We are extraordinarily fortunate to converse today with psychiatrist and psychohistorical researcher Robert Jay Lifton. His new memoir, written after 60 years of professional life, is an amazingly fascinating and entertaining book. Dr. Lifton speaks in his persona of a gifted, intelligent, and rational observer and thinker, a self-described disciple of the Enlightenment and a humanist approach to understanding.

When I was a kid, I used to love double-dips. I’d go to the doctor and afterwards, we’d stop by the drug store soda fountain for my free ice cream. Summers, there would be all the ice cream suppers at the churches with fresh home made ice cream and cake. Double-dips of chocolate ice cream and cake!

Unfortunately however, today’s double-dip will be a recession.

Here’s the Family Research Council’s Imam Tony Perkins, writing a piece about what social conservatives are looking for in the GOP’s 2012 nominee.

Conservatives loathe Keynes, but they have no answer to the inexorable logic of his book. That makes them push their idiot theories even harder. That will be great for the rich, and screw the rest of us.

In his soulful book, Beauty: the Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue writes:

“The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves.”

Politics is conspicuously absent from the list. And that made me think, can politics be beautiful?

If David Remes can’t “disseminate” this information–if he can’t go to reporters and say, “all that damning information against my client comes not just from a detainee who was waterboarded, but it comes from the period when he was being waterboarded,” what good does it do?

Yesterday we looked at the potential responses from Democrats in Wisconsin to the dirty trick from Republicans, who plan to run “spoiler” candidates in the recall elections to force primaries and move the general recall elections out to August. Democrats had a couple options, ranging from taking the high road to retaliating with spoiler candidates of their own. The final decision reflected mostly a high road approach.

The Obama Administration is not even investigating financial crimes. Is it because they think what the banksters did was just fine, or because the banksters are social peers, and criminal prosecution is just beyond comprehension?

“But don’t miss David Ignatius, who’s written a novel about war crimes without knowing it, and Henry Kissinger, who’s a war criminal but doesn’t admit it, appearing with CNN’s Zakaria. If you can stand that, you get credit for two episodes of CSI.”

Goofy starring in Tiger Trouble with Dolores the Elephant. This Walt Disney Productions cartoon was released on January 5, 1945.