Special Report | The Dumbing Down of American Politics: Week of August 26

• Tea Baggers, Fundamentalists, Bigots, and Other American Dumbasses of the New Millennium
• 7 New Items including:
  • Amerika’s Future is Death
  • Not Senseless, Not Random: The Deadly Mix of Race, Guns, & Madness
  • Extremism normalized
  • How to Think
  • George Lakoff | How Right-Wingers Scam People Into Buying Their Toxic Philosophy
  • The Biggest Problem With Traditional Schooling
  • Dark Ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment
  • George Monbiot | Right's Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by Too-Polite Left

David Culver, Ed., Evergreene Digest

Clay Bennett

Amerika’s Future is Death, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy

• “The day we see truth and do not speak is the day we begin to die.” - Martin Luther King
• Paul Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan. But unlike most who work for the plutocrats he's been able to detach from the madness.
• "Most Americans have a very small knowledge base and very large ideological preconceptions. Consequently, they cannot tell fiction from fact."-Paul Roberts
• Special Report | The Dumbing Down of American Politics: Week of July 1

Not Senseless, Not Random: The Deadly Mix of Race, Guns, & Madness, Rinku Sen, ColorLines

• But none of (what we need to do) will be likely unless, in our grief and fear, we also muster up clarity and outrage. Right now - before the public debate is recaptured by questions of which politician said what to whom.
• 60 Mass Shootings Since Tucson
• Sikh temple shooting sheds light on world of 'hate rock’
• Batman Shooter and His Psyche Drugs

Extremism normalized, Glenn Greenwald, Salon

• How Americans are efficiently trained to acquiesce to ideas once deemed so radical as to be unthinkable
• How propaganda is used in the U.S. to control it citizens
• Michele Bachmann's damaging innuendo
• How to Think

How to Think, Chris Hedges, Truthdig

• If universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek is more important than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then we become barbarians.
• Chris Hedges on The Alyona Show
• Special Report | The Dumbing Down of American Politics: Week of July 1
• George Lakoff | How Right-Wingers Scam People Into Buying Their Toxic Philosophy

George Lakoff | How Right-Wingers Scam People Into Buying Their Toxic Philosophy, Joshua Holland, AlterNet

• Here is what progressives can learn from right-wing messaging.
• Special Report | The Dumbing Down of American Politics: Week of July 1

The Biggest Problem With Traditional Schooling, Marion Brady, Washington (DC) Post

• Decades of teaching adolescents tell me that the single biggest problem kids face with traditional schooling is information overload. So much random, disorganized, disconnected information is dumped on them they can't come even close to coping with it. That some seem to do so - collect 'A's and ace standardized tests - can be misleading. They've learned to play the simple 'Remember' game.
• "One Size Fits All" Fits None of Our Kids
• Chomsky: How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey
• These Low Information Voters Will Be Our Undoing

Dark Ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment, John Atcheson, Common Dreams

• Republicans and Tea Partiers may be leading this retreat from reason, but they are unopposed by Democrats or the Press. And in the end, there is a special place in Hell for those who allow evil to prosper by doing nothing.
• George Monbiot | Right's Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by Too-Polite Left
• These Low Information Voters Will Be Our Undoing

George Monbiot | Right's Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by Too-Polite Left, George Monbiot, Guardian UK

• Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object.
• How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington
• Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes
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