The Big Bing Theory

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On some blogs and chat rooms , this mild mannered but pissed off middle of the road, card carrying member of the ACLU, liberal; I've been called "radical." Of course the ones calling me that are usually the ones I just insulted for not thinking for themselves. It doesn't bother me, in a way it's good. It reminds me that common sense isn't really common, and I don't have a monopoly on it. When I am called a radical I pause because I am an introvert at times and with that can come self delusion. I believe the president is currently afflicted with this disease, but in his case he is insulated from reality. Which is kind of what self delusion is about. So I go through a self evaluation because I pride myself on being open minded and pragmatic. Oliver Wendall Holmes is my hero, ideas and opinions evolve over time, an example is the living document the Constitution of which he helped shape as a Supreme Court Justice. Recognizing you don't know everything is the simplest definition of wisdom I know of. A few instances recently I've enjoyed pondering that don't fall under the presumption of being liberal views.
Tennessee has a new license plate that reads "Choose Life" an obvious nod to the anti-abortion movement and certainly expressing a political opinion. The knee jerk and his/her reaction would be if a liberal and to the ACLU who sued; that this shouldn't be allowed because it is an opinion that runs contrary to the constitutional laws of this country. But I don't agree, and I still call myself liberal and belong proudly to the ACLU. Political expression is vital to freedom and though I don't agree with the right to life movement as a whole and believe a right to privacy protects a women's right to her own reproductive freedom, this license plate doesn't infringe on those things in my view. You're not being forced to purchase this plate, so it's not an unfair tax. It does not establish religious preference by the state so does not violate the 1st amendment either. It's a political point of view which the 1st amendment protects. Bu there's another thing, it was right for the ACLU to sue. As I said political discourse is essential and the legal system worked perfectly!
The process provides the country an opportunity to discuss something. If Tennessee hadn't made the plate and the ACLU hadn't sued we wouldn't be talking about it and it wouldn't be in the news. If were able, liberals can also impress upon their more conservative friends that we don't like abortion either. No one does. Planned Parenthood doesn't make millions from the procedure and I'm sure that doctors and nurses would prefer to do anything else but that. We feel that the procedure should be rare and safe. Why we do is another discussion.
Another instance recently. Intelligent design. I am concerned that what I see as absolute bunk be introduced into our public consciousness and our public schools. However the point should be well taken that the theory of evolution is a theory and is always subject to scrutiny. Whether Intelligent Design has any merit is another discussion. I am also concerned that those who prefer science to faith forget they don't "know" everything. Personally I think that in a way the theory of evolution is a human explanation for God's intelligent design. But my definition of "God" and "intelligent design," would appear radically different than most too. Whenever I am in an intellectual flux I fall back on the most intelligent human ever to exist, Albert Einstein. I have a quote scrawled on a sticky note that reads,
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
What a humbling statement eh?
Third recently. A young man knocked on the door the other night. Dogs go crazy of course. People must think we're nuts! 5 dogs barking like the Feds are at the door and I'm yelling "Nixon, Nixon" Like Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson in "Where the Buffalo Roam." But of course I'm not yelling Nixon, which Bill used in lieu of "sic' em" with his doberman in that fine movie from the 70s. I wade through the sea of dogs and beat them back and hop outside to see what the guy wants. He's got a clip board and his hand out. I have a lot of respect for anyone with that kind of go get 'em attitude but let's face it. Even if you agree with their cause it's a pain in the ass. But lately, I've been to self centered and having been exposing myself to people around me and vowed on my birthday to change that. So I listen to his spiel and he is polite but persistent. I end up giving the guy a 15 dollar check, and yes it's tax deductible. His cause was a local one. I had read about it in the home town rag I frequently write to that morning. A local cement plant wants to burn tires to fuel the process it takes to make their product. (Side note. . the Romans built everything an entire empire because of volcanic ash, the primary component of the cement they used to build, it's pretty fascinating stuff . .) OK, they want to burn tires as well as coal in a safe way with little pollutants and danger to the locals here. They also want the state to pay them a fee for recycling all these unwanted tires. Now this solicitor and I have some legitimate beefs with this company. How safe is safe? Can and will the company honor that promise to the community when they have shown that they have made mistakes in the past and been fined repeatedly for it? And on top of that, they want some tax payer dollars on top of this deal?!?
There's a few things here that got my wheels turning. Walking door to door for a cause you believe in is a noble and humble thing to do. Usually because people just don't want to hear what it is your selling. Before you start you know you will fail more than succeed usually because most folks just want to be left alone. Secondly the economic side and the unanswered questions that should be posed. For example, what to do with these tires? How can this company produce heat enough to make a product that is very useful and essential to economic development and have as little an impact on the environment? Is there an economic solution short of boycott to this problem? Ingenuity, come up with a way for the company to do this without harmful emissions. Walking door to door serves a function of raising awareness but it needs to go beyond that. Or, maybe I just think too much.

Senator,
I recently wrote you expressing my support for Senator Feingold's resolution to censure the President. I received a form email that briefly addressed the topic of warrant-less spying on Americans. The Republicans in Congress are busy making this policy legal, which leads me to believe they feel the President is currently breaking the law. You cite that censure of a president has happened once in our history. So what? That is politics as usual thinking. Stop being a politician and start being a representative. You are charged, as a Senator, to provide oversight of the executive branch. If this clear violation of the law is not reason for oversight what is? Based on your voting record; your endorsement of Alberto Gonzalez, a man of questionable moral character who has given the President the green light to torture people in our name, and your vote to stop a filibuster despite your reservations on the qualifications of Samuel Alito to be a Supreme Court Justice, I can only determine you are more concerned with riding the fence than speaking your mind and doing the job you were elected to do. If you want to continue to act like Republican Senator Wayne Allard then please get the hell out of my party.

I was home because Di (wifeling) had her wisdom teeth plucked out of her jaw and someone has to be able to yell at the dogs. It's hard to do with gauze in your mouth. Ringo is barking right now in fact, I'll let him bark a while, keeps the riff raff away from the hood. Anyway I had some time on a beautiful indian summer day and decided to hide in my club house and get worked up. My club house consists of our hall closet. 3 and a half feet deep and about 5 feet wide. Just enough room for a desk and chair. I have posters on the wall. It's like a fort, but I digress. I decided to do some Google news surfing, you know to keep up on current events. I stumbled upon the story of a Denver high school teacher who's been placed on leave after one of his students delivered a recording of one of his "liberal rants" to the local conservative hack hate radio station. The student was "plucky" enough to secretly record someone he disagreed with instead of standing up and challenging the teacher, which was encouraged. I heard a section of the recording, it was a lecture the day after the State of the Union speech peddled by Bush last month. The content of his rant, was factual, delivered forcefully and had the audacity to claim that capitalism isn't a system that respects human rights. He also compared verbage Bush used to similar to Hitler. Rounding out the lecture, he thanked people for the questions he received, though they are missing from the tape, and he states that he was trying to get kids to look under the surface and to stimulate thought and debate. He's a Geography teacher, the student is 16 and looks like a brown shirt goose stepper uber capitalist. Kid is in the paper with a short sleeve shirt with tie, arms crossed and the look of defiance on his brow. So the teacher here is being attacked pretty hard from the right wingers, even Rush Limbaugh, for "tainting" these poor young minds with liberal garbage. None of them willing to talk about the merit of his comments, again 100% factually accurate. So I go on to this blog from the local Rocky Mountain News. Icouldn't resist. One person, from Seattle, was shilling his book, "The Magic Shield" I think, he wrote in the blog that he was horrified to learn his children had been taught that Thomas Jefferson had slaves and that we wiped out a large number of indians with blankets laced with small pox. The man was outraged! Actually and truly outraged that a liberal teacher told his kids facts, truth, actuality. I still have a hard time understanding why on earth a parent would want to teach their child ignorance. Stunning. I read a poor conservative who had to endure truth telling liberal elite through college. The horror! I had to chime in. I told the ignorant one who can't handle complex issues like Jefferson owning slaves, that sugar coating history doesn't help anybody. But to both of these "oppressed conservatives" I had to ask the obvious question. Do you think people don't like you or your conservative views because they run counter to reality? Do you think you couldn't argue with fellow students because your argument left out a lot of information to come to a conclusion. In other words, maybe your just assholes. I mean really, I can disagree and get along with anybody, but conservatives like this drive me nuts. They are skewering a teacher, probably ruining his career because they don't like the idea of a teacher, teaching how to think and question. I met some flack. I was told I was ignorant and that I had no idea of the horrors they had to endure at the hands of the liberal intelligencia. Was I suggesting that liberals were smarter than conservatives? To their brand of conservatism, I replied, yes. Why? It's been my experience that liberals are more open minded, enjoy learning and gathering and processing information. These guys were content to hold the hands over their children's ears and shout la la la la la la la when anyone says something "unfortunate." Like Jefferson owning slaves among other truths. They were content with their ideology, one based on faith more than fact. Liberals of my stripe on the other hand, research, digest and form opinions based on factual accumulation of data. We are even willing to admit, upon learning more and more, that we may have been wrong about something.
I didn't hear from them after that.

The media does not bully Christianity, nor do judges or the ACLU for that matter. Retail stores are not anti-Christian because they choose a different holiday greeting than the one some people prefer. The media printing stories about a controversial painting of the Virgin Mary with dung used as paint doesn't mean they are praising, approving or promoting the content or criticizing Christianity. The media not printing controversial cartoons that have some muslims taking to the streets in violent protest is the prudent thing to do and I fail to see how it's an example of the press bullying Christians. When Thomas Jefferson was elected president, some hid their bibles in wells and under floor boards convinced that they would soon be confiscated due to Jefferson's secular nature and belief in a separation of church and state. How silly they appear to be to us now. Yet this idea persists. Somehow, some claim, the dominant religion and influence over the land is being hampered by non-believers. It's as if people were picketing churches on Christmas day. A survivor of a Nazi death camp could tell us a thing or two about what religious persecution and bullying is. Be thankful you have the freedom to worship as your conscience dictates and stop trying to bully people into believing that you can't.

Again and again I read and hear Republicans defend Bush's policies by trotting out accusations that Clinton did the same thing. Lately I hear that Clinton also sold our ports to foreign countries, this of course relates to the deal about to go through that will allow a government owned company of the United Arab Emerites purchase and run 21 of our ports. First I have to point out the obvious. Republicans have often been overly cautious when it came to matters of security. They also have been known to have issues with government owned companies of any stripe. Yet there are supporters of this deal who are Republican and Bush supporters. All the while Dems are being accused of being hypocrites for not supporting it. This brings up another issue. That if Clinton did it, we as Dems must have loved it! That's not correct. Most liberals I know in fact, aren't Clinton fans. He erred, on policy, on fund raising, on health care and gays in the military, sided with Republicans too often and helped gut welfare. Those are just issues that the political polar opposites disagree on. There are many that all of us can agree on, such as lying about his affair, his last second presidential pardons, etc. So as some Republicans are prone to do in any debate, they insist on attacking motives of critics instead of looking at the merit of the arguments being presented. It's easy for Dems to go down that road by defending Clinton by pointing out the differences. It's important to stay on point.
Can we all agree it's bad that our ports and some roadways as well as maintenance on the jets we fly on all operated by foreign owned businesses? Isn't it prudent to at the very least use American owned companies for matters that may directly affect matters of national security? And I'm not giving a green light for Haliburton to be running everything though I'm sure Cheney would love that. But some Republicans are so shocked that we're the one's who brought this up! Liberal talk radio has been talking about this for weeks, and Democrats on the hill were the ones who objected to this first. Some are so shocked they have actually begun defending something that flies in the face of conservative thought. That's my favorite oxymoron, next to compassionate conservative. Lou Dobb's, to his credit has been vigorously attacking this horrible idea despite being threatened, through his boss CNN, by the government of the UAE by no longer offering themselves to their network. CNN has told them to go fly a kite. This ports thing is just a bad idea. And it's the tip of the ice berg. Our ports and our aircraft are not secure. Our National Guard is guarding the wrong nation and our borders are as porous as ever. By the way I have a solution for all that.

Bring our National guard home, increase their number by offering incentives similar to the GI bill and ensuring their duties won't involve their deployment to a foreign land, ever. Increase the Coast Guard with similar incentives. Divert funds from our standing military and shrink it (just like Rummy wants to do). Give port authority, all of it, to the Coast Guard, border security to the National Guard, with more funding to border states. Ports should inspect each and every container that comes into the country. Let me remind you, capitalism should take a back seat to security. Stop giving aid to Mexico unless they begin taking care of their citizenry and clean up their act. If we need to build a wall, maybe we should. The national Guard should be utilized to secure possible terrorist targets such as chemical factories, and power plants. Citizen soldiers would be more like a revolving police force, spending time on active duty and working in the private sector.

I bet my liberal ideas would shock some conservatives eh?

Don't make the assumption that liberals behave like conservatives do. Time and time again the conservative's only defense is to call liberals for being hypocritical for criticizing Republicans by bringing up the sins of previous Democrats. By assuming that liberals constantly defended these transgressions is false. Plenty of us were shamed by Clinton, plenty of us didn't agree with a lot of his policies and fund raising techniques. This is the last great myth to bust about Democrats and blind allegiance to their party. The rise of the Republican party can be directly linked to the allegiance they have been willing to show towards their party. The decline in the Democratic party can also be linked to a willingness to disagree with our party's leadership. The only reasons? Of course not. There are other factors involved. But for the sake of argument I think it's safe to say that liberals are more inquisitive than conservatives. I think it's also safe to say we are more open minded and willing to expose our selves to different things. Conservatives tend not to. They have a much smaller comfort zone. This explains the willingness to believe that criticism towards Republicans has no merit. That there is a liberal media bias that is controlling the minds of the citizenry. To them, they are right and we are wrong, therefor any resistance must be due to us being fools of the elite establishment. There has to be some sinister plot lurking behind every lie exposed or crime committed or even mild criticism of the president. Though I do believe there was a well orchestrated effort to bring Clinton down, I still found his behavior abhorrent. So even this last petty attempt at defending their leaders bad governance to the critics on the left, is shallow. Back at them. If conservatives look hard enough at Bush and co. or better yet, if Bush were a Democrat he would have been impeached by now. But the is not. Though his actions against the constitution and the shame he has brought to the country far far exceeds those of Clinton, he is a Republican. So that makes it different. It's ok because he's on their team and they will blindly follow him.