GfS and Old Dude,
I'm not blindly loyal to any political party, and I do try to read and hear both/all sides of an issue - as long as the issue is important (not whether someone prefers Dijon mustard to "plain" mustard or whether the rhetoric of someone's pastor is flambuoyant ) and what's being said seems to be honest and fair.   
The problem I have with many right-wing talk shows and even many "news analysis" shows is that they deal in out-of-context sound or video clips, distort the facts, focus on trivial or tangential issues, and spend way too much time predicting what's going to happen next -- that is, when they're not engaging in lazy, biased, and sloppy "interpretation" of what current events (e.g., election results) "mean." (Case in point: Media 'pundits' declaring that election results over the past year or two show "anti-incumbent sentiment," when a lot of the data don't square with that interpretation and other results are easily attributable to other factors.)


olddude - PM
Date: 26 Aug 10 - 11:27 AM

What disturbs me is this. When there is a very good hardworking and caring person who happens to be Republican. The party anymore doesn't want that type. They have been pushed so far to the right that it gets more than disturbing.

My family especially my uncle is very close to Tom Ridge. He was the first homeland secretary. Tom left DC holding his nose. The guy was probably the best Gov Pennsylvania ever had .. and a very good decent person. He walked, did his job then left holding his nose .. Now why would that happen ..

I do agree that today's Republican Party bears little or no resemblance to the party of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Everett Dirksen, Tom Ridge, Gerald Ford, etc., - much less that of Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln.    But today's Democratic Party is far less liberal than that of Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, George McGovern, or Jimmy Carter.   The real progressives tend to vote Democratic because there's no chance of being represented in national office, or even most state offices, by any other party.   But even the Obama administration has pretty much relegated voices like Dennis Kucinich, Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders (Ind. - Vermont), etc. to the "fringe."

It's been said that Bill Clinton was the best Republican President we've had in recent decades, and I think that's a pretty accurate assessment.