Books on tape

Just got back from a two-day road trip to Louisiana to attend the funeral of my sister's father-in-law. Before leaving I popped into the library to check out their books on CD section and picked up three that I have been wanting to read but haven't had time.
The fist was Jimmy Carter's "Our Endangered Values" which is an indictment of the radical, fundamentalist conservatives who have taken over our government - through their control and domination of the Republican Party.
Carter is an exceedingly decent man, a southern Baptist and Sunday school teacher who 30 years ago was considered to be a moderate, if not conservative, Democrat thus drawing the ire of the liberal wing of the Party and prompting the 1980 primary challenge by Ted Kennedy that ironically served only to weaken Carter and usher in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Today, of course, Carter is firmly on the liberal side as Republicans have shifted the country's political discourse sharply to the right.
Listening to the book, what struck me the most was the realization of just how intellectually shallow and faith-based the conservative movement is. The hard, cold facts of most issues are clearly on the liberal side.
Another book I picked up at the same time and which I am only half-way through listening to is John Dean's "Conservatives Without Conscience."
Dean was a protege of Barry Goldwater and legal counsel to Richard Nixon, but today he is thoroughly disgusted by what he calls the authoritarian strain of conservatism which has infected his old party like a cancer.

The British Are Leaving! The British Are Leaving!

Tony Blair finally decides it’s time to cut-n-run.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday announced plans for the imminent withdrawal of around 1,600 of his country's troops from Iraq.

Too bad it’s far too late to salvage his legacy as anything other than Bush’s lapdog. But now even Blair has had enough and is ready to pull the plug on the Iraq debacle.
Of course, they aren’t playing it up that way. They are simply doing what we should be doing - declaring victory and going home. But the level of denial among Bush supporters is so strong that they are willing to believe anything the Bush administration tells them including the wacky notion that this British Withdrawal (Is) A Good Sign.

More scientific consensus

Golly, they agree with Al Gore!

The board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation's leading general science organization, yesterday issued a consensus statement declaring global climate change "a growing threat to society."
The board's statement attributes Earth's recent warming to human activity, noting: "The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years."
The board called for "rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions," warning: "Delaying action to address climate change will increase the environmental and societal consequences as well as the costs."

Perhaps they were all brainwashed by watching An Inconvenient Truth.