The Difference Between a Tea Party “Patriot” and a Real Patriot, Allen Clifton, Forward Progressives, April 19, 2014

Republicans are great at coining a term and using it over and over and over and over and – well you get the point. It’s as if there’s a secret handbook only conservatives are given access to where they’re instructed which words to say and when to say them. Rich people aren’t wealthy, they’re “job creators.” Laws that legalize using religion to discriminate against others are “religious freedom” laws. Even when it comes to patriotism they act as if they’re the only ones who are patriotic. As if flying an American flag, putting a “God Bless America” bumper sticker on their vehicle and finishing sentences with “support our troops” instantly makes them patriotic.

Maddow Asks: ‘Why Do We Overlook Right-Wing Violence and Refuse to Call it Terrorism?’ Answer: Because They’re White, Chauncey DeVega, AlterNet, April 18, 2014

Domestic terrorism is an oxymoron in America when white folks are involved. Whiteness imagines itself as kind, benign, safe, neutral, normal, and good. “Terrorism” is something those “other people” do, i.e. the Muslims, or some other ambiguous cohort of black and brown people who “hate American values”. Whiteness and the white racial frame are possessed by an acute sense of historical amnesia as well. The most dangerous domestic terrorist organization in the history of the United States was the Ku Klux Klan, a group that killed thousands of black Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Open Thread: “Why Be A Neocon?…” Balloon Juice, April 19, 2014, comment by Patrick II

Neocons are “noble” liars. Their philosophy’s relationship to truth is based on the old gold, silver, iron, brass social classes of Plato’s republic, so measuring their success or failure in their own mind is by different standards than they allow us “brass” and “iron” citizens to see. We think that Iraq was a failure but for the true “gold” neocons, ie: Cheney, Krystal, Rumsfeld, Iraq was a success. They privatized the oil fields and put them back in the hands of large oil companies. They got Bush re-elected as a “war” president and kept his low tax policies, supreme court nominations and privitization policies in place for four more years. It only cost about 5,000 american lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, — prices in brass and iron they are willing to pay.

You will never get a true gold neocon to admit failure because by their secret, “noble” standards they have not.

Raising a Moral Child, Adam Grant, New York Times, April 11, 2014

Praise in response to good behavior may be half the battle, but our responses to bad behavior have consequences, too. When children cause harm, they typically feel one of two moral emotions: shame or guilt. Despite the common belief that these emotions are interchangeable, research led by the psychologist June Price Tangney reveals that they have very different causes and consequences.

Shame is the feeling that I am a bad person, whereas guilt is the feeling that I have done a bad thing. Shame is a negative judgment about the core self, which is devastating: Shame makes children feel small and worthless, and they respond either by lashing out at the target or escaping the situation altogether. In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behavior. When children feel guilt, they tend to experience remorse and regret, empathize with the person they have harmed, and aim to make it right.

Bob Dole says the GOP is way more conservative than it was even 20 years ago. He’s right. Chris Cillizza, Washington Post, April 23, 2014

Here’s Bob Dole on the current state of the Republican party: “I thought I was a conservative, but we’ve got some in Congress now who are so far right they’re about to fall out of the Capitol.”

So, is Dole, his party’s presidential nominee in 1996, right?

To answer that, you first need to understand the idea of “asymmetric polarization” — a fancy way of saying that while both parties have moved closer to their respective ideological poles in recent year, the Republican pole is far further to the right than the Democratic pole.

Photo credit: Nari Sin [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr.