Finding something in common is the essence of 'pragmatism,' because that offers the possibility of finding something else that works for all.

I grew up in the Midwest, but I haven't been back there in a long time, and I have no desire to go back. It's a great place, if you happen to be white and come from the right side of the railroad tracks, are not poor.

I've been away so long now that it makes me nervous to go back to places where everyone looks just like me. Lakoff cannot be talking about Milwaukee, ranked in the 'Black Commentator' as the worst place to be black or Indiana, happy to send its youth to Iraq as canon fodder.

However, that is where I learned to hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Rather, a good American should deny reality by being positive, at all costs.

Even 'Catcher in the Rye' saw the phoneys for what they are. If cognitive psychology promotes snake oil, give me Freud instead, with his respect for Greek tragedy. Life is too short to try to live out someone else's sales pitch.

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If Lakoff lived west of WI or IL, he was living in an eastern state, NOT a midwest state!!! Anything south or east of that area is a southern state. I am in the north center of this nation in the bluest of blue states, and it IS the "midwest" and Lakoff's "values" that discuss religion and politics together are so far off base here that it's an alien concept. In the stoic area I live and where I grew up, religion was never discussed anyway, and most certainly it's never, ever discussed in connection with politics!

WHY are people talking about religion and politics as though they are connected?!?!? They are NOT connected!!! The Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment to give us freedom OF and freedom FROM religion!!! Religious dialogue belongs in houses of worship, NOT in the realm of politics or on television on political infotainment shows or infotainment news on MSM!!!

Discussing religion and politics together makes us all fall into the neoCon trap of judgemental attitudes that say Dems don't have any "values" and that puts Dems in the position of defense, and no one listen to any progressive ideas if they're listening to defensive answers to judgemental questions or progressive answers to judgemental statements. They've already made up their minds and they will not listen anyway. We saw that happen in the "debates" of '04, in particular, and while King Georgie Boy has/had the verbal skills of a cretin with a low IQ, he still won the day because he could repeat his mantras of "terra and fear" - scare tactics to make sheeples who can't think or analyze for themselves vote for him - and against their own best interests. (And, of course, there was the questionable results from e-voting machines in OH and FL.... 2000 was not an election; he was Selected by the Supreme Court. He was not "re"-elected in '04 because he wasn't elected in 2000.)

Lakoff needs to get over the neoCon trap he's fallen into of discussing religion and politics together. It's a fatal trap guaranteed to make Dems lose elections and keep neoCons ignorant and unreceptive to ideas that can't be put on a bumper sticker.

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Endless national debt? Pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation? Building bigger and bigger bombs? A richer and richer plutocracy? Greater medical spending for one of the poorest health care systems in the developed world? Growing poverty? Greater destruction of the ecosphere? Wipe out more non-human species? More air, water, land pollution and desertification? Etc., etc., etc.

That's the Republican party platform since Barry Goldwater.

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The idea here is not to force any version of religion on the US. What many of us are appalled at is the religious right's hijacking of the "values" conversation. And we mean to step into the space that they have claimed as their sole domain and to push back.

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Spiritual Activism Conferences in Berkeley, Ca. July 20-23, 2005

Conference Goals:
Begin the process of creating the strategy and program for The Nework of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), which will:

1. Challenge the misuse of God and religion by the Religious Right

2. Challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism of the advanced industrial societies (first and foremost in the U.S. and Canada), and replace it with a NEW BOTTOM LINE (so that institutions are judged efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological consciousness, and to the extent that they maximize our capacities to respond to the universe with awe and wonder)

3. Build an alliance between secular, religious and "spiritual but not religious" progressives--in part by challenging the anti-religious biases in parts of the liberal culture (while acknowledging the legitimacy of anger against those parts of the religious world that have embodied authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic practices and attitudes).

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Where is the conference on surviving Peak Oil? What's going to happen to all the Americans who are totally medication dependent.....when do they start stockpiling? The common ground we will all find is survival, baby!

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Though I'll tell you that without Cooke County, IL would have gone to Bush in a landslide in both 2000 and 2004 like he did Indiana and Missouri. And Wisconsin was so close both times. WI or IL is as good as MO and IA and even the Dakotas and Montana if you look closely at the actual makeup of each state's results. Lakoff's book makes it clear that following the polls and letting the rightwing media and the GOP pick the battleground states is a terrible mistake for Democrats to make.

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