To judge by his column in today’s Washington Post, Michael Gerson demonstrates a surprisingly poor grasp of the evangelical world. To say (as Gerson does) that evangelicals fear big government is laughable. They love big government — as long as they get to run it.

What does the progressive movement need to succeed and gain power? Concerted efforts to win local elections is the starting point. But unless there is some sort of coordinating structure, whether hierarchical or egalitarian, local successes will never grow into national political significance.

Without Funding, True Activist Progressive Leftists Are Challenging Progressive Democrats in Mass — by NormanB (Deviations from the Norm”)

The late Mary Travers once sang a song called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? It was a lamentation about the human cost of war and it was a popular protest song during the Vietnam era. Well it seems to me that someone could write a song, or at least ask the same question, about Libertarians. Specifically, where have all the Libertarians gone?

100 Congressional Candidates and National Organizations Oppose War Spending No Matter What Lipstick Is Applied to It

The Rand Paul controversy is not really about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paul himself has said that he doesn’t want to repeal any part of the law. So instead of trying to paint him as a racist, we should be using this moment to expose the dangerous ideologies of the Tea Party and the conservative-liberatarian movement.

Libertarians annoy me, but Rand is especially annoying today.

I have been attacked by some of my libertarian friends and most of my conservative friends. In this post, I will defend myself and set the record straight.

As a libertarian, it is hard to determine who Palin really is and what she is trying to accomplish.

For at least 100 years, the “Establishment” powers that be (primarily Corporatist inclined wealthy elites) have successfully divided the American people into opposing camps, thereby preventing us from ever uniting to overcome and replace this corrupt system.

Libertarians and Progressives share more in common than we sometimes realize. And it has always been important for those with power to ensure that we never realize that.

As a Progressive, I have always argued that Big Business has its hands too deep in the government’s pockets. My Libertarian friends have agreed, only to say “you will never reform that corrupt government; you would be better off without it altogether.”

For years we have debated which of these approaches is better: the Progressive approach – to REFORM government from within, or the Libertarian approach – to forget that fight and just do away with most of the trappings of government altogether.

As we stand upon this field of setback and defeat in the fight for better healthcare delivery and access, we see that our most trusted “progressive” leaders were bought, cowed, coerced, and betrayed the very principles upon which they claimed to fight. Now, those Libertarian friends of mine are shaking their heads and asking me, “Do you STILL think you can trust your elected officials to fix the system from within, to separate Government and Business?”

I think the answer is not either/or. I think that to answer that way is to be trapped within this Hegelian framework upon which we are being played.

The real answer lies in what I call “bending the line” or “redrawing the circle.” In short, we need to do what the reformers of another age had to do. Recover the truth about our reality from those who would posit that the “Earth is Flat” or that the “Sun revolved around the Earth.”

Those with power deliberately reframe the reality in a way that makes the truth “disappear” from the daily lexicon, and positions allies against one another as opponents in a perverse fictional dialectic that serves only one goal – the enshrinement of the established power structure and the enslavement of the rest of us to that power structure.