overtone

Nobody is more experienced in dirty politics than the Clintons. A lot of people regard that as one of her major strengths - not at all sarcastically. If this situation had been guaranteed four months ago, it would be regarded as a sign of Sanders having set himself up very well from where he started - if he keeps gaining ground as he has, that is if current trends continue rather than plateauing as all stat projections assume, he will actually take the lead in won delegates sometime on June 7th. That is unlikely, of course. But very far from impossible.

Mussolini. Please. Trump represents Wallace's faction of the American public, of course, but at the time that base was kept aside by the Democratic Party it claimed - it was a minority aspect of its Party. Now, conjoined with the fundies, it is the major and dominant faction of a national Party. Trump is closer - in his voter support, in his basic policies - to Nixon himself. And that is the aspect of history this is rhyming.

I want my wife, my children, my lawyer, my doctor, my sheriff, all local judges, politicians, and bankers, to be able to hide their personal info from my enemies. I don't want my enemies to be able to blackmail or pressure people whose discretion and fair judgment is important to me. The government is one of my enemies, potentially.

I used to work with a guy like that - he had his name tattooed on his arm. Apparently as a reminder. We were going to get his address put there too, but I quit that job before we had the chance. From my childhood: "A Methodist is a Baptist who can read." I used to think Presbyterian was 'rithmetic, but Reagan was Presbyterian. The Pentacostals speak in tongues, which is a kind of negative literacy, then you get to zero (Baptist), reading (Methodist), writing too (Presbyterian), and arithmetic (Episcopalian). In people: Palin; Gohmert; W; Reagan; Bush. In your Republican politicians it's very important to get all the way up the chain to arithmetic - otherwise you get these idiotic tax cuts for their rich pals. I have a basic sympathy for the notion that Trump isn't going to do anything that he says now - as some guy on TV put it, once he's elected White House policy will be whatever is going through his mind when he's talking. But that doesn't make him harmless - one problem with bullies and narcissists is that they are too easily cowed, too easily impressed by a louder voice, a bigger fist, greater and better earned confidence, or simply a serious threat that taps their innate cowardice. He's going to be too easy to manipulate, because even though very intelligent he has no foundation of character. So while the big worry seems to be that he will embarrass the US and demean the office of the Presidency, which he will of course, that office survived W&Cheney and Jeff Gannon; the bigger worry is what someone who knows how to push his buttons can get him to do with the US military. And the biggest worry is what his supporters will be up to. He's surrounded by bad news in the way of buddies - the greater evil is one with the more evil friends. They should be. They haven't been since 1964.

That might cheer me up for the rest of the week.

Underfunded they may be, but things like Medicare up until the Republicans burdened it with Plan D, or the Post Office while it was a government agency, or most municipal sewer and water systems, were very efficient compared with their private counterparts - Medicare has very skinny overhead compared with private medical insurance, for example.

That's true in the negative sense, in that Trump is no more rightwing than Sanders is leftwing - neither one is an ideological extremist, both are running as pragmatic responders to need. Nope. The KKK faction is all Republican now. The Republican Party, of course. Why do you ask? And so you remember the changeover by 1980, so that the KKK faction has been Republican for your entire adult life. Trump is running in 2016, not 1966. Is there some reason you can recall George Wallace but not Richard Nixon, trade union racism but not Ronald Reagan's? Seems like more recent decades should be as easy to recall as more distant ones. Or do you start all recent history in 2009, as so many rightwingers do. When the VP is by turns toady and evil, and the cabinet packed with corporate predators starts shoveling the wealth into the appropriate bags, and the generals of the various armed forces are getting together to talk things over; when Trump sets out to build his Wall and finds the Endangered Species Act and the EPA force an expensive delay he can do nothing about legally - so he discards the law, under some Homeland Security pretext, and fires the entire body of EPA execs the way W&Co fired the inconveniently diligent DAs - will one of you Republicans finally and at long last accept personal responsibility for the consequences of your political immaturity and dereliction of citizenship?

"Elephants are fairly slow-moving animals, particularly compared to other pack animals" True, but they aren't that slow overall - their walking speed when en route somewhere is 4-5 mph. An eight hour day is forty miles, at the high end of that.

For at least 40% of the American electorate, Trump is just saying from a podium what their radio and TV pundits have been saying for years now. For many of the rest, it's familiar. Plus they've seen him on TV, so his style is not a shock. Rush Limbaugh is the leading and most influential voice of the entire Republican Party. Trump is mainstream. The one is a bizarre, near impossibility that most of the Western world regards as a joke and that would be a disaster if it ever somehow happened. The other is a standard, normal thing that most Western industrialized countries already do more or less, and that the US itself has done in the past (GI Bill, etc) and that proved to be a very good thing - possibly the best public expenditure American ever made. And that is how most of the Trump/Bernie comparisons devolve. They are similar in some sense, but not in their relationships with physical reality.

Those were dinosaurs, not reptiles. There are reptiles capable of packing burdens, such as the large tortoises that children can ride at zoos, but not very fast. Most of the common human pack animals are chosen for speed as much as for load capacity - as far as I know every pack animal humans employ is also raced, as a matter of strong interest. Maybe not musk oxen.

Nonsense. All that is being asked for is actual attempts to progress in actually a good direction, an end to the ongoing rollback of the New Deal. Politicians who are on the good side, at least. Some pull on the left rein, with input from reality. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, - you know the names. There's nothing new here. This is not new. This is not suddenly honest, this is the same crazy that's been collecting in one place and growing - right out in public - since 1980 or before. There's an American illusion that more violent and vulgar is more honest - it isn't. Liars can swear and rant to their purpose. And crazy is beyond honest and dishonest. If that were true the sobering would have happened in 1994. It would certainly have shocked the honchos into sudden prudence, when they heard Alan Greenspan submit as formal testimony that he never imagined top drawer bankers would act irrationally for their own benefit, and read that he was an Ayn Rand acolyte in his forties. Hearing stupid ideas out loud only sobers people up if they have a source of good ideas, for contrast. The people flocking to Trump have been hearing their ration of these "ideas" out loud (and almost nothing else) for more than twenty years, and the faction has been growing and becoming more central and more powerful that entire time. They now control Congress - they are the dominant constituent base of a voting majority of the House and Senate. Marco Rubio was until a couple of months ago a Tea Party wacko, which meant (in the "both sides" fable) a wingnut from the fringe. He hasn't changed. He is now thought of as a centrist, a moderate - that's because he is, in fact, and always has been, relative to his Party. He's a center and establishment Republican. And a Tea Party fruitcake. At the same time. Paul Ryan is Speaker of the House. The Speaker of the House is not on the fringe - he's third in line for the White House, and in control of the budget of the country. (Another Ayn Rand acolyte in adulthood, btw, and given budgetary control after - not before - Greenspan's testimony. Still think giving crazy and stupid "ideas" control of the world's biggest bullhorn is healthy ? ) It's not a conflict of ideas any more. That was lost when the American idea presenters - the news media - were turned over to a handful of coordinated corporate interests and their professional marketing operations. Have you been following what's been happening recently at MSNBC? The following statement is a fact: according to Rachel Maddow herself, and most lefties agree with her, she is ideologically only slightly to the left of Dwight Eisenhower. She is what an Eisenhower Republican would look like on TV these days. She's the centrist in your conflict of ideas. So use that as your measuring scale, and realize what sort of "ideas" the regular American is now immersed in, 24/7, nothing else coming in, and calling it "both sides". Because only a minority of Americans - and it's not a large minority - ever get as far as Maddow for even brief visits into what was once known as reality. The "message" is irrelevant. They lost control of their monster, and they want it back, is all. They don't want it dead - they want it back. The "message" was just bs they were making up as they went along anyway. I've been hearing that my entire adult life, with every new disaster. That was what was supposed to happen after Reagan's election on the bigot and fundy coalition and subsequent vandalism of the US economy while embarrassing the country in public, for example - the self-identified "reasonable people" said that it was healthy and good to have such failure be so public and the responsibility and blame unavoidable, that we would finally have this conversation so long overdue, that at least people would now come to their senses. Not quite what happened, eh? The question never answered is this one: Conversation how, and with whom?

You don't have to worry about the gun - never owned one. Or locked my front door when at home. Maybe it's the Canadian airflow in my childhood home. And hatred? Please. One of the strangest things about conservative folks is this mirror they carry around, that they think they see the world in.* One of the more disturbing things is the frequency with which they see hatred in that mirror. There's a Buddhist bon mot: "That art thou" - but one seldom expects it to be embodied at such a crude and material level. And one of downright funny things is listening to them describe a Trump rally as if it were some kind of new and different manifestation of American political life. Guys: this whole Trump thing is basically the Republican Party the rest of us have been watching grow hair since 1980. The biggest difference is style points - the vulgarity coming from the podium, instead of backstage and behind the radio mic and so forth. Rush Limbaugh has been the voice of the Republican Party for twenty years. I have yet to read or hear a single Republican pundit or shill whose career has spanned the rise of fascism in the Republican Party use words like "we" and "our" and "us" when assigning blame for this mess - apparently, the elephant in the room can't see itself as itself, mirror or no mirror. I take that back, there's another significant difference: Trump occasionally says true things about Republican politicians, history, and policies. That's almost unique, in that Party - no wonder some of them think he's a Liberal. *( A marked enough characteristic that it can be used to discover Republican political tactics - vote fraud and electoral manipulation, for example, and this business of politicians buying support with legislation, and welfare fraud, and draft dodging, and rounding people up for whatever reason, and so forth. Just notice what they accuse others of doing, and you'll know what they're up to this time)

When facing fascism, a world in which inaccurate terms are accepted as equivalent to accurate ones, both "namecalling", and one demonstrates maturity through reticence and dissembling in the face of open lies and public slander and physical threat, lest one's truthful and correct terminology of objection alienate the liars and slanderers, is a world lost to fascism. Why give up so easily? Continual accurate - the key: accurate - mockery and public shaming, until nobody will put up with their garbage in public any more. Most people are reasonable - they won't want to be publicly associated with dregs, once they recognize them. We beat them into the ground and shot them in the holes once, burned their houses and barns, took their horses and cattle for compensation for our efforts, and freed all their slaves. We can do it again. If that's where they're taking this.

You can have a problem with it all you want, but the 2004 vote and their reasons for casting it are a matter of historical record. Sure they do. But they don't know what my "side" is. I know this because they tell me what my "side" is all the time, they have an entire history of my "side" (everchanging, but always some version present), and it doesn't even agree with the simple physical facts in front of them, let alone the events that took place in years past. And it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what I think and say my "side" is. So wtf? When the most important factors in somebody's political decision making are batshit hallucinations, the matter of "priorities" among them is a secondary concern. Whoever said anything about anybody's rights? Except the folks who advocate taking away mine because the wingnut emergencies of the world in their heads must be fought in that manner, I mean. Not to quibble, but I didn't actually - I called their state of mind when they voted for W in 2004 insane. It was. And it disassembles the comforting illusion that since conservatives are sane they won't vote for Trump. Anybody who listens to Rush Limbaugh or watches Fox News because they "have a point of view"; anybody who voted for W&Cheney in 2004, McCain/Palin in 2008, and/or Romney/Ryan in 2012; can be persuaded to vote for Trump in 2016. And you know I'm right about that. No harm in trying. We've tried basically everything else in the way of hinting, suggestion, reason, careful presentation of select and not too discomfiting fact, respectful consideration of their latest Acorn vote fraud video or chemtrail hallucination or secret Muslim President evidence or proposal to build torture interrogation facilities under the American flag or thousand mile wall along the Mexican border with twelve million people deported to the other side of it. We've been respectful. We've been calm and kind. When they elected Louie Gohmert and James Inhofe to Congress we provided their chosen representatives with the same staff and facilities and privileges and protection against legal interference with their activities we provide actual adults performing the duties of office. When their hero rancher cheated us of a million dollars he owed our Parks and Recreation budget, assembled a private militia with military grade firearms to threaten the Sheriffs and emissaries who tried to collect on his promises, and strutted around threatening to kill people who thought he belonged in jail, we didn't just drone his terrorist ass and bury the remains with the carrion of the eagles and wolves and cougars he had poisoned and shot in our wilderness, somewhere in a hole in the cowburnt waste he had made of our public land. We even made special rules for the media figures they prefer, so they could tell lies and slander people as "news" without getting fired, and we got rid of anyone who made them too uncomfortable or treated them with disrespect. We repealed the Fairness Doctrine so that Rush Limbaugh could set up in business. We partly deregulated the licensing of the public airwaves so that a few corporations and a couple of very wealthy men could dominate the news media over huge geographical areas. Remember Brian Williams instructing Matt Taibbi in the necessity of deference, of not reporting plainly on what he, Taibbi, had discovered by interviewing and listening to those attending Tea Party events and Republican political rallies? The problem with Taibbi's reporting was that his reporting of facts and quotes and actual events made the Tea Party look corrupt and crazy and bigoted and not very intelligent or grown up. As Taibbi put it, after many weeks of diligent and honest research, they were full of shit and financed by billionaires and racist to the bone. So Brian Williams was in the awkward position of having to choose between being respectful and being an accurate deliverer of news and information. And he chose to be respectful, because that was his policy and company policy in the news business, and he lectured Taibbi on that policy. That's how far we've gone in not calling the crazy out. We step on actual reporters, curb the competent and honest and hardworking and insightful, so that the likes of Brit Hume and Joe Scarborough can dish what they dish without public embarrassment. We suspend Brian Williams and coddle Bill O'Reilly, just to keep the wingnuts happy and feeling respected. It's not working.

This country voted for W: Twice. Reagan: twice. There is nobody - nobody at all - that someone who voted for W&Cheney in 2004 will not vote for if properly marketed. The sanity level of the average US conservative was checked on that one, and it didn't register on the dipstick. So Trump is going to have a lot of voters turning out for him, especially white men - let's try some possibilities: #A majority of the white men over 35 voted for McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan - and the black vote stays home this time. So does the brown - Clinton's record is spotty, and a lot of them are Catholic. #Assuming Clinton and a standard VP, the left libertarians (a plurality of the country) will have nobody to vote for - lots of them stay home. The evangelicals, despite having no one to vote for, turn out anyway in a protest vote against Clinton. So do the gun rights folks - two weeks before the vote, hunting season approaching, a propaganda campaign with half-truths about Clinton's position and warnings about her Court influence launches. #The voter suppression efforts and gerrymandering effects (and some actual vote rigging) work, cutting the black and brown vote by 10 - 15% in at least a couple of key States. #We get a genuine Muslim terrorist attack somewhere that registers on the US awareness screen. #Clinton has to take time off to be deposed on the email question. Also, somebody gets hold of a copy of her Goldman Sachs speeches, and they read as we expect them to. Trump settles his troubles out of Court quietly and quickly, claiming the exigencies of more important business. #Putin, recognizing an ally, arranges for some kind of Russian event that makes something Clinton did look bad. He also hints that he is more worried about Trump than any other American (he can get some advice from the Iranians who got rid of Carter for somebody they could do business with). #We get a financial scandal in October involving people or institutions connected with Clinton, and the stock market takes a hit.

Uh, that point of view has been very well represented throughout - to the point that the Ferguson travesty of special treatment was defended as "fair", to avoid even the suggestion of a minority receiving undue favor.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/delegate-targets/ Trump has well over 100% of the total he needs at this date to make it likely - according to 538.com - that he takes the nomination outright, with more than 1237 committed delegates going into the convention. So he has overperformed the 538 statistical models so far, while running in Cruz and Rubio and Kasich strongholds with proportional primaries and caucuses. There are no more very large States with enough evangelical voters to hand Cruz easily predictable wins, and his most favored States (Utah, Missouri, maybe North Carolina, etc) are proportional, not winner take all. Trump can take it by winning 11 of the larger remaining winner take all states including California, without getting a single delegate from a proportional State - if he runs anywhere near Cruz in the large proportional States, he doesn't need California. So if he loses only a third of the remaining States, and that third includes the proportional ones favoring Cruz, he locks up the nomination before he ever sees California. That man is looking down the road, and it's all downhill to the following: President Trump.

It's juvenile to think government is irrelevant to any adult in a democracy governing a modern industrial State. Voter turnout is low because people are lazy. I don't. I don't. I just point out the obvious: they did nothing to earn it or acquire a claim on it. I have no problem establishing a government and using it to ensure that most wealth accumulated by citizens is passed on to whomever they wish to receive it upon their death - that's completely contrary to capitalist economics, of course, but I think it's a good idea and I firmly support it. I don't. The subject was the estate tax. In the case of the estate tax it's defined by the Federal government: individuals bequeathing wealth valued at more than 5.45 million dollars are held to be "rich", and nobody else. If you read the big signs printed in block letters and carried around by the OWS crowd on television for years now, you'll find the "rich" defined as those in the upper 1% income bracket. And so forth. These definitions are easy to find, if you ever need them. I don't, of course, for any of my posting here, and you don't for any replies to my posting here. Waitforufo typically trolls, baits, goads, misreads and misrepresents, namecalls, and badgers people with rhetorical questions irrelevant to the discussion. The "common ground" is seldom approached in that manner. As far as why anyone would support Trump - he's Republican, and no more objectionable than half the Republican candidates for any national office over the past thirty years or so. Newt Gingrich, say (temporary frontrunner in 2011 for Pres.) Sarah Palin. Ted Cruz. Richard Cheney. W.

The subject of that little story was not politics. I'm not, actually, very interested in politics, and I don't expect anyone I meet out in the world to be fascinated by any political topic in particular. It's completely irrelevant. There is no such definition, and it doesn't matter. Nobody "deserves" inherited wealth from relatives they did not support, financially or economically in some way, thereby acquiring a contractual interest of some kind. That's not the point. Venom? The only venom involved is the observation that when trying to get one of these people to not abet the ruination of their country and everything they claim to value, one must provide them with reasons they can fit into their preconceptions. That's a bit venomous, granted, but what can you do? Don't be silly. This is the Republican base, for decades now. Palin was nominated for VP in 2008, W&Cheney won the Presidency in 2000, Rush Limbaugh has been on the air since the early 1990s, Reagan gained the Presidency in 1980. Somebody who talked like Limbaugh and had enough money or connections to run for President was always a possibility. Not for Clinton. These people ->believe<- the crazy you've been hearing bits of, the stuff you've been startled by in polls. And they aren't "conservatives". They are paranoid, rage-motivated, racially bigoted, misogynistic, fundamentalist, systematically misled and manipulated yahoos. The media operations of the Republican Party's corporate backing have been working them over for more than thirty years now - they've been immersed, without access to the outside world of information. The only thing they know for sure that's accurate is that they've been betrayed by power, by their government and the elites who influence it, by somebody. My bet is Sanders would have far more success, because that's what the polls say, and because he is white and male and honest and forthright and anti-establishment, like Trump he makes accurate observations about corruption and other stuff they can see for themselves, and because he hasn't been murdering people to cover up his cocaine smuggling operations and systematic betrayals of the public trust, that kind of stuff. Or didn't you know that about the Clintons?

As we just saw for eight years with Obama, there are no such moderate conservatives in the Republican Congress. Whether there are any in the general Republican Party remains to be demonstrated - they appear to be mostly Democrats, in real life. There is no "polarization" based in ideology. The only trend is the increasing power of fascism within the Republican Party, and through it the American government. The only way to "reverse" that "trend" is to vote many Republican Congressmen out of office. How, exactly, should a US President sworn to uphold the Constitution represent the KKK faction, otherwise known as the Tea Party, or - more accurately - the Republican base? Clinton might well have less support from the Republicans in Congress than Obama had. And she will not - or should not - have the support of "most liberals" for her military ventures backing Israel and Big Oil, her trade deals and tax breaks favoring Wall Street and Walmart, or her predictable rollbacks of Obamacare, Medicare, Social Security, and the like. Sanders would be more likely to achieve Clinton's supposed and achievable goals than Clinton. He would be negotiating from a stronger position, and his compromises would be made from a stronger initial stance. He is also likely to pick up support from those who prefer actions taken in accordance with solid and reliable principles they disagree with, over actions taken from shifting grounds of expediency however temporarily congenial. We have seen that often since the Vietnam War, when "transactional politics" came into vogue: a fair proportion of Americans wanted to either get in completely and fight it to the wall, or get out completely and let the chips fall. Either way, but decide and do it. That's a common American political position, and Sanders can count on significant support from it. Absolutely and completely false. I have specifically stated, many times, that Clinton is a moderate rightwing authoritarian, equivalent to an Eisenhower Republican, and that such a stance is not an extreme one, and that I would vote for Clinton over any Republican in contention without hesitation. Eisenhower was not a wingnut. Moderate conservatism is not wingnuttery. Clinton is not "as bad as Republicans" - nowhere near.

Imagine this, in the era before people really understood how TV and scripts and the like actually worked: Not really. Less wise, to quick to jump on fads, but they tend to be better connected to information. That's not "correct". It's juvenile. Parks? Landscape management? Clean air and water? Medical care? In point of observation, the Republican base minds very much having to pay for anything that doesn't benefit them directly and personally and visibly, and they mind very much establishing civil liberties for anyone but themselves, and they regard all of government as either of direct and tangible and immediate benefit to them or a worthless and parasitic bureaucracy. This applies not only to services and conveniences, such as health care, but to actual defense against real dangers - such as wealth accumulation and aristocracy, or the creation of a reserve army of the sick and unemployed and ghetto-bound such as Marx was counting on. The only way to persuade them to impose an adequate income or estate tax, for example, is to focus on the fact that the children of the rich don't deserve inherited wealth and the tax will never ever be imposed on anyone except the undeserving heirs of undeserving and snooty and distant elites - preferably foreigners. If they can be persuaded instead (by the owners of their TV stations, say) that they or people like them are likely to be taxed, or that the wealth was fairly acquired ("earned") in some way by non-snooty regular folks, they will vote themselves a jack-booted landed gentry and their children a future as the servant class in a Jane Austen novel. Because "class warfare" is bad, they have learned from their leaders. Illustration, appropriate for a science forum: over the years I have spent some time in two contrasting roles: as a gatherer of bait leeches for fishing; as a research assistant in various biological and ecological investigations, including getting wet and dirty and cold in various boreal bogs and bug-filled bailiwicks of my region. In both roles I occasionally met regular folks in "conservative" areas while doing so - in the field, in the bar where I took my time off, at the gas station, casual. And the amount of hostility my researcher role encountered from these regular folks is kind of striking. Memorable. Apparently, the suggestion that their tax dollar was being spent to support a parasite such as myself engaged in such unprofitable activity as I was engaged in was seriously irritating. But that isn't the point. The fact that it wasn't even true some of the time (private funding, pro bono mud-sampling, etc, happened) is not the point, either. The point is the lack of curiosity, interest, sense of fellow citizenship, sense of responsibility for the landscape, anything like that. I can't even remember how many times researcher me was disparaged, mocked, on the receiving end of some comment about governmental waste of money or derogatory reference to the nearest university. I can count on one hand the number of times anyone asked me what I was seeing, what was going on, what was being discovered or checked out, without my bringing it up and sort of guiding the conversation. On the other hand, pillaging the landscape to service the recreational whims of rich tourists whose opinion of the locals was illustrated by the amount of garbage and shit (literal) they left everywhere was universally treated with respect, and the onerous working conditions appreciated. Salt of the earth. Go figure.

Not really - at least, not like it's been recently, for one of the Parties. There used to be a safety factor built into the high general intellectual status required of a respectable nominee, including wide experience, which coupled with the lifetime appointment put them outside the ability of political operatives to reliably predict their behavior. So we had key judges in the Muhammed Ali case, for example, successfully advocating for a decision quite at odds with the political desires of the faction that had appointed them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Marshall_Harlan_II (Note as well the influence of this Justice, a strict adherent to precedent and nominated to be so, on future decisions of the Court such as Roe v Wade). In the modern day we see such nominations as Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Harriet Meiers, and the Court diminished. Compare, for example, this nomination with that of his ideological and philosophical predecessor Harlan above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito Note the difference in quality, and apparently consequent increased political predictability of ruling.

The species in the OP paper showing the highest temperature tolerance while glassed up, Milnesium tardigradum, does not apparently form trehalose. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18070104

The wingnuts hate Hillary to the point of mild derangement, and the Republicans in Congress have no more inclination to work with her than with Obama. Ideology has nothing to do with it. Where is she going to get liberal support for rolling back the New Deal and lowering taxes on the rich? Because that's what the Reps want to do, and it's pretty much all they want to do. That's not how FDR did it, or Lincoln, or even Lyndon Johnson. That's not how we got civil rights, or union rights, or any of the nice things.

It warms my heart to see that innocence and faith are not dead, but if capitalist ideology had anything to do with the behavior of the current Republican Congress Obama would have owned it like Napoleon. For example: He got his health care plan straight from Mitt Romney, who cribbed most of his from Bob Dole's Republican plan in '93 - but did the Republicans welcome Obama unto their bandwagon? Not at all - they ran from their own legislation like it had rabies. Republican Senators filibustered their own bills, if Obama endorsed them. Clinton's ideology has nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, the average American wants more, not less, socialism in their government. And speaking of that, the only "wins" Clinton has ever obtained have been (from the majority US poll pov) what the soccer folks call "own goals". There are two ways to interpret this: continual defeat, or an agenda quite different from anything liberal or left. I'm going with door number 2. And - just for the record - calling out the influence money and pushing for reform is not "idealism" of any kind: it's a solidly cynical take on the current operations of Congress.