I, on the other hand, interrupt people because my thoughts fly out of my mouth. My handbag's full of rubbish. And I want to do something that matters with my life. Right now I'd like to write plays, sing in musicals, and/or rid the world of poverty, violence, cruelty, and right-wing conservative politics.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

The conservatives had started bringing demagoguery to the table on the [Afghan] war issue the previous fall [fall 2006]. Whenever opposition members criticized the war policy, assorted Tories accused them of being disloyal and of failing to support the troops....[Harper] was gaining the reputation of a leader who couldn't see a belt without wanting to hit below it.

“Best Buy remains our favorite stock and we would be aggressive buyers at current levels. Even our newly raised estimates could prove to be very conservative as the company rides the digital TV wave, gets an incremental boost from the new video game cycle and starts to improve its operating expense infrastructure.”

The ability to be tough-minded remains useful; but by now, the fact that we are all in trouble in terms of both nature and culture can only be denied by those who become overly conservative and blindly reactionary. The more tender-hearted imagination that suggests we are all in this together and that there must be an underlying unity in life may be the only way to survive.

The bottom line is, I hear my donors, I hear our base out there, I hear the leadership. And we're taking steps to make sure that we're even more - how shall we say it - fiscally conservative in our spending and certainly making sure the dollars are there when it's time to run our campaigns.

We can score political points. We can try to advance some important initiatives. But at some point, it takes sober-minded, responsible conservative leaders to identify when you've pushed as far as you can and to have the courage to go back and face the electorate and explain to them why you voted the way you did.

I don't know of a Democrat - whether they're a conservative, a centrist or a liberal Democrat - that doesn't think that it's important to have quality jobs that pay decent wages so that families can support themselves, so that they can have the dignity of being able to afford health care, put money aside for pension, buy a home.

Entheogens (or psychedelics, to be more historically correct) have now been recognized as the mother of our Western ecology and conservation movements, as well as the entire field of transpersonal psychology and our apparent desire to return to some firsthand spiritual and/or mystical understanding of G/d (rather than blindly accepting traditional religious dogma without an experiential basis.

In a story on the U.S.-brokered security pact between the government of Sudan and southern rebel groups, the New York Times referred to the war in Sudan as "a pet cause of many American religious conservatives." It is hard to imagine the Times describing the plight of Soviet Jewry as a "pet cause" of American Jews, or opposition to apartheid as a "pet cause" of African-Americans.