The first outrage of the new regime
Yahoo! News - House GOP Changes Rules to Protect DeLay

Majority Rules: A Couple Big Bummers...From The Conversationalist website comes dire predictions in David Taffel's essay, "Misunderstanding Socrates and Democracies". He reminds us that Socrates was executed not by an authoritarian regime, but by a "restored Athenian democracy". Socrates' rhetorical questions had given Athenian politicos just too much trouble; Socrates understood that the majority in a democracy can be manipulated and deluded into a false sense of security. Fed praise and chauvinist pride, a people can become oblivious to real dangers. (This reminded me of an observation of Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, where he points out that we in America seem to be more concerned with gay marriage than with nuclear bombs.) Mr. Taffel also quotes John Adams as saying, "...democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts , and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

May the Pendulum Swing... As an antidote to all the so-called "moral values" that are nearly drowning us in America, there is a current of secular thought being rediscovered with two new books: Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers. Mr. Harris is concerned with the terrible danger of blind religious faith, characterizing it in catastrophic terms. In an interview on the Amazon.com website, Mr. Harris makes the statement that "...with false certainty, anything is possible. This covers the Hitlers and Stalins of the world as well." He draws a very interesting distinction between faith and mysticism. He defines mysticism as "an empirical and highly rational enterprise".
Perhaps there is an antidote to all the fundamentalist thought that is now flexing its muscles.
More on this subject at another time. I've bought both books and want to dig in some first.

Face it: We've been utterly "terrorized"....The intent of the 9/11 attacks was to make Americans afraid and to act out that fear.
The results of the Presidential election demonstrate that we are doing just that. We picked the guy who has promised to make America "safer"...We should have been much more careful about what we wished for. Overwhelming force just does not equal "safer".
Americans were also terrorized by the prospect of gay marriage, and while the President made some curious comments about the possibility of individual states' granting some sort of "civil unions" to gay couples, the overall thrust of Republican policy has been overwhelmingly and ruthlessly against anything of the sort.