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SOME TIME AGO I wrote a series of posts on a piece of "conservative" propaganda about an economics professor who failed an entire class.

I put the word "conservative" in quotes above, because I don't believe that the message in the email was actually representative of conservative values.

There's a game being played around the whole idea of "conservative" in this country.

The good, normal American citizens who consider themselves conservatives are being told, by talk radio, Fox news, Tea Party lobbyists, and all those forwarded emails, that being a conservative means selling yourself and your children out to Wall Street and big wealth.

But I digress.

Though only a little bit.

Because the same people who are misleading America about what it means to be a conservative are doing the same misleading about liberals.

A reader just forwarded me another email which begins with a similar riff on the same theme. [read more]

THIS IS THE COMPLETION OF A TWO-PART post, which I interrupted to disagree with Rachel Maddow and John Stewart on a closely related question.

In the first part, I...

1. Pointed out that the title of the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" was factually false,
2. Asked why, then, Republicans had chosen to try to mislead the American people, and
3. Suggested that the answer to that question lay in the fact that, as humans, we use language in two distinct ways, for two distinct purposes.

These two uses of language can be called: [read more]

I'M GOING TO TAKE TIME out to disagree with two people I greatly admire.

Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart each took time on their respective programs to reprimand Democratic Representative Steve Cohen for a speech he gave on the House floor Tuesday night.

Both Maddow and Stewart are "reality-based" people.

Each of them, in their own way, fights a noble battle for reason, civility, and small-t truth in public discourse.

So I was at first surprised, and then intrigued, when they both exhibited a sort of knee-jerk response to Cohen's remarks.

This is what Cohen said:

They say it's a "government takeover of health care"—a Big Lie: just like Goebbels.

You say it enough—you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie—and eventually, people believe it.

Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing.

SORRY FOR MY recent absence from the mull—I've had a virus, which has kept me from my usual schedule.

The topic that brings me back is the recent revelation about the Republican attempt to repeal the health care bill.

One of the ongoing themes at the daily mull has been the deep connection between spirituality, politics, and reality-contact.

This bill, or rather its title, serves as a perfect case study of the problems we face as a nation in that regard.

As you probably know by now, Republicans titled the bill the..

Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act

As you also probably know, they back up the claim in the bill's title by citing the Congressional Budget Office, as the source of their estimate that the bill will cost 650,000 lost jobs. [read more]

A WORD TO MY ultra-conservative friends:

Many people are having difficulty seeing the connection between your hyped-up rhetoric of recent years and the shooting last Saturday that killed six people and injured Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others.

There's good reason for that difficulty, and it speaks well of the American people—but there is a connection, just not the one we might expect.

The connection we expect, and rightfully reject, is causal.

It's the idea that somehow Sarah Palin putting Democrats in the cross hairs of a rifle, or Sharron Angle's thinly veiled threats about people arming themselves and turning to "second amendment remedies" if they lost at the polls directly caused this shooting.

The evidence for such claims seems thin at the moment, and will probably stay that way. [read more]

I WAS PART OF AN INTERESTING conversation on Facebook the other day, and it led to an even more interesting bit of research.

A friend had posted a link to the definitions of "American" in the Dictionary of Capital Letters and had received several comments.

One of those comments accused those who agreed with the Democrats on income tax rates for the wealthy of waging "class warfare".

I responded:

I question your use of the phrase "class warfare". I don't see anything adversarial (let alone war-like) about suggesting that those who reap disproportionate rewards because of the structure of our system have a responsibility to make a disproportionate contribution back to that system, and especially to the way it takes care of those who often work the hardest for disproportionately small rewards.

The top few percent in this country benefit immeasurably from living in a country with high education values, with a healthy populace, with less poverty, etc, and they benefit immeasurably from the economic freedoms and privileges the country provides for them.

Holding a fellow citizen responsible to do their fair part is not adversarial or war-like, it's a matter of respecting them as full fellow-citizens, and not just writing them off as leeches, whom we expect to take without giving back.

No one is suggesting the guillotine, or even eliminating great wealth--we're merely treating our very wealthy fellow citizens with the respect of asking them to play a part commensurate with their ability and rewards.

The other person replied that "class warfare" was not his invention, but the phrase used by Marx and his followers to describe their agenda for the rich to pay their fair share.

This piqued my interest. [read more]

THOSE OF YOU WHO have been following this series will recall that in the previous post I suggested that the question of whether humans are bad in some sense depends on our model of morality.

But before looking at the main models of morality, we probably should ask why we need morality at all.

This is a particularly interesting question in light of current political alignments in America.

The conservative coalition is, at the moment, thoroughly divided on the question. [read more]