COFFEE BREAK 228

+ updated at 4:08 P.M. EST on Tuesday, November 16, 2010

+ Thanks to The Thom Hartmann radio program, I just discovered a book by Russ Baker which I must read.  It is Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.

+ On Democracy Now! Health Insurance Company Whistle Blower Wendell Potter predicts that the GOP Congress will gut the consumer protections which are a big part of the Healthcare Reform law. The interview is available in video, audio or transcript.

+ As I continue to ponder the election results, one striking fact comes to mind: The Democratic base was fired up in 2006 and 2008 while the Republican base was disillusioned with Bush and the GOP Congress. The Democrats won.  In 2010, it was just the opposite.  The Republicans won.  Get it?  The base can not be taken for granted. The base expects to see much of its agenda embraced with at least a few significant victories.  Clearly, the Democrats in the White House and Congress did not embrace enough of the Progressive agenda and did not win enough victories.  I hope the Democrats have learned their lesson.  We will see if the Republicans did. 

+ TruthDig offers "The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum" by Chris Hedges. It takes courage to read anything Chris Hedges writes but courage is needed now in heavy doses if we are to solve our global problems "with liberty and justice for all."

The article begins:

The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s intellectual life.

“You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders,” he wrote in his 1959 essay “...From an Exile.” “You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand. You must (defying outside power; gritting your teeth as we grit ours) take us back.”

But they did not take Davis back. Davis, whom I met a few days ago in Toronto, could not find a job after his prison sentence and left for Canada. He has spent his career teaching mathematics at the University of Toronto. He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the professors ousted from universities never taught again. Radical and left-wing ideas were effectively stamped out. The purges, most carried out internally and away from public view, announced to everyone inside the universities that dissent was not protected. The confrontation of ideas was killed.