Survey No. 1: Can You Indentify a Republican vs. a Democrat

Identification of Republicans vs. Democrats

I spend a tremendous amount of watching C-Span.

As a result, I watch many U.S. Senate and House proceedings.

Quite often, I turn off the sound for some unrelated reason, and when I turn around and focus on the TV screen, I usually see the face of an elected official speaking. However, since I do not have the benefit of sound, I am unable to determine the subject about which the person is speaking.

Frequently, there is a banner below the person identifying their state, whether that individual is a Representative or Senator, and the party affiliation.

I've found myself playing a game with myself, trying to guess the party of the person without looking at the banner, and without listening to his or her position. Although I have not actually kept score, I believe that I can, within 10 seconds, tell a Democrat versus a Republican, simply by looking at them, based purely on physicality, with an accuracy of roughly 95%. Can you?

Do you think that there are some distinguishing physical characteristics?

Post 36d: Comic Relief from P.J. O'Rourke

On occasion, we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously, and have a laugh. It is in that spirit that we offer the following, from one of the best.

Fairness, Idealism and Other Atrocities: Commencement Advice You're Unlikely to Hear Elsewhere.
By P.J. O'Rourke
May 4, 2008

Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you're
thinking: "Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!" But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech.


Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything -- which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes -- we wore them. Weird beards -- we grew them. Weird words and phrases -- we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

So now, it's my job to give you advice. But I'm thinking: You're finishing 16 years of education, and you've heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief:


1. Go out and make a bunch of money!

Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money." Instead, they tell you that money can't buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.

There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.

2. Don't be an idealist!

Don't chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you'll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That's $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You'll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good?

Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, "I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can't eat. I can't sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I'm a better person. And because I'm the better person, I have the right to boss you around."

Get a pair of bolt cutters and liberate that tree.

Who does more for the redwoods and society anyway -- the guy chained to a tree or the guy who founds the "Green Travel Redwood Tree-Hug Tour Company" and makes a million by turning redwoods into a tourist destination, a valuable resource that people will pay just to go look at?

So make your contribution by getting rich. Don't be an idealist.

3. Get politically uninvolved!

All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I'd be standing here with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret ballot. I've got three kids and three dogs in my family. We'd be eating Froot Loops and rotten meat.

But let me make a distinction between politics and politicians. Some people are under the misapprehension that all politicians stink. Impeach George W. Bush, and everything will be fine. Nab Ted Kennedy on a DUI, and the nation's problems will be solved.

But the problem isn't politicians -- it's politics. Politics won't allow for the truth. And we can't blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound like on today's campaign trail:

"No, I can't fix public education. The problem isn't the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or more computer equipment The problem is your kids!"

4. Forget about fairness!

We all get confused about the contradictory messages that life and politics send.

Life sends the message, "I'd better not be poor. I'd better get rich. I'd better make more money than other people." Meanwhile, politics sends us the message, "Some people make more money than others. Some are rich while others are poor. We'd better close that 'income disparity gap.' It's not fair!"

Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, "That's not fair." When she says this, I say, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you." What we need is more income, even if it means a bigger income disparity gap.

5. Be a religious extremist!

So, avoid politics if you can. But if you absolutely cannot resist, read the Bible for political advice -- even if you're a Buddhist, atheist or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those people who believes that God is involved in politics. On the contrary. Observe politics in this country. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics through history. Does it look like God's involved?

The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there's the tenth: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."
Here are God's basic rules about how we should live, a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts. And, right at the end of it we read, "Don't envy your buddy because he has an ox or a donkey." Why did that make the top 10? Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, include jealousy about livestock?

Well, think about how important this commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't whine about what the people across the street have. Get rich and get your own.

Now, one last thing:

6. Don't listen to your elders!

After all, if the old person standing up here actually knew anything worth telling, he'd be charging you for it.

P.J. O'Rourke, a correspondent for the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic, is the author, most recently, of "On The Wealth of Nations." A longer version of this article appears in Change magazine, which reports on trends and issues in higher education.

Post No. 34: Opportunity to Serve as Guest Author – It’s Your Turn to Express Yourself

© 2008, The Institute for Applied Common Sense

Since we started this blog in April of 2008, numerous readers have asked us about the blogging experience, and how they might start their own blogs. It took us almost two years to actually do so, and we regret not having done so earlier.

A blog opens up a whole new world to you, and allows interaction with folks all over the world, about all sorts of subjects. The blogosphere is truly a global virtual community.

(For those interested, a major blogging convention is scheduled for Greensboro, NC on Thursday and Friday, October 16 and 17, 2008 (http://convergesouth.com.) On Saturday, October 18, 2008 BlogHer (http://www.blogher.com), a community for women who blog, visits the city as part of its traveling tour.)

We’re going to provide you with an opportunity to post an article or articles on our blog, as Guest Authors, consistent with the goals and principles of the Institute for Applied Common Sense.

There is no need to repeat our philosophy here; it appears stated in the right column of the blog. However, before getting to the Guest Author opportunity, we thought that we should share with you a profile of our readership.

There are many widgets and tracking devices which can be installed on a blog, to provide information about the visiting traffic. We are particularly enthralled with http://www.sitemeter.com . Even their free service provides valuable information, as will be reflected below.

The vast majority of the readers of this blog appear to be non-bloggers. We frequently receive direct e-mails containing comments as opposed to comments on the blog. Roughly 15-20% of the readers are located in countries outside of the United States. We have regular readers from Australia, Finland, France, the Palestinian Territories in Gaza, Germany, Iceland, India, Israel, Jordan, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom.

Thus far, we can not recall any readers from China. Far more newcomers (individuals not associated with any of the members of the “It’s Your Turn™” Team) read our blog than friends of the “It’s Your Turn™” Team. The newcomers also have a tendency to read more articles and to stay on the blog reading them longer.

It appears that most of our foreign readers live in smaller cities, and we have noticed that they spend more time reading more articles than any other group.

We employ the “next blog” button feature of the Navigation Bar at the top of our blog to “blog surf” and visit other blogs. The vast majority of the other blogs which we visit are based in Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Brazil. We are actually surprised at the large number of Brazilian blogs.

Most blogs are uniquely personal. A large number display photos taken by the blogger, chronicle the lives and experiences of children or newlyweds, or display the artistic work of artists of every imaginable variety. We tend to randomly surf to other blogs and when we find one of interest, we stop and comment.

Although we are sure that there are many blogs dealing with political or societal issues, we rarely run across them. (That may be explained by the fact that we use Google’s free blogging platform, http://www.blooger.com, and those interested in professional blogging tend to buy other software for blogging.)

We joined a number of Google Groups (or discussion groups), most with some type of political theme. The bulk of our traffic is referred to us through Google Groups, following our leaving comments on the group discussion boards. We stumble through blogs written in French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and leave comments using a combination of English and our broken language in question. Most interestingly, it is the Brazilians who most frequently respond.

The readers who consider the articles, or the ideas expressed in them, to be radical or dangerous are generally Americans. We never sense any reluctance to go to another place intellectually on the part of our foreign visitors.

We have no real sense of the age demographic of our readers. We suspect that we have far more women readers than men, based on the comments.

In the U.S., our readers have a tendency to be from the West Coast, Southwest, and the Eastern Seaboard. Mid-Western readers hail from Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In the South, we get visitors from Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia; there are virtually no readers from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Tennessee. There are also very few readers from the Rocky Mountain States and the Plains States.

Our blog informs readers that the “It’s Your Turn™"Team will soon embark on a nationwide tour of college campuses to engage students in a conversation about personal responsibility and making difficult decisions. In response thereto, we have received numerous comments which generally might fall into two categories: (a) those which inquire as to where we were when they were in college; and (b) to inform them when the tour is scheduled to be in their vicinity.

The blog has evolved over time. It morphed from simply posing rhetorical questions in admittedly lengthy essays. It went through a period when we suggested theoretical constructs which might be utilized to analyze certain situations. Our original goal, which remains today, was to simply get people to think and avoid rushing to judgments and decisions.

One of our favorite stories revolves around Senator Barry Goldwater, the ultimate conservative. Just prior to his death, he was asked to identify one thing he appreciated as a senior citizen, which he did not appreciate in his youth. He replied that in his youth, he thought there were only two sides to every issue. In hindsight, he understood that there were at least three.

Our view is that there are at least 27 different ways to view everything. Not all of them are good, productive, or positive at any given particular time, and their importance definitely changes depending on the context or circumstances. However, we should be aware of them.

Another goal of this blog has always been to encourage people to “dig deeper” in trying to understand the underlying causes of problems, instead of being distracted by the superficial, and typically emotional, symptoms.

If at times you’ve been confused about the purpose and focus of this blog, you are pretty perceptive. We essentially conducted a virtual focus group during the first few months of the blog’s existence. We’re still experimenting with different approaches.

Amazingly, we have not received one, single, nasty, off the chart, emotional rant, and for that we modestly take some credit. It was not our intention to get folks worked up, but rather to get them to say, “Hmm, let me think about that.” The most frequent comment which we received was, “I hadn’t thought or looked at it that way.” We view getting folks to pause during the thought process as a good thing.

We mentioned earlier that we are inviting our readers to serve as Guest Authors. We have a few guidelines to ensure that we maintain the spirit of the blog. We’re interested in civilized, respectful discourse, between participants with open minds. We believe that reasonable people can differ about how to approach a problem. Please observe the following guidelines:

1. Please limit your article to 750 words maximum;

2. Discuss any issue in the news or societal issue that you desire;

3. Avoid just criticizing or taking a side, and instead think in terms of suggesting a solution to the issue, or at a minimum offer some reasoned alternatives;

4. Try to be as objective as possible and set aside your personal biases;

5. Pose rhetorical questions to challenge the reader to consider various options, and innovative ways to analyze the issue;

6. Avoid the use of invective and judgmental statements, which might prompt emotional responses;

7. Avoid taking sides, or the positions of the liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, etc. Your piece should cause all sides to ponder; and

8. Be sure to “dig deeper” to reach the underlying causes.

Send your articles to RDGreene27401@gmail.com with an urgent flag. As long as they are generated in good faith and generally within our guidelines, they will be published “as is,” without further editing. Be sure to tell your friends and contacts to read your articles once they are published. This should be fun.

© 2008, The Institute for Applied Common Sense

Post 23: What Views Would the Members of a Truly Independent American Political Party Hold?

© 2008, The Institute for Applied Common Sense

The following is a partial list of the views, controversial though some may be, of a particular, well-educated, middle-class American citizen:

1. Men and women who choose to have heterosexual sex make a “choice” when they do so, and society should not interfere or be responsible in any way for what happens to them following pregnancy. The fathers and mothers should negotiate all further responsibility or lack thereof.

2. All citizens of the United States should be required to serve a minimum term, in a combat role, in our armed forces to defend the interests of America, but only on a domestic basis, and not outside of our country and her possessions.

3. At some point in the not too distant future, we should start dividing the states in half, and all liberals shall have the opportunity to start moving their families and assets to those states designated as liberal, and all conservatives shall have the opportunity to start moving their families and assets to those states designated as conservative. Over time, perhaps 100 years, when the process has been completed, the country should be divided in half into two separate nations, with each functioning separately, harmoniously, and independently.

4. Students should be strongly encouraged to pursue certain academic areas, through government incentives, based on carefully calculated predictions of the needs of our society over the next 50 to 100 years, and those who choose not to avail themselves of those incentives should be left to fend for themselves.

5. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be repealed, along with the Equal Protection Clauses, and all forms of discrimination should be permitted depending on the individual’s desires.

6. Marriage should be outlawed, along with all sexual interaction between any citizens. The societal costs (spousal abuse, child abuse, out of wedlock births, legal system, divorce, mental health, and substance abuse) associated with interpersonal relationships is far too high, and society should not have to pay that price for individual decisions.

7. Working together, the armed forces of committed nations should provide advance notice, and with the agreement of the Palestinians and Israelis, simply surround the Palestinian Territories and Israel, allow those individuals not currently living there to enter before the containment, and those not wanting to be part of the fight to exit, and then allow the two sides to fight as hard and long as they deem necessary.

Is this individual a male or a female? Is this person a heterosexual, a gay or lesbian individual, or a bi-sexual? Are these the views of a Republican, a Democratic, a Libertarian, an Independent, or perhaps a member of the Green Party? Do you agree with this individual with respect to any of their views? There is an odd number of opinions expressed, thus permitting you to choose four with which you most closely agree. If you were told that four of them were the positions or the party platform for a particular party, would you consider yourself a member or adherent of that particular political party? Can you identify an underlying philosophical theme or thread running through all of these positions?

Earlier this year, there was a rather interesting device circulating on the Internet, when there were still more than fifteen candidates competing against one another for their particular party’s nomination. The reader was asked to indicate his or her position on roughly 20 to 25 issues. Based on the positions taken by the various candidates up to that point, the device advised the reader of the name of the candidate who most closely supported the reader’s positions. Would you be willing to have a president elected through such a mechanism, with the candidate scoring the highest combined percentages of support in all areas deemed the winner?

Let’s get back to our citizen? Is our citizen a male or a female? Located in the South, North, or West? Is this individual a Christian? Is this individual of good moral character? Would you allow your son or daughter to marry this individual? Would you be willing to work with this person? At what point did you decide that you disliked or liked our citizen? At some point, as you proceeded down the list of seven positions, did you change your mind, and perhaps change it again?

Not only have we entered an era where we dissect anything and everything associated with a political candidate and those connected with or supporting that candidate, we also make assumptions about the totality of individuals based on individual issues. Let’s assume that either Candidate McCain or Candidate Obama truly and honestly held any one of the views held by our citizen above, and the candidate had the guts to express that to the American people. Could either one still manage to get elected? Which one would be a disqualifying factor? Would two, or three, or four of the views held subject the candidate to disqualification? Let’s assume that two remaining candidates following a primary process both held these personal views, but agreed to abide by and pursue the platform determined by their respective parties, despite their philosophical differences. Could they still be elected?

Is there some value to categorizing someone as good or bad based on a few factors or a few opinions? You can be reasonably certain that the views expressed by our citizen are held by millions of others, if they honestly disclosed their views. However, are the views too radical and too controversial for any sensible member of our society to openly embrace without fear of retribution? How many of you said to yourself, “We don’t do things like that in America”?
I ask you, are all of these attacks on individual statements and opinions necessary? Do we really get the honest views of our candidates in America? Should a politician pursue, once elected and after disclosing their true views to the American people, his or her personal goals, or simply those of the people, or are they one and the same? Some would argue that we have reached a point in out society where we really don’t truly know who we are electing these days. Consider the possibility that the best actor, with the best handlers and PR people, could probably manage to get elected, by saying just the right things, and playing it safe. You tell me. Do you like this, or is it that we can’t do any better?

Oh, by the way, for those of you who know me personally, which one of the seven opinions do I hold?

© 2008, The Institute for Applied Common Sense