I believe in expertise. Dr. Van Lede at My Eye Doctor in Pelham is the best. I like to talk to knowledgeable people who know what they are talking about. Otherwise I can take small talk only for so long. I like to learn new things. Intellectual curiosity keeps me going.

 

July 10, 2013  · 

Shared with Your friends

We superficially serious people have to struggle to find connection and meaning in today's world. Shirking work in favor of the afternoon movie matinee or treating ourselves at 5 Guys no longer carries the excitement it used to. It's difficult to tell the difference between reality and filaments of our imagination. Thriving on cheap thrills is harder and harder because it seems that just about everything is cheap these days. We wouldn't know how to get seriously serious if our lives depended on it.

 . . . . if young people have no understanding of the vast bloodletting that was the Civil War, fought because of the country’s original sin of slavery, how can they navigate the current debates on race and reparations?

-Hugh Hewitt in the WaPost

Michael Tomasky

 Pay Attention to What You See: Donald Trump Is Losing His Marbles

If he keeps this up, he’ll drag the entire Republican Party down with him in 2024.

MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/GETTY IMAGES

Trump “dances” at the Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia on June 30.

This is the kind of topic about which liberals generally don’t want good news. They want to worry. They assign to their right-wing foes a strength and formidability that they never see on their own side (I’m often as guilty of this as anybody, I confess). They lack faith in the common sense and decency of the average voter. They want, on some level, to think, or at least to fear, that disaster is around the corner.

I rise today to fight that tendency. Yes, it’s early. Yeah, it’s premature. But I’m going to say: The signs I see so far? They suggest to me that Donald Trump (a) is going to win the GOP nomination and (b) stands a very good chance of leading his party to an epic wipeout next November.

Heather Cox Richardson

 But the Republican embrace of Moms for Liberty illustrates dramatically and to a wide audience how radical the party itself has become, threatening to turn away all but its extremist base. A strong majority of Americans oppose book banning: about two thirds of the general population and even 51% of Republicans oppose it, recognizing that it echoes the rise of authoritarians.

As historian Nicole Hemmer points out today for CNN, Moms for Liberty are indeed a new version of “a broader and longstanding reactionary movement centered on restoring traditional hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality” that in the U.S. included the women of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and segregationists who organized as “Restore Our Alienated Rights” (ROAR) in the 1970s. Hemmer observes: “The book bans, the curricula battles, the efforts to fire teachers and disrupt school board meetings—little here is new.”

In the past, a democratic coalition has come together to reject such extremism. If it does so again, the Republican marriage of elites to street fighters will crumble, leaving room for the country to rebuild the relationship between citizens and the government. When a similar realignment happened in the 1930s under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Republican Party had little choice but to follow.

 I drove thru Pepper Place today but it was so busy and hot I did not stop. I cruised thru the Southside, did not stop, but from the car revisited old haunts from the 70’s. I drove thru the Hardee’s on Valleydale and realized again why most Hardee’s have closed. I spent time at the Hoover B & N but was told the employee lady I like didn’t work there anymore. Then I went home.

 

Quick: If someone says "there is no there there," what comes to mind? Oakland, California? Mike Pence? East Texas? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? Lots of possibilities. You could easily get carried away these days.