Homegrown Democrat

By Garrison Keillor

I got the Audio Book for my trip north. It’s great! I’m definitely going to have to visit Minnesota someday. Of course I agree with it completely:
Chapters 1 - 4

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Something has gone seriously haywire with the
Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic
Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles
who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to
their communities, and supported the sort of prosperity
that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who
had vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the
paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the Flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of
D-Day, who made it okay for reasonable people to vote
Republican (even in the South), and he brought the Korean
War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway
System, declined to rescue the French colonial army
in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity,
in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished
mightily and higher education burgeoned and there was
a degree of plain decency in the country. Much too much
was made of Alger Hiss and the Hollywood Ten by lefties
with a bad case of the yips. Fifties Republicans were
giants compared to today’s. Richard-Nixon was the last
Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward
the-poor.

In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the
party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of
Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and
became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade
Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a
gang of pirates famed for bold symbolic forays that diverted
and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah,
such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan
who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long
Beach. The Willie Horton ads of 1988. The flogging of
the undeserving poor, the barely concealed racism, the
drumbeat of diatribes against The Gummint. The Nixon
moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by
a legion of angry white men who had risen to power on
pure punk politics, nasty, violent, borderline psychopath.
“Bipartisanship is another term for date rape,” says Grover
Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. ‘’I don’t want
to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the
size where I-can drag it into the bathroom and drown it
in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

Now you understand the #### I am in???

Are you in a minority up there?

Sadly, yes

So you don’t see any truth in what Keillor says?

I think he thinks he is funny. I think he thinks he is superior to we “poor-hating” Repubs

Do you see his any of his comment’s on how the Republican party has changed? My dad is an “Eisenhower-era” Republican & he’s very different than today’s right-wing Republican.

Mike, have you seen this website? More evidence for differences in rep/dem values in the “who gives” and “who gets” sections. Very useful:

http://www.opensecrets.org/
:)

I’ll check it out when I get back.

Finished the audio book on my trip to NV. It’s very good and very partisan (as you would expect from it’s title). It’s really his biography.

Clark - Garrison claims that the ambulance service is better in St. Paul than in the “Republican” suburbs because of all their tax cuts. Do you know if that might be true?

One thing that Garrison talked about is the odd marriage of the traditional big-business Republican with the religious right. My wife has often commented how strange she thought this was. Garrison articulates it very well. It is indeed a very strange marriage.

I live in a “republican” suburb, and it’s fine so far as I know. I suppose St. Paul might have better experienced ambulance personnel since all the animals live in St. Paul.

Another site to visit: calculate your loss. Try it with a birthdate of 1980.
http://corzine.senate.gov/Social%20Security/calc/index.html#

Corzine. Yeah, not biased opinions there

Well, in this case it’s a mathematical formula so that bias should be easy to spot if it’s there. Where is it? ???

Thats a very complicated formula they use there. ??? No matter WHAT you stick in there, it cuts the amount under the so called “Bush Plan” 16 percent. I read over their “Calculations and Assumptions” page. It did not explain anything much less how they arrived at the 16% reduction. In other words, its BS IMO. Besides all that, Dub has said that everything except increasing payroll tax is open for discussion. In other words, come up with a better idea, and he’ll listen to it.

Anybody??

TG

Quote (clark_griswold @ Mar. 24 2005,14:53)
I suppose St. Paul might have better experienced ambulance personnel since all the animals live in St. Paul.

What exactly do you mean by this? Looks like some of that "barely concealed racism" that Garrison Keillor refers to.

Well, TG, I got values ranging from 1 % (for 1950, various income assumptions) to 15 % (for 1980, var. inc. ass.). :)

Quote (Takayama @ Mar. 27 2005,03:13)
Quote (clark_griswold @ Mar. 24 2005,14:53)
I suppose St. Paul might have better experienced ambulance personnel since all the animals live in St. Paul.

What exactly do you mean by this? Looks like some of that "barely concealed racism" that Garrison Keillor refers to.

Yes, what exactly did you mean by this, Clark?

???

Maybe St. Paul is the wrong side of the tracks as they say in the south. My mother use to lock the doors on the car when we drove through those sections of town, if you know what I mean. I was in Rochester for a while and there were many similarities to the south in that town. I can’t speak for the rest of the state and am not implying anything about what Clark meant.

Quote (TomS @ Mar. 27 2005,08:43)
Quote (Takayama @ Mar. 27 2005,03:13)
Quote (clark_griswold @ Mar. 24 2005,14:53)
I suppose St. Paul might have better experienced ambulance personnel since all the animals live in St. Paul.

What exactly do you mean by this? Looks like some of that "barely concealed racism" that Garrison Keillor refers to.

Yes, what exactly did you mean by this, Clark?

???

I mean, there are more ex-Wisconsinites living in St. Paul.

See how racist I am?

And it's not implied. It's flagrant.