Embrace Your Extremism!

Sean Fenley has an article on Dandelion Salad, a wonderful compilation of progressive views. He wrote about how values consistent with a civilization with a social contract would be considered extreme now. How even Jesus Christ preaching to help the sick, poor and vulnerable would be called "radical" and "Marxist".

We have to embrace (or stand up to the extremist label) and push the discourse further to the left. Or even the center, circa 1970. Nixon would be a radical in these times. My reply to his piece:

Sean, you are so right. Civilized values and the societal good are held to be extreme left-wing views in the MSM. During the health care reform debate, Bill Moyers of PBS’ Journal program (sadly canceled) had knowledgeable professionals speak about Medicare-for-all and single payer plans. Maureen Dowd called such discussion that of “the left wing fringe.”

Armed militia men marching on DC on the anniversary of Tim McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing are not referred to as extremists but merely as “exercising their first and second amendment rights.”

In certain states which allow the carrying of unconcealed weapons, armed people are testing their rights by entering such common areas as Starbucks stores. I should say, “armed white people” because I could not imagine any other race getting away with such privilege.

Propaganda by the corporate state is funding information now.

Today the NYT is running an op-ed piece written by Kris Kobach, one of the constructors of the Arizona “guilty until proven innocent” bill, who was an adviser to AG Ashcroft. There is no opposing view to pick apart the constitutional holes in his logic, unless you count Linda Greenhouse's article a few days before, "Breathing While Illegal"

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

Greenhouse is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and has covered SCOTUS for years. She is afraid that the current court will not strike down such law as unconstitutional. With good reason. In 1982, a similar law in Texas was struck down. At that time, a young John Roberts was an assistant to Texas Attorney General William French Smith. He wrote that such an action was "judicial activism." He is now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.