on declaring scapegoats. These fake letters sent to a politician and other like them are just one example of the kinds of lies that conservatives base their political actions on.

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Addendum 4:57 pm
Zachary Roth (TPM Reporter) is all over the Bonner and Associates covert propaganda operation.

...a former Bonner and Associates employee who spoke to TPMmuckraker significantly complicated that picture, portraying Bonner and Associates as a place where ethical missteps were far from rare. "They just got caught this time," he said.

Texas; The inevitable long-term result of conservative philosophy in government

Texas under the control of conservative evangelical Republicans for more than a decade now is seeing the result of the conservative Republican low-tax low services small government business-friendly philosophy. The following information is from Texas Senator Eliot Shapleigh:

After a decade under Perry, Texas is last in the number of people who have a high school degree and near last in average SAT scores. Texas is second in population only to California; yet Texas doesn't have a single public university in the top forty while California has five. Perry’s own Select Commission on Higher Education and Global Competitiveness declared that:

Texas is not globally competitive. The state faces a downward spiral in both quality of life and economic competitiveness if it fails to educate more of its growing population (both young and adults) to higher levels of attainment, knowledge and skills.

Texans breathe air with more carcinogens than citizens of any other state. Perry’s highway department is broke; within two years, by admission of Perry’s former chief of staff, now chair of the highway department, the department will have no money to build new roads.

On the streets of Texas, predatory lenders now charge Texas families interest rates of 1100% per year.

Over the last few days, in the sharp glare of national headlines on health reform, Perry’s health record has become a national scandal. By percentage and number, Texas has more uninsured than any state in America, with one out of four Texans lacking health insurance. In some Texas counties, up to 40% have no health insurance. Contrary to the claims of some, even if non-citizens (who include legal residents as well as undocumented immigrants) were removed from the statewide estimate, Texas would still have the highest uninsured rate in the country with 4.1 million uninsured citizens.

One in six uninsured American children resides in Rick Perry’s Texas. In 2003, Perry cut over 200,000 kids from the state's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Over the course of his tenure, rather than insure more kids with the $958 million that the federal government specifically set aside for Texas to expand CHIP, Perry sent those taxpayer dollars back to Washington, D.C. so that other states like Illinois could use those dollars to provide coverage to all of their children. In 2009, when 29 of 31 Texas Senators voted to expand CHIP, Perry said he’d veto the bill.

Our state ranks in the bottom ten in the U.S. when it comes to the number of physicians, dentists and nurses per capita. Here in El Paso, with thousands of new troops on the way to Ft. Bliss, we struggle to provide care with fewer doctors and nurses per capita than any large city in the country.

Due to the lowest reimbursement rates in the U.S., nursing homes are leaving Texas just as baby boomers seek care. After years of opposition to basic public health education, Texas is second in the U.S. in teen pregnancies.

When it comes to care for our most vulnerable Texans, all 13 of Texas’ state schools for the mentally retarded have been under a Department of Justice investigation for systemic abuse and neglect. "Fight clubs" at the Corpus Christi State School, where staff pitted residents against one another, recently made headlines on CNN.

That is the reality of Rick Perry’s Texas today. When change is on the way, Perry talks of suing the U.S. government to stop it. Here’s what he said in recent radio interview:

I think you’ll hear states and governors standing up and saying 'no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their healthcare. So my hope is that we never have to have that stand-up. But I’m certainly willing and ready for the fight if this administration continues to try to force their very expansive government philosophy down our collective throats.

What philosophy was Perry talking about? President Obama’s plan to provide health care coverage to every American, even Texans.

Who benefits from Rick Perry’s reality? In Texas today, three of the most expensive hospitals in the U.S. rake in profits, with charges that are almost three times the national average. Brownsville Medical Center was #8. From El Paso, Sierra Medical Center was #37 and Providence Memorial Hospital was #46. All three are owned by Tenet Healthcare Corporation.

Is Tenet's priority patient care or maximizing profits? Let's look at some numbers. The average cost of cardiac care at Providence Memorial Hospital is more than $15,000 per day, and at Sierra Medical Center, it's more than $18,000 per day. At University Medical Center of El Paso—the "public option"—it's less than $4,000 per day. In other words, these Tenet-owned hospitals charge about four times what the public hospital charges. And that's why Tenet spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to kill our new Children's Hospital, another "public option."

Rick Perry’s Texas is also home to health insurance companies for whom record profit, not better patient care, is the prime value. Health insurance premiums have risen substantially over the last decade. From 1996 to 2006, the cost of family coverage in Texas increased 85.7%. Over the same time period, our incomes increased just 8.6%. With premiums growing 10 times faster than incomes, coverage becomes less affordable for more and more Texans every year.

Conservative philosophy is essentially the refusal to permit anyone to plan and work for long-term social goals combined with permitting wealthy individuals to prey at will and unrestrained on most customers in the economy. Conservatism is an abdication of social goals if those goals interfere with the effort of self-centered powerful wealthy individuals who want only to increase their own personal wealth. Senator Shapleigh provides the numbers behind the last decade and a half of conservative control of the Texas government, and it is almost all bad - unless you take the view that only wealthy families who want to get richer matters and everyone else should sacrifice to support them.

Removing Rick Perry as Governor in the November 2010 election is a start to correcting the conservative stupidity that dominates Texas today.

What planet are the "Birthers" and Lou Dobbs from?

The national Republicans are demonstrating their insanity, power-hungry natures and political desperation by embracing the "Birther" movement. But it's clear why they are doing that. They have been removed from power in the federal government for incompetence in governing together with widespread corruption. Not only have the despised Democrats taken over both Houses of Congress, to add insult to injury Bush was replaced by of all people a man whose father was an African. A man the conservatives call "Black" has become President of the United States. Such events are so unbelievable to the conservative Republicans that the conservatives are in shock and acting like their entire world has turned upside down. When a few crazies started publicizing the idea that Obama is not a native-born American citizen and thus not eligible to become President, many have grabbed onto the idea in desperation. But it is desperation, as Jon Stewart demonstrates.

Jon Stewart accurately and with his usual humor presents the case that the "Birthers" are attempting to make that Barack Obama is not a native born American citizen eligible to be elected President. Stewart's case is as even handed a description as any reasonable person could present, since the "case" is itself insane and irrational and it is being offered by self-centered crooks and whacked-out crazies.

So who are the crazies and crooks? The crazies consist largely of the shocked and frightened conservative voters who simply can't believe that the conservative world they thought they were creating here in America has collapsed. The crooks are the more sane among the career conservative politicians who have built political careers out of the conservative movement since Reagan was elected.If the conservative movement has collapsed, then their careers are in real jeopardy.

The conservative crazies include a large number of angry right-wingers who will vote for anyone who promises anything that might possibly be used to replace Barack Obama as President and to replace the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate with people more to their liking. Those politicians who would be more to their liking are racist right-wing fundamentalist evangelists like ex-Representative Tom Tancredo, as well as Sen. Sessions, Sen. Coburn, Sen. Ensign or Sen. Vitter. Individually the conservatives may not appear crazy, but they all belong to a culture that is irrational in nature. They all know what they hate about the current more liberal culture, and they simply want it changed. They are disinterested in the process necessary to bring about that change. Since they are interested in getting the results they want and find that no rational process gets there, they reject rationality and in many cases, even science. The result is that the conservative culture is tends to be anti-rational. Those politicians who are riding this electorate for personal advantage and are not themselves crazies are the conservative Crooks. Those are the crooks, a groups strongly represented among the elected politicians.

In the House the crazies include Minnesota's Michele Bachmann who is famous recently for trying to get people to illegally refuse to fill out the 2010 census among other insanities. Similarly, there is Katherine Harris who famously ramrodded the theft of the Florida election for George Bush in 2000 when she was Florida Secretary of State. She later represented the Florida 13^th Congressional District from January 3, 2003 – January 3, 2007, displaying all the sanity that we currently see from Michelle Bachman. Most of her problems became public when she ran for Senate in 2006. These are just samples of the Republican conservative caucus which is clearly filled with such kooks.

Many of the conservative politicians themselves are often not crazy like the voters who elect them are, but they cater to those voters so they can be elected to office. They have embedded themselves in that anti-rational conservative culture, generally because their family and/or friends belong to it. Then they have created political careers within that culture. Texas Senator Cornyn may be one of the more sane group who is capable of moving whatever direction the wind blows in order to protect his career and current seat in the Senate.

Generally, however, as the national Republicans have gained their reputation for being unable to government effectively - largely because of their demand that government not operate on rational scientific processes - the conservative politicians have found it harder to attract Independent voters. This has become true even as the voters identifying as Democrats have grown in numbers. Those identifying as Democrats have clearly rejected what the conservatives claim to offer, so they are not open to conservative arguments. So the only thing the Republican office holders can do to remain in office is to appeal to the more extreme crazies among the voters. The "Tea Parties are one example of this, as is the "Birther" movement. So is the greater use of right-wing extremism issues by leading Republican politicians as they are led by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and the gaggle of right-wing shock-jocks on radio.

The "Birther" movement itself is run by a gaggle of incompetent "lawyers." Here are descriptions of those lawyers reported by The Washington Independent.

• "Phil Berg, the original “birther” lawyer, has been forced to pay out sanctions for legal malpractice." His arc of career failure continues as he pushes this idiotic "birther" case.
  


• Orly Taitz, a California lawyer featured in the Jon Stewart routine above,"...got her law degree from an online correspondence school." Jon Stewart provided additional information on her career. She has also claimed to be a Dentist and a real estate agent. One has to wonder how many careers she can fail in.


• "Charles Lincoln, who has been assisting Taitz — [he] provided judges with amended complaints in Keyes et al v. Obama et al last week and he showed up at the last hearing on the case— has been disbarred in California, as well as Florida and Texas." Since he has been disbarred in so many states, it would appear that he is practicing as a law clerk supervised by Orly Taitz who apparently still maintains a law license in California.
  

Apparently Lou Dobbs has bought the arguments made by Orly Taitz. Why he sticks with the story is unknown. He frames his "reporting" as presenting the conflict, but no one else with any sanity recognizes any valid conflict now, including the President of the CNN Network, Jon Klein. Is Dobbs so hard up for ratings that, like the conservative Republican incumbent politicians, he has to troll for viewers among the crazy right-wing extremists? Or perhaps he got suckered by Taitz and can't find a reasonable way to drop the subject. It is an unanswered puzzle why he is now trashing his own reputation as an on-air pundit to keep bringing the so-called story back up time and again.

In any case, that appears to be the current status of the major elements surrounding the "Birther" movement. That strange movement looks like a clear symptom of the total collapse of the conservative movement and the self-destruction of the national Republican Party. That the "Birther" issue is still making news as all demonstrates the collapse of the news industry and it's wide spread replacement by political advocacy media organs. But that's another story in itself.

Steve Benen points to Reagan's diatribe against Medicare 48 years ago

This is rather interesting. Steve Benen reports on Jonah Goldberg's NRO description of Ronald Reagan's diatribe against Medicare in 1961 as somehow "still fresh today."

Maybe Goldberg got the words "still fresh today" right, but he hasn't a clue what they mean. In fact, Reagan's rant was dead wrong about Medicare then, and the same arguments are all the conservatives have to oppose Obama's health care reform today. They words are fresh today because we are hearing them from the panicky idiots on the right-wing again, but they are as wrong today as they were with Reagan mouthed them as a conservative spokesman for GE 48 years ago about Medicare.

Here is why the health care crisis so critical to America

Any government that fails to meet the needs of large segments of the population for economic and social stability for a long time becomes less legitimate. As the government loses legitimacy, threats to replace it by one means or another rise. The health care crisis has reached the point where government can no longer protect its legitimacy by buying off large groups of people. The number of uninsured is growing, and a much broader group of those supposedly with health insurance are beginning to realize that it may not mean anything. Even if you can get care, the uninsured cost can bankrupt you. Too often the insurance company itself will cancel the policy before paying large claims. Add the health care crisis to the near brush with Depression and the rising unemployment and the government is in trouble. Any politician in office right now should be looking over their shoulder and feeling that their job is threatened. Only those politicians in the most radically gerrymandered states or districts can feel safe. Watch the contortions that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been going through to try to act sane for the moderate voters and still keep his conservative creds with the right-wingers.

When the government attempts to enforce an ideology or religious doctrine on large groups of unbelievers they face push back. When the numbers of active unbelievers get large enough, the threat becomes dangerous to the incumbent government's continued hold on power. The government then has two choices on how to deal with that loss of legitimacy and the resulting threats to its continued hold on power. It can either step in and do what is required so that fewer people face the problems or it can resort to more extreme authoritarian methods of repressing those who threaten to replace the government in power.

China's communist government considers the Uighur population to be a threat because they reject the Communist doctrine based on materialism. That was also the Chinese government's problem with the Falun Gong and the Tibetan Buddhists. But it has also been the problem for the American conservatives who are trying to enforce their strange ideology on America. It explains the pressure to steal elections and conduct dirty tricks, as well as the expanded actions by right-wing extremist groups like the anti-abortionists, the racists and the anti-immigration groups. The push-back the conservatives get from those of us who recognize the snake oil they are peddling is why they still feel like they are an oppressed minority.

But that mechanism is also the basis for why Obama is dropping in the polls. Fewer and fewer people see him acting to protect them from the economy or from the American medical disaster-zone that is good primarily to make a few more people rich and occasionally provide pretty good medicine but unreliably for anyone but the very rich.

While the economy was expanding a lot of people who were not rich thought they might become rich, so the threat of a health care crisis seemed less likely. Now that the conservatives have also destroyed America's economic growth, that group has clearly gotten smaller as more and more people are sweating out just keeping their job.

The real problem for health care reform is clearly in the rich man's club in Congress - the Senate. The Republicans have been a shrinking minority, but they are no longer in power. The Democrats are, and the economy and health care crisis reflect on the Democrats now. It's clear to the Republicans who are left that if they can just hang on they begin to regain the power of the opposition during times of social and economic crisis. Which leaves the gang of six. All of them appear threatened and desperately grasping for funds to gain reelection. How to deal with them is the question.

Obama's advertising in their states is a really good idea. Let's hope it works, because the health care crisis is ground zero for the continued existence of the Demorats in power in Congress and in the federal government. This is one the Democrats must win. That is equally true for the conservatives.

So that's the battleground in a nutshell. And politically, nothing else matters now. Nothing.

The latest take on the curiosity that is Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is a rather sad, empty and unimaginative person of little importance. Personally she does not matter much to me. But right now she is representative of some real American problems, like why America's education system is falling behind that of so many competing industrial nations (education doesn't matter enough for public funding) and why we turn out Lawyers and financial MBA's instead of scientists and production engineers (The top career rewards aren't as big and its a lot harder to learn to be an competent engineer or scientist than it appears to be to become a celebrity.) But let me just start with Sarah. Why did she resign so suddenly out of the blue?

Josh Marshall has posted the best explanation I have yet seen for Palin's strange and rather shocking resignation as Governor of Alaska. It makes a great deal of sense to me. She is a grifter, and the grift has finished. She is getting out of town while the getting is good. So now we can wait for the announcements of her money-making opportunities. She won't keep such deals from the Paparazzi (in this case mostly political and business reporters) because that kind of publicity is what she needs to extend her celebrity. She'll tell the Paparazzi because she needs them as much as they need her. Her reason for feeding the frenzy will be that the Paparazzi will extend her celebrity and keep her bankable. That dynamic between the celebrity and the press is the core of the entire celebrity culture as well as being the business model of the such journals as supermarket tabloids, People magazine, and the business publications Forbes, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal ^[*].

My read is that Palin has a single overriding motivation and that is ambition. She has a single major asset for her ambition to ride which is her celebrity status, the result of a lifetime spent chasing celebrity with no apparent significant interest in anything else. That's been her career. Her single asset has reached its apogee and was suddenly sliding away (stolen by her "enemies") so she has taken this opportunity to renew it. She will sacrifice anything to feed her ambition, including honor and the respect that can be earned by living up to your commitments. She has just proven that by her resignation.

Why do I care enough to blog about her? Two reasons. First, like the entire Pop Music scene, she seems to be emblematic of America's long celebrity obsession fueled by greed and the power of publicity experts to milk the public through the developing new forms of mass communications being created since the 1960's. That trend is run by grifters like Sarah Palin. It is a trend that runs counter to the great strengths America has always demonstrated as a solid, hard-working middle class productive nation with a culture centered on the strengths of well-trained and experienced journeyman workers.

The creation of the barely out of her teens Britney Spears is a symptom of the disaster of that celebrity culture. But the celebrity culture to which Sarah Palin now belongs is not isolated in society. It has broader implications. It has meant that America as a society and as an economy has failed to provide adequate rewards to the very many extremely capable people who might be induced to become engineers in college and learn new ways to invent and manufacture improved products. Instead, the best and the brightest are becoming lawyers and MBA's in the hopes of somehow suddenly getting rich by cashing in on a celebrity event of some kind. America's economic rewards are being redirected to celebrity status rather than to production of real goods and services of real value ^[**].

The second reason is that Sarah Palin's case is a cautionary tale of the utter vacuousness of the modern Republican Party. Their interest is in gaining power, nothing else. John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, not because she was best qualified if as President he died she would take over and run the country, but because he simply could not be elected to the office that fed his personal ambition and his feeling that he deserved to become the next President. He bought into Palin's celebrity to feed his own unbridled and undisciplined ambition. McCain is the son of American Naval Royalty, and he deserved the job of President more than anyone else by right of birth.

McCain is a conservative in part because it is an excellent justification for laziness. He resists working for his rewards because he feels he is entitled to them by right of birth. He is angry that so many people don't just hand them over because of who he is. Give such individuals a social problem to solve that does not involve their own interest directly and their solution is "Ignore it. If there is someone else with a good idea, skills and some idea how to get rewarded for it, they will solve the problem and we don't have to do any damned thing about it. "They call that the "free market" solution. What it really results in is a statement of "Let someone else do it, I don't want to think about it because I've already got mine. What? You want me to do hard work?"

So what we have is a toxic and unproductive celebrity culture that is taking over America, together with a political party representing and built on that culture that is made up of people who offer an economic ideology that advances that toxic culture. They are in it, like Palin, solely for their own personal benefit. Sarah Palin is just one more example of that culture, together with her national political mentor, Senator John McCain. The results of that culture, both in the failure of America to remain economically competitive against so many other industrial nations and in the clear emptiness and nastiness of the conservatives running the modern Republican Party are very clear.

So tell me. Why should we care about the sad spectacle that Sarah Palin is making of herself? Should I add Governor Mark Sanford?

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^[*]An interesting side note. I was told by the journalism prof of a public relations course I took that the articles in the Wall Street Journal that had no byline were simply public relations articles written by the company that were their subject. No real independent reporter was involved in writing them. Such an idea gives a very interesting view of such Wall Street Journal news articles.
^[**]In a world that is populated by too many people to feed and in which half the worlds population exists on less than a dollar a day, the idea that the national economy that is using up as much as a quarter of the world's resources is using them to create celebrities for export is an ethical issue I will leave you to ponder. It is clearly one that the American conservatives and the free marketers wash their hands of.

Conservatism scientifically exposed for what it is.

According to Battachio at Vagabond Scholar Conservatives offer no programs or proposed policies that will even remotely benefit America. He does this with several nice colorful Venn Diagrams and clear discussion. Here is Botachio's summary of conservatism's:

"... if there had been any uncertainty before, the 2007 crusade against 12-year old accident victim Graeme Frost eliminated all doubt that spite is a point of pride for movement conservatives. ( Also, most corporate journalists won't call them on it - nor will they be honest about how mainstream eliminationist talk is among conservatives.) Modern conservatism can be summed up many ways, from "You're on your own" to "Good luck" to "Screw you, I've got mine" to "Screw you, I don't have mine, but you ain't getting anything either." It's a twisted worldview, impractical and even unrealistic, generally self-serving, sometimes self-destructive, but almost always destructive to others. Rather than recognizing and trying to minimize unnecessary suffering, as an ideology it seeks to justify cruelty and callousness. Movement conservatives seldom feel responsible for their own actions or the horrible consequences of their policies. It's unquestioned dogma for them that they represent the "natural" order, that unearned privilege within their group is proof of merit or God's favor, and the real problem with America is the uppity heretics who question all that and don't mind their place.

I strongly recommend that you click through to Vagabond Scholar and enjoy the post in all it's excellent color. If nothing else, rarely have I seen Venn Diagrams used as entertainingly and still be informative.

Why do so many Conservatives make clearly insane statements?

I have long wondered why the conservatives publicly make so many absolutely insane statements. For example, Sarah Palin's Friday announcement of her resignation considered in view of her Presidential ambitions seemed utterly insane. So do the efforts of the Discovery Institute to abolish the teaching of science to our children in public schools and replace it with Bible instruction. Then I read a rather arcane literary search to find the source of an odd quotation, and suddenly I had a minor "Aha!" moment. Those people are not insane. They simply hear a different music from what I hear.

So bear with me. The way to the "Aha!" is, like so many such revelations, a bit twisty. Let me start with Mark Kleiman's posts on his problem quote.

Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community recently was taken by a phrase and decided to track it down to its source. The phrase was

"Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music."

His investigation is reported at

• The Dancers vs Those who cannot Hear the Music. (Second post) and
• Bleg: Quotation Source (First post)

The posts are interesting as a literary puzzle, and the quotation itself does need some recounting of its history of use to make a lot of sense. So I read them both. And with the resolution to the puzzle, I got more than I bargained for. I got what appears to be a real lesson in how we humans understand each other - or how we fail to do so.

In explanation I need to reproduce the fruits of Mark's exploration first. It's a quotation from Henri Bergson translated from the French to English.

I would now like to draw attention, as a symptom no less worthy of note, the lack of feeling which ordinarily accompanies laughter. It seems that the comic can only shake a person up on condition of falling upon the surface of a truly calm soul, one that is well integrated. Indifference is its natural environment. Laughter has no greater enemy than emotion. I’m not saying that we cannot laugh at a person who arouses, for example, pity in us, or even affection; only that for a few moments it would be necessary to forget affection, to tell pity to be silent. In a society of pure intelligences one would probably no longer cry, but one would perhaps still laugh; whereas souls that are invariably sensitive — in agreement and at one with life, where every event would be prolonged as a resonance of feeling — would not recognize or understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to let everything that is said or is being done capture your attention; act, in your imagination, with those who act, feel with those who feel, let your sympathy open up as wide as possible, and as though struck by a magic wand you will see the lightest objects take on weight, and all things imbued with a severe color. Now detach yourself, look upon life as an indifferent observer; even dramas will turn into comedy. It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order that the dancers immediately appear ridiculous. How many human actions would be able to resist a test of this type? and would we not see many of them go from being solemn to funny, if we isolated them from the feeling that accompanies them? Therefore, the comic, in order to produce its complete effect, in the end demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. It is addressed to pure intelligence.

In essence that says "You cannot understand how the dance you see makes sense if you do not know the environment - the music - the dance is conducted in."

Or to reverse that, if someone does or says something that is simply incomprehensible to the point of being insane, perhaps you are not aware of the environment within which it is being done or said.

Which brings me to the way conservatives and liberals see the political issues that are current in today's American political climate. For one point, why did Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation effective July 26th seem so insane? We don't know what the actual environment Palin is operating in. In terms of Palin running for President in 2012, her resignation announcement is simply insane. But her running for President is the talk of the Pundits. Palin may simply not want to run for President. In fact, Palin may not want to advance in politics at all. Some reports indicate that she is sick of it. If the music she is dancing to suggests that she simply go back to her family and look for other ways to earn a living, then her announcement suddenly makes complete sense.

Or take another thing. The idea being pushed by the Discovery Institute that science is inherently wrong and at best should only be taught to children in school in classes that contrast evolution with the Biblical myths of the creation. As a person with extensive training in science, statistics and research methods and academic management studies, I find the idea that the Creation myth could substitute for science to be literally insane. But what I do not have is a correspondingly deep grounding in the Christian Bible, since it never made rational sense to me and never had sufficient literary interest to keep my attention for long. ^*

No doubt what the Discovery Institute wants to do is push a thorough grounding in the Bible onto all students. The fact that my mother was similarly insistent and I quickly learned to resist such pressures as not responding to the things I was curious about means nothing to the religious zealots of the Discovery Institute, nor does the utter impracticability of the the literal reading of the Bible as a substitute for science. I simply don't want and have never wanted induction into their environment. But also pretty obviously, they have no use for the environment I have been attracted to all my life. They reject it (science) and want modern children to similarly do so.

The real "Aha!" for me was to realize that Creationism is NOT insanity. It is simply the rational expression of the total environment the Fundamentalist Christians have created for themselves and now emerse themselves into. They have their own school systems, their own separate churches (which reject mainstream churches and call them "Unchristian") and with FOX News, they have their own captive popular news outlet on TV. They also teach their followers that all sources outside their captive media are telling lies and should be rejected.

US Senators like Jeff Sessions and Jim Inhofe have come out of that environment and are representative of it. The apparently insane statements they make describing their beliefs are not so much insane as they are representative of the very insular fundamentalist Christian culture which is their total environment.

But the reverse is undoubtedly true. They see my statements in many cases to be quite as insane as I see theirs. That's because they have no idea of my environment and want nothing to do with it.

Religion is not the only area in which individuals from different environments see each other as spouting insane statements. True believers in Libertarianism also represent such a closed total environment, and for all the logic that has gone into assembling the theories of economic market libertarianism, it simple fails in practice whenever it is tried. The True Believers will not accept that it has failed, however. They don't consider reality and real situations to be refutation of their neat and pretty theory.

Given all that, I don't think I can any longer see what the conservatives say as being insane. It is simply representative of a very different environment. I cannot hear the music to which they are dancing. But unfortunately, they cannot hear the music to which I dance, either. The conflict is not going to end.

But since government has to operate for everyone in the area governed, it cannot operate based on any given ideology. That is the great power of the separation of Church and State given us by the Constitution. The purpose of that provision is clearly to keep the police functions of government from intervening in what is often a conflict between people who have sharply different and conflicting environments and world views. What the Fundamentalists are demanding is that their world view that is expresses as Creationism be taught as a replacement for the world view of the Enlightenment as expressed in science on the general level and Evolution in particular. But public schools are specifically set into place by government to teach students how to operate government without enforcing a specific ideology.

Both Libertarians and Fundamentalist Christians reject reality-testing of their ideologies, because science works by proving that assertion are false. The fundamentalist ideologues reject any suggestion that their ideologies are false, so they attack the schools, teachers and publications the teach other views.

That rejection is a key method of teaching and perpetuating the memes that are at the core of their ideologies. Neither fundamentalist Christianity nor Libertarianism can continually be transmitted to new converts reliably if they are allowed to test the memes against reality occasionally. That avoidance of reality-testing permits the passing on of the memes and perpetuating the doctrine.

So welcome to my analysis of insane political pronouncements. The real problem is that they are only insane when you cannot hear the music the speaker is "dancing to." Does that help?

Beats me. But it satisfies my curiosity.

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^* A strange and very pleasant recent exception is the outstanding book entitled A Palpable God by Reynolds Price. I picked it up because his opening 44 page essay on the nature of "Narrative" was said to be the best writing on the subject out there. He then goes on to illustrate what he means by translating 30 stories from the Bible, mostly old testament. I will agree that the essay is the best I have found on the subject of what narrative is and how it works, and his illustrating stories become fascinating in context. I find the subject of the nature of narrative particularly interesting because I read that brain researchers using modern tools to study the brain in action have concluded that our memories are laid down in the brain in a narrative form.

Humans have been equipped by evolution, not only with language, but also with the narrative form of structuring thoughts in language. That, it seems to me, also has massive implications on how human societies are formed and aggregated into larger structures like clans, towns, and Empires. In an oral age, story-tellers carried the knowledge of human civilization to others as well as stories being the primary way of passing knowledge from one generation to another.

It also may be the explanation why such written stories as The Torah, the Bible and the Koran consist of are so central to organized western religions.

Welcome to the conservative Republican fantasy world

Steve Benen caught a beautiful example of conservative Republican fantasy.

This afternoon, Sanchez was interviewing Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), arguably the chamber's most conservative member, about the shrinking Republican Party, and whether the GOP's hard-right agenda is driving away mainstream voters. "Quite the opposite," DeMint said. "We're seeing across the country right now that the biggest tent of all is the tent of freedom."

"What the hell does that mean?" Sanchez asked. "The 'biggest tent' is 'freedom'? Freedom? You've got to do better than that!"

In response, DeMint argued that Americans are actually embracing the Republican message: "Americans who are normally not even political are coming out to 'Tea Parties' and protesting." This, DeMint suggested, is proof of the Republican message connecting with the electorate.

He wasn't kidding. The future of the GOP is Tea Baggers and the tent of freedom. It sounds like the message you might read in a greeting card written by Joe the Plumber.

Right. DeMint and his similar extreme conservatives are the same people who really don't realize that Steven Colbert is laughing at them.

About 300,000 people who came out to locations literally next door to their homes nation-wide. BIG turnout! Right. And "Freedom" is a word that has whatever meaning the speaker wants it to mean, often not the same meaning twice from the same person.

The public has spotted the scam the conservatives have been pulling, and only the most extreme hard cases even bother to come to their events now. Conservatism as we have known it since Reagan is toast, and the most extreme conservatives are blinding themselves, much like tobacco executives blind themselves to the dangers of smoking because their income depends on it and because those who do smoke are deeply addicted to the weed. Conservative leaders are similarly addicted to the perks of their leadership positions and most of them have no place to go if they lose that.

We are watching the end of the conservative movement.

The media is being polite. They are describing the collapse of the conservative control of the Republican Party as the "evolving of the Republican Party." What we are watching is really the death throes of conservative control of the Republicans, at least nationally. The fact that Specter has been forced to switch to the Democratic Party is just one more dead canary in the conservative coal mine.

The mechanism is, I suspect, that the conservatives have used the issue of "Who is more conservative?" as an election tool for years, much as they used the cry "Who lost China?" for years during the Cold War. They've used the cry "Who is more conservative?" since Reagan, in fact. The result is that they have elected the strongest right-wing extremists possible because they think that is the route to electoral success. It certainly mobilizes the base, especially after they allied with the evangelical religious conservatives of the Christian Coalition.

Suddenly (from their point of view) the public has realized the disastrous consequences of letting the conservatives run government and turned their back on conservatives. All except the strongest conservatives, in fact, have backed away. So have many of the evangelical conservatives. But as the moderates flake off from the Republican brand, the remaining conservatives still think this is just a bad patch and that conservatism is still the route to electoral success. Since things are going bad for them with the public, they are retreating to their strongest point - be more conservative. So the most extreme conservatives are being concentrated in the party and they are becoming more desperate, much as soldiers fighting a losing battle will.

The result is that extremists are running the party now, not the politicians. Limbaugh never compromises, and always goes for the most extreme position. So do the other talk show hosts, as do the extreme writers like Coulter. The good politicians are recognizing that won't work, but the base won't keep them in office if they don't adhere to the most extreme conservatism.

What we are watching is the death throes of the conservative movement, and they won't go quietly. They can't. Conservatism is inherently an extremist quasi-religion.

I'm at last enjoying the show. I suspect I am feeling a lot the way my parents did in 1944 when both the Germans and the Japanese were in retreat on all fronts. Neither fascist nation gave up, either. Both, if anything, became more extreme. The Kamikaze pilots are only one example of the extreme measures they took. So was the German enlisting of teenagers from the Hitler youth to defend Berlin and the German homeland behind the Rhine. So was the desperate German offensive of the Battle of the Bulge.

I do expect conservative extremism to get even worse in the near future, though. That will last until the talk show conservatives are dethroned as the effective leaders of the conservative movement.

At least, that's my current best guess.

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Addendum 6:30 pm
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell thinks that Arlen Specter's switch to the Democratic Party is a threat to the country.

I guess that as an extremist conservative McConnell can't distinguish between a threat to the Republican conservatives and a threat to America.

Conservatives are inherently short-sighted and cheap.

Remember when, back in February, three Republican "centrists" pulled the $870 million from the Economic Stimulus bill because "It didn't belong there?"

Typical conservative thinking. It wasn't happening right then and the rather ignorant trio didn't understand it, so don't prepare for it. It looks a bit different now, doesn't it?

One thing government does that private enterprise cannot afford to do is to essentially stockpile individuals with in-depth training and expertise in anticipation of a foreseen but not yet current need. That is the exact reason why back in the 15th century is became clear to governments that a trained, long-term professional army would almost always defeat mercenaries who were called up only during an emergency. How long does it take to train a special forces soldier, for instance?

Xe (renamed from Blackwater) doesn't do it. They wait until the government has selected and trained the soldiers, then they go hire them when they have a contract and let them go after.

The CDC is another government function that is set up in anticipation of a major life-threatening set of threats that we hope is not current, but have to be ready for when it does occur. That's a major reason why modern industrial nations suffer less from pandemics than do third-world and developing nations.

And yes, it can be overdone. You can't be ready for every eventuality. So there is a balance, but the trio were too conservative with money and foresight. Disease and epidemic is almost as easy to predict as someones death (a certainty.) It pays to be ready.

Why are the Republican leaders so irrational?

What we are watching is a battle between conservative True Believers and social scientists. The True Believers trust great leaders who decide things in secret, then impose their decisions. The believers in the social sciences like us believe that the modern social sciences working openly and publicly, coupled with good historical research of the economy and with government experiments in social engineering is a better way to operate.

Why is government the center of the battle?

I contend that the U.S. Constitution is a blueprint for government by social scientists. One indicator that I am right is the way that the Bush administration has violated the Constitution and side-tracked the Rule of Law that works to enact the provisions of the Constitution.

So we all are asking why the Republican leadership is so clearly irrational and so obviously ignore clear indisputable facts. Let me offer a reason, one I consider likely.

Who are these irrational conservative leaders?

The Republican leaders are deeply committed conservatives. They believe in their very bones that the worldview pushed in conservative propaganda is TRUE.

I think they see the current economic downturn as normal and inevitable. It is a real bad patch for the holders of the conservative worldview because their worldview includes faith that there simply is nothing that can be done to prevent such downturns, and that in fact efforts to stop the economic downturn or even to alleviate its effects will be counterproductive.

Why do the conservatives think they should enforce their views on the rest of us?

The current conservative leaders see themselves as leaders who are right. They know they understand what is really happening better than the rest of us do. It's just that they are unpopular and being relegated to the wilderness. Since they are True Believers and know they are right, they are certain that if they stick to their faith, events will in the end justify them and they will return with more power than ever before. Because they are RIGHT and they know it.

What leads them to believe that this is an effective way of acting?

Traditionally, many Christian Saints achieved their sainthood for such clear unwavering strength of character to hold onto their faith.

It looks to me as though the current Republican leaders consist of both religious and secular strong believers with this view. They live in mostly self-isolated groups of their own kind and reinforce each other. Socially I would guess that the conservative movement resembles movements like that of the Catholic Franciscans or the Jesuits. [Both of those were externally financed, as are the modern conservatives.] [Historical analogies are always very imperfect, but they provide an explanatory narrative not otherwise easily obtained. Use with great care.]

So what's next? How do we react to the conservatives?

I don't think that we can expect rationality and fact-based thinking from the conservative leadership. They are the product of the conservative "mob" and they have to cater to that mob to continue in their leadership positions. That's as true of Limbaugh as it is of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R - OK) or Rep. John Boehner (R - OH).

Those conservative leaders see their role as leaders who hold the banner of their faith high as they trudge through the wilderness. They expect that the (uncontrollable) events will turn around and justify them. Then they will return to national leadership with greatly enhanced reputations for having suffered to expose The Truth. The secular conservative leaders look back to their myth of the way Winston Churchill was rehabilitated by the crisis of WW II. Their supporters want them to do exactly that.

So we have to convince the so-called Independents that they are simply wrong. Then we have to battle back against the True Believers who are trying to impress their views on all the rest of us. We aren't going to reach or convert the True Believers.

The True Believers are waiting for Obama to fail. They are convinced that Obama's failure is inevitable because he is attempting the impossible. They know that government cannot successfully prevent, ward off or shorten a Recession or Depression, and when the current one returns, so will they.

We better have an Army of Economists and researchers figuring out what really is happening. Knowledge, not Great Leaders, is the key to dealing with this. [Of course, Obama will be considered a Great Leader if he can orchestrate the knowledge and appropriate reactions to the current economic crisis.] History of the Great Depression is important. But so is modern economic model-making. Both must be accompanies with real, wide-open scientific discussion which is not hobbled by conservatives who refuse to listen to opposition.

Social Science better come through with some answers that work, or the True Believers will be back to enforce their ideologies on the rest of us.

Why are the conservative Republican leaders acting so irrationally?

They can't act any other way and have their conservative political base keep them in their leadership roles. If they act rationally and try to actually govern instead of trying to use government to impose Conservatism on America, then their base will replace them. And some of them have drunk the Kool Aid and actually believe this stuff. But it comes down to the fact that they simply are not being permitted to act rationally.

They are in the same position as the Republican Party was in the 1930's. And for the same reasons. That's why.