The Republican Party of today embodies two clashing frames of mind that could either bring it down after 166 years of life, or jog it a mite leftward to the moderate center, where it could readily survive as a viable opposition to the Democrats.  There’s an alternative scenario: a massive realignment of parties, in which the Republican remnants of this mighty collision collapse like a dying star into a minor planet of certifiable extremists and oddballs, which fades into the vastness of historic space.  One can see the major elements of this paradox in the struggling campaigns of Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, both confronting: practicality vs. rigidity, realism vs. dogma, pragmatism vs. ideology.

Psychiatrists classify this behavior of dueling absolutes as acute neurosis.  Rick Perry’s drive for the presidency is designed to win the GOP’s hard-right base, while satisfying the extremist oil-and-gas libertarians who fund him.  Perry now confronts a voters’ rebellion by angry elements within the party’s hard-right base, who despise his practical program to provide in-state college tuition to the children of illegal immigrants.  This pleases Texas’ large Hispanic voting bloc, while it avoids the social menace of a lost generation of rootless and angry Hispanic youth.  But the hard right wants Perry’s program repealed by radical voters who want to know: is he really one of us?

As for former governor Romney, his pragmatic, hard-headed policy in Massachusetts early in the last decade to close state tax loopholes for corporations brought many millions of lost dollars back into state coffers, but his “tax raising” operations have created resistance among the Republican true-believing anti-tax sect to candidate Romney’s drive for the presidency.  They can’t stomach his shape-shifting political identity: liberal to conservative on ...

The political community called the Democratic Party has been stricken by aphasia. The consequences of muteness of leadership can be mortal.

Aphasia is the inability, periodically or totally, to speak.  The result in Congress is that the Tea Party is left to run the political show – by default.  The mandarins who program the Tea Party’s tactics from offstage hold the Democratic and Republican Parties hostage to their agenda of nihilistic obstruction.  The result is the near-total paralysis of the two-party system.

In this vacuum, the Koch brothers, libertarians Charles and David, create legislative havoc through their Tea-Party’s control of the House of Representatives.  And “Congress,” that co-equal branch of the government where laws are supposed to be made, is blamed by the public for its inability to do much in a time of national crisis.  However, Congress as an instrument  is   n o t  the  problem.  It’s the Tea Party, and the unelected masters who run and pay for it, who should be held publicly responsible.  But the Democrats, their aphasic state, mutely accept responsibility -- with their silence.  Latter-day Democrats have forgotten how to hold their rivals accountable.  They’ve lost the art of fiery political speech on the old-fashioned stump – to inform, to mobilize, to educate citizens through systematic, cohesive public communications on what’s going on and who’s to be held accountable for it.  Their silence is compounded by a great national silence.

Congressional Democrats should be naming and calling out the villains.  They should be arousing the populist passions of frustrated and angry Americans at the repeated obstruction of Tea Party members in Congress, and their directors, the Kochs and fellow libertarians.  They should be identifying the culprits, and naming them -- ...

I enjoy PBS’s weekly science documentary NOVA -- well-conceived, well reported, well produced.  The series makes an important contribution to the people’s understanding and importance of scientific inquiry.  I recommend it highly.  Next time you view Nova, take note of the series’ contributors.  They include Howard Hughes Medical Center, Franklin Templeton Investments, and a single individual named David H. Koch.  Most viewers let the credits slide by.  Few bother to think about donor Koch,  let alone how to pronounce the name:  Kotch or perhaps Kosh?  The name of the seemingly enlightened Mr. Koch, actually pronounced like the soft drink, “Coke,” has little to do with the drink--ORr with scientific advancement. But, as principal funders of the Tea Party movement, their Trojan horse inside the federal government, David and his brother Charles have everything to do with the libertarian hijacking of the Republican Party and its right-wing propaganda and agitation network, through their lead sponsorship of the Tea Party It's their Trojan horse inside Party and the federal government.  Together the Kochs form the wealthiest individual opposition to enlightened democratic governance.

Among David and Charles are leaders of the American confederation of wealth, private and corporate.  The Kochs are among the wealthiest men in America. They sponsor twice-yearly conventions of the wealthy to discuss strategy and action on protecting American free enterprise and the gaining and retaining of unfettered wealth.  Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have attended some of these events.  These two members of the highest court in America are objects of controversy over conflicts of interest at the highest levels of the federal judiciary, over their affirmative role in the Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to ...

Congress resumes its polarized deliberations this week after the summer recess.  With the horrific ideology-driven storm over raising the debt ceiling behind them, has anything been learned by the Ultra-Cons on the value of old-fashioned compromise?  Or will Koch-driven Tea Party members complete the process of hijacking the Republican Party, wielding a hatchet and a hard line?

If today’s victorious shoot-from-the-lip Republican leaders still have any respect for their founding saint Abraham Lincoln, it would be well that they act on some of his wisdom: “The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.”   I for one regret that we voters could not move events fast-forward to hear the unbending lip-flap of Mitch McConnell and his leadership buddies before they cast their ballots: “The mandate for change is directed at the other guys,” he growled just days after the G.O.P’s stunning victories.  That joyless machismo was softened by the ultra-con political manager Sal Russo’s Lincolnesque observation that "Most people recognize that you have to give to get sometimes."   Republican enforcer Rush Limbaugh was having none of it: “What is all this talk about compromise?  We've got nothing to compromise."  What’s with Rush’s “we?”  No one’s elected him to anything.

Hard-bottomed members of the Gritty Old Party had best remember three things: what happened to them in 2006 and 2008 can happen to them again in 2012.  The centrist voters who swing elections, including the one just past, didn’t vote for bully-boying by Al Capone or by Rupert Murdoch’s gunsels.  They voted for productive compromise-propelled progress on Capitol Hill, not more gridlock, with “No, No, a Thousand Times No” as their refrain.  Tough talk is hardly the ...

As far near the edge as you can get on the far-out right wing, “super-patriots” are working overtime to poke a stout stick through the spinning spokes of this democracy – or, what’s left of it.  They have been hard at work, over a year before the 2012 presidential election, pushing hard to get new laws through state legislatures to suppress the votes of citizens who tend to vote the Democratic line.  At least a dozen states will insist that voters display photo IDs at polling places before they can cast ballots.  Other states are busily attempting to shorten voting hours, as well as the number of days voters may cast early ballots.  Both strategies are devised to curb the voting of the jobless, the young, minority voters, the needy, the ill, the elderly, all folks who lack the funds to pay for photo IDs, or the time to spend on voting lines on election day.

This tactic has been on the books of ultra-con orthodoxy since Republican politics went extreme in the 1980s during the Reagan years.  That’s when a pioneering far-right organizer, the late Paul Weyrich, got hefty donations from the likes of the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife, big spenders off their beer profits and the Mellon banking fortune respectively.  Weyrich began building a popular-front of hundreds of far-right activist organizations whose activities media have yet to begin reporting on.  Here’s what Paul Weyrich told a meeting of the religious right in Dallas in 1980 about the power of suppressing voter turnouts: 

“Many of our Christians have what I call the Goo Goo Syndrome: Good Government.  They want everybody to vote.  I don’t want everybody to vote.  Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been, from the beginning of our country, ...