…sees, much to his surprise, liberals actually working together.

…”Do we not care that our president lies, cheats, and steals as long as he bullies the rest of the world and the weakest amongst us at home? I hope not.”

…to settle ourselves, find our strength, and stay positive:

“We are part of a huge movement right now and that in and of itself is quite incredible. Breathe… Relax… Feel the energy in the air because there really is a feeling of unity floating around.”

…continues the track about defending the American-ness of city dwellers and blue-staters.

…a quasi-abstruse model, complete with charts and graphs, for learning “how to deprogram yourself from the cult of consumption.”

…the Dems’ “base” regions are the dynamic, growing areas:

“Virtually all of the globally competetive sectors of the American economy, film, television, music and other media, software, financial and legal services, etc. are concentrated in Blue America. The Reddish portions of the country are living off federal subsidies, tarrif barriers, and military spending. It’s not a coincidence that the most dynamic portions of Dixie (the much-rumored “New South”) are some of the Bluest parts (you also have some desperately poor, mostly black, rural counties) and growing Bluer.”

It’s an oversimplification, but with its points. It helps explain why Bush’s favorite industries are land- and resource-based (oil, mining, waste management, agribiz, etc.); while the Kerry camp’s talked about high-tech promises for the future.

People who live in the “blue states” are real Americans too!

…“101 Points to Ponder Before Taking to the Polls.”

…progressives learn from political strategist George Lakoff and unite behind a permanent publicity drive to reframe the language of US politics.

…American politics will only be healed when sane people take back the Republican Party:

“In a very real sense, the health of our democracy may hinge on the conscience of Republican moderates. Only they can keep their party from being hijacked by crony capitalists and gay-and-feminist-bashing evangelicals. If they stand by and let Cheney reinterpret the free market as a playground for corporations who need not worry about competitive bidding or honest accounting, if they let the fiscal conservatism that was once the hallmark of their party be drowned in red ink, if they stand by and watch the Patriot Act be used to squelch dissent, if they let neoconservative advisers hand our foreign policy over to a militarized corporate elite, then there will be no stopping the continued descent of American politics into the slough of megalomania.”

…six months ago that the politicos’ attempt to instill “the image of Decisive, Steadfast Bushâ„¢ as the nation’s last line of defense against untameable chaos” was already in trouble:

“…Instead of being saved for the closing kick of the election campaign, the War on Terrorâ„¢ theme and Decisive, Steadfast Bushâ„¢ persona have had to be trotted out one time after another — to the point where they begin to be no longer comforting, but stale. In fact, as they have metamorphosed through Dubya’s personal neuroses into repeated claims of being a ‘war president,’ he seems increasingly less like Winston Churchill and more like Captain Queeg.”

If anything, this process has accelerated.

…in the LA Times (free registration required) against “Bush’s Empty Rhetoric on Democracy”:

“Bush and his supporters act as if anti-Americanism is simply the necessary and worthwhile price we pay for our principled advocacy of freedom everywhere. The truth is that anti-Americanism has prevented us from consistently advocating democracy throughout the world. And the inconstancy of our belief in democracy — which the citizens of pro-American dictatorships everywhere have noticed and exploited — makes anti-Americanism all the worse. There may be a way out of this dilemma, but preaching the universality of democracy and practicing otherwise is surely not it.”

Of course, this is hardly the first administration to play power-politics under the guise of “promoting democracy.” The story of the Cold War era is awash with the names of brutal despots and murderous regimes who invoked the sacred mantle of anti-Communism, and received oodles of US support in return.

It’s probably not “our freedom” that anti-American troublemakers loathe, but something else.

…the Republicans might be due for a reckoning and rebuilding era similar to that of the post-Carter Democrats.

…a similarity between the already-infamous White House snub against “the reality-based community” and an Orwell line about “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”

…Bush’s continued election viability to his appeal to “our lizard brains,” manipulating the populace into a pre-rational state that leaves us “shrouded in the fog of fear.”