brendan @ 20

his “grand architecture” will “exit” the stage, not “exeunt”.

It is, in fact, “exeunt.” Look it up.

“Exeunt” means “they exit”.

Marretta @ 46

Well, the GOP can’t actually win anything if they play fair. Karl taught them that lesson and it is one they have taken to heart. The California Initiative is the latest development in their “Department of Dirty Tricks,” and if Karl didn’t have a hand in that one, I’ll eat my hat. The blogosphere needs to be screaming at the top of their lungs about what these cockroaches are trying to do in California, because shining light on cockroaches always slows them down.

Do you know if the Dem Party is doing anything about this? Can they stop it or counteract w/ another state? Anything?

In 2006 California elected a progressive Dem named Debra Bowen to be Sec. of State. She initiated a top to bottom review of all the electronic voting machines and found them all pretty much crap.

Other states can take that and get rid of them too.

That’s one reason Repubs are working on California. They don’t have the machines to fix things.

But, the bigger trend is to get rid of the machines nationwide and that will help Democracy, regardless of who might win.

Check out http://www.BradBlog.com for more on the electronic voting machines scandal.

TiredFed @ 6

just wait until 12 million letters go out that say: you’re fired! one heck of a storm is coming, folks.

One trillion dollar worth of ARMs are due for interest adjustment during the next 14 months. I suspect a significant number will go into default. My GF’s mother has a friend who works in a bank loan dept. Last week the defaults were coming in at the rate of 17 per hour. The Fed. pumping money into the economy to maintain liquidity is too little too late.

It’s going to be a rough ride; we need to make damn sure the right people and party receive the blame.

OTOH, we Democrats choose to fix problems and lead the country.

We should find some way to smooth out the bump by perhaps allowing mortgage lenders to renegotiate unilaterally, within government guidelines, to help homeowners manage to pay off their loans by stretching them out and reducing payments, again according to some government guidelines Congress might set.

Smooth out the bump and keep the market liquidity and we’ll all do better — including people who don’t think they have a dog in this fight.

Not the sign of a “happy Camper” going off to spend time with the family…

As I grow older, I avail myself more and more of the ancient prerogatives of old men. I hitch my pants high, shake my head at the barbarous young and drive a stone-cold 55 on the highway. I’m risk-averse and dress as I please. (In my beginning is my end: I’ve evolved from slob to hipster slob to ironic slob back, finally, to slob.) I distrust change, labor unions and Al Sharpton and believe that at high enough rates income taxes become confiscatory. In short, I am white, privileged, middle-aged and boring.

But one thing I am not, and never will be, is a conservative. The recent essay anthology “Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys” (Threshold Editions, $23) has given us liberals a chance to think about why, even in our calcifying stodginess, American conservatism remains a nonstarter for us, a stack of loyalty oaths we’d never be tempted to sign.

(snip)

a more accurate wording might have been “Why I Turned Right: Or, The Experience That Closed My Mind Forever.” Richard Starr, writing about the revulsion he felt for the 1970s, begins his essay by concluding, “Jimmy Carter made me the conservative I am today, as I suspect he did many members of my generation.”
(snip)

The left is knee-jerk and borderline depraved; the right is freethinking and decent. All very fair, no doubt. Lay this down as your given and the comforting solecisms flow forth unregulated. When the left is being idealistic, it is naïve, utopian, technocratic and meddling. When the right is being idealistic, it is idealistic. Thus Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty reveals the left to be hopelessly overreaching, as David Brooks assures us, while George W. Bush’s war in Iraq “is one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken.”

Democrats fail essentially; Republicans fail incidentally. Conservatives have been playing this game of “heads I win, tails you lose” for roughly a generation. Ever since Ronald Reagan twitted Jimmy Carter with “there you go again,” the American right has carried itself with a swagger, confident the crowd will have its back.

(snip)

From the evidence of this volume, their righteous anger at liberalism is not cynical. Not at all. Conservative pundit-intellectuals have locked into a magical frequency, one that remains occult to the left, connects with a large segment of the viewing and reading public, and comes from someplace very sincere.

(snip)

Young people tend to be politically unthinking, and liberal arts professors tend to be arrested young people. But many undergraduates, encountering the towering stupidity of college radicalism, tenured and otherwise, chose to be conservative, where conservative meant deferential to the past, appropriately awed by greatness, calm, courteous, skeptical and cautious.

(snip)

Here we near the answer to our riddle: how privileged college graduates, while fronting for the interests of corporations and the rich, speak the language of angry populism, and with such depth of conviction. “I remember,” D’Souza writes, misting up at his college days, “some of those early dinners at the Hart farmhouse, where we drank South American wine and listened to recordings of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Robert Frost reading his poems, Nixon speeches, comedian Rich Little doing his Nixon imitation, George C. Scott delivering the opening speech in ‘Patton,’ some of Churchill’s orations, and the music from the BBC version of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited.’ ” In a similar vein, David Brooks writes of his early days as a right-winger: “I remember a series of parties with libertarians, pro-lifers, Scoop Jackson hawks, movement activists and movement dissenters all dancing together to the Talking Heads.”

In Rich Lowry’s essay, the point is finally driven home. “To this day,” he writes, “I read between sets on the weight machines at the gym, and while brushing my teeth.”
(snip)

To be genuinely humiliated is to know how to tap into the humiliations of others. Rejecting tout court a culture of cool that prevails against him, a certain sort of person turns to campus politics. Because these conservatives were, by and large, low-status males (or the feminism-disdaining women who loved them) in high school and college, they know instinctively how to connect with the culturally dispossessed.

(Stephen Metcalf writes the Dilettante column for Slate and is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/books/review/