The Reagan romanticism from the right continues, even though Reagan, by today's GOP standards, wouldn't be welcome.  They like to beseech him, but they wouldn't like him.

But no matter.  In the outrage-fueled war to keep Americans excitable and hostile to anything the GOP opposes, facts have no place in such a discourse.  They're pesky, and the more facts you have, the more arrogant and wrong you are.  That's where we are today.

Also where we are today is in a place where Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) is proposing to dump Ulysses S. Grant -- our 18th president and decorated civil war hero -- from the $50 bill in favor of Ronald Reagan.  McHenry's rationale:

President Reagan was a modern day statesman, whose presidency transformed our nation's political and economic thinking. Through both his domestic and international policies he renewed America's self confidence, defeated the Soviets and taught us that each generation must provide opportunity for the next.

Let's keep in mind that McHenry is a guy who used to say he doesn't have enough evidence one way or the other to know if Obama is an American citizen.  After a fairly heavy amount of blowback, he softened his position.

Oh, and one last set of pesky facts, before I forget.  Bill Clinton left office with slightly higher approval ratings than Reagan as well as a balanced budget.  But, you know, details.

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In what Bizzaro World can you group Al Gore - alleged enviro-lunatic, evil hoax-foister, raging liberal - and Bill Gates - capitalist, American business icon, technologist - together?

In this one.

Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging reports on Bill Gates's (yes, that Bill Gates) TED speech in which Gates describes his plan to get everyone - the entire world - to zero climate emissions.   This isn't about reduction, making slight changes to your lifestyle, being less of a carbon polluter: Gates is talking about zero.  Strangely, everyone who pshawed Al Gore is suddenly listening to Bill Gates.  If Gates's weight comes to bear on the climate issue, it will vindicate what I've been saying all along: that the issue was a political one (as everything is these days), not scientific, and that Al Gore was entirely the wrong guy to breach the topic with the American public.

Some highlights from Gates's talk, as reported by Steffen:

He reckons that because population is going to continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy.

and

For most people, a ten percent or twenty percent improvement sounds like a big deal -- in large part because the improvements they're most familiar with involve giving things up. When they do encounter it, the idea of "zero" looms like a giant wall of deprivation in front of them. The idea that zero might not be the end of the good life, but in fact the beginning of a much better way of life, is simply inconceivable to the vast, vast majority of them. When we talk zero, we sound crazy.

But when Bill Gates talks zero, he sounds visionary. Gates, whatever else he did Friday, just made the most important idea on the planet mainstream credible. That's a big, big deal.

and

The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.

We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving efficiency.

The obvious prediction, of course, is this, and I'll stake it here: deniers will immediately blackball Gates, a once-great man succumbing to age and a slackened mind, a once-strong American capitalist having his ideology shaken due to his philanthropic work and his waning willpower to defind that which made him wealthy.  He has his, they'll say, so he can afford this fantasy.  The rest of us who have to foot the bill for this hoax can't.

And, with the swift pens of our national media news-based entertainment industry, in the blink of an eye, Gates could be politicized and marginalized in the climate debate.  Zero emissions?  Smarter cities?  A new definition of prosperity? Nuclear power? What?

It's the very risk of all that Gates could lose that makes his move incredibly important.  I've never been one to applaud Microsoft or its products, but I am staggered, in the best way possible, at what Gates has done here.

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"For the best democracy money can buy."

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Given the liberal stigmas that adorn much of Pixar's work, who would have thought there is a socially conservative thread running through some of their most seminal work, most notably the films directed by Brad Bird?

There is something conservative about much of Pixar's output, but when I say conservative, I mean a small “c” conservative that sees the world along the same lines as Edmund Burke: “A disposition to preserve.” I'm going to call this “social conservatism,” by which I don't mean the religious or moral conservatism of modern political discourse, but a conservatism that is interested in preserving traditional social features - in particular, the idea of “family” - but which sees such preservation as ultimately futile. The family will dissolve, eventually, and so we must do what we can to keep it going as long as possible. It is a worldview based not on progression but on loss.

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Foreign Policy asked their top Global Thinkers to recommend their favorite – or most important – books.  The responses range from children’s books to biographies to policy manuals to fantasy novels.  Here’s the full list of their suggestions.

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Here's your winner, from Ann Sensenbrenner:

One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd's eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn't seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic.

Although I have to say I still find this runner up funnier.

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I voted Republican in every election since this last one.  Since making that decision, I've been called a liberal (which I am not) more times than I can remember, both in jest and with venom.  I've been told I am a bleeding heart, someone who doesn't appreciate the value of personal achievement and hard work, and someone who believes government should be larger, not smaller.  I've been called far worse, epithets commenting on my perceived affinity for our current President's racial origin.  Basically, I've been told that I'm everything the modern GOP opposes, because as their problem-child poster-boy GWB says, you're either with them or against them.

I suppose, then, I'm against them, only now it's occurring to me as to why.  And this is on a true ideological level, not the level that makes such a decision easy.  Listening to Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin is too easy, and quite frankly unfair: anyone can use the bombastic morons as examples of why something is broken and stupid.  For more rational folks, it runs deeper than that.  It has to.  We're talking live-perspective framework value systems here, not who makes the best margarita.

For quite some time since making the egregious decision not to vote GOP in 2008, I've tried to explain to people that I'm a moderate, a centrist, but in today's polarized, polemic view of social and fiscal stances, moderates are looked at as Libertarian loonies and relegated to either irrelevance or Leper Island.  It's hard to fit in when you have to wear a red or blue label to do so.  And in my experience, most people who claim to also be moderates are anything but, and a quick five-minute conversation usually reveals the plumbing.

I do believe in smaller government, but I don't believe privatization run amok or unregulated corporate GDP engines are the answer. 

I am smart enough to know free markets aren't always free.  I don't trust corporate interests as far as I can throw them.

I believe there is some form of climate change problem despite the actuaries flinging shit at one another over the data and its proclivity to be shared openly -- or not.  I do question exactly how much humanity's occupation of this planet is contributing to this.  My position in this debate is susceptible to the whims of new evidence, data and discoveries.

I think that overt consumerism and greed was the ballroom partner to predatory lending and loan schemes that securitized so many mortgages that made it impossible for banks to know who they owed and who owed them. 

I believe that Obama's fiscal policies are trending off course but he's inherited a hell of a mess and everyone seems OK with ignoring that. 

I believe that in order to affect meaningful change -- of which time and history will be the judge and jury -- there will be pain and gnashing of teeth and calls for military coups so that the superwealthy entrenched firmly in the beltway's ass can remain so.  I believe like everything that requires hardline change, difficult decisions have to be made, and difficult decisions, by definition, mean people get pissed off.  Anytime someone has to look out for the long-term welfare of a group people will be pissed.  That's leadership.

As I'm learning, in the two-node political spectrum we have today, I don't really fit in.  I've spent the last year watching all sorts of news channels and reading blogs of all stripes, and it finally occurred to me that maybe, during what I consider my political awakening, my old party moved away from me as much as or more than I moved away from it.

So it's apropos that today I come across The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan saying he's leaving the right.  His reasons are his reasons, and his claim that he's been resistant to partisanship and cliquery is certainly true, in my experience.  Nonetheless, his manifesto as to why he's leaving nicely crystallizes what I've been struggling with for quite some time.

So here goes.  I thank Mr. Sullivan for putting words to the thoughts and frustration I've been feeling lately, but at some point, you've got to look it in the eye and call it what it is.

Below is Sullivan's manifesto in its entirety.

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I'm not alone.

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