Michael Lerner on the election

...[E]ven though the huge amounts of money spent by the Republicans didn't guarantee them electoral victory, it was only because of equally large amounts of money spent by the Democrats, and the sources for some of that money are the corporate and financial interests who will expect (and receive) real consideration from policy shapers to protect their interests. It is the power of that money and its shaping of the media discourse that helps marginalize spiritual progressive ideas like building a world based on love, generosity, social justice, peace and environmental sanity. The absence of that money for progressive voices is a major part of why more decent and principled people don't enter into politics in the first place. So, don't let anyone tell you that the 2012 election proved that money wasn't important - it was often central to shaping the choices we'd have when we voted....


http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12655-liberals-and-progressives-happy-but-not-elated-about-obamas-re-election

Leftists Explain Things to Rebecca Solnit

**If you like this piece, please contribute to ReaderSupportedNews.org, from whom I lifted it**

Leftists Explain Things to Me
By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch
27 September 12

     Dear Allies, Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I've come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

     O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we're talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.

Leftists Explain Things to Me

The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they're hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.

     The same has been true of other politicians: the recent governor of my state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in some respects quite good on climate change. Yet it was impossible for me to say so to a radical without receiving an earful about all the other ways in which Schwarzenegger was terrible, as if the speaker had a news scoop, as if he or she thought I had been living under a rock, as if the presence of bad things made the existence of good ones irrelevant. As a result, it was impossible to discuss what Schwarzenegger was doing on climate change (and unnecessary for my interlocutors to know about it, no less figure out how to use it). More...

Welcome Wonketters!

I have very little new to say that I haven't already posted on Wonkette.com (http://intensedebate.com/people/RedStatePinko), but if you want to see my personal favorite of my OLD posts, see http://redstatepinko.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_archive.html (of special interest to left-wing intellectual property owners)

Fellow recovering revolutionaries, prepare to fall off the wagon

I haven't found anything here that I can disagree with. No interventions, please. http://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/join-now/

Love thine enemies..

Here's something from Truthout that has an appropriate ring of Truth:

Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers, Not Called Them Racists

Friday 02 October 2009

by: Mike Elk, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

While we may not agree with the teabaggers, they are not all crazy.

A few weeks ago, I attended the teabagger protests in DC. The thing I noticed the most about the folks there was that, for the most part, they were friendly, nice, hardworking people. Sure, there were some crazies; sure, there were some racists. For the most part, though, they looked like the type of folks I grew up with in the labor movement, coming to DC to enjoy a protest and spend the rest of the weekend taking in some monuments and museums. These weren't rich suburbanites; the teabaggers I saw were mainly poor people, whose trip to DC were probably the only the vacation they would be able to afford this year.

[more at link above]

I'm not quite as lazy as I look

I haven't posted here in a long time, obviously, but here's a recent comment from me on Openleft.com. You can search there for commenter redstatepinko if you have any reason to wonder what i've been thinking.

Three hopeful themes on on which to mastu--oops I mean meditate:

1) Many people who currently answer opinion polls in a "conservative" fashion are more persuadable now than they have been for long time, for reasons that are easy to imagine. And many of them just voted for a "socialist," who we hope will be persuading them on a regular basis from his bully pulpit. This will at least move some of them closer to the center.

2) Obama and his team are not merely good message-crafters, but good temperature-takers as well, and have proven their ability focus on obtainable goals, thus avoiding the possibility of a Gingrich-style midterm ambush. Pragmatism need not be identical to "center-rightism," because...

3) ...There is every reason to believe that Obama is sincere in his dare-to-dream hopeyness. This means that he will have to be receptive to well-crafted arguments for progressive policies that are clearly in the national interest.

Do as we say, not as we do

Hey, I DO love that goddam america. It's high on the list of my six favorite countries. We ("they"?) have our hypocritical moments, however...

Ann Wright | From War to Peace - Japanese Style
http://www.truthout.org/article/from-war-peace-japanese-style
Writing for Truthout, Ann Wright discusses her experience with Japanese peace: "After World War II, Japanese men (and women) have been spared the obligation of serving in any wars. Because their Constitution (written by Americans) says war is not the Japanese national doctrine for resolving international disputes or for ensuring their national security, the Japanese people have been given 60 years of peace."