About the Blog

This is a blog for calm discourse with a liberal agenda. I am not out to malign Republicans and extreme conservatives. This is a forum to muse, or to vent, about liberal values - a place where we can examine our daily lives through a Democrat lens. With climate change deniers and anti-gay bigots all around us, sometimes we (well, I) forget to be Happy to Be Blue.

I spent most of my life in situations far removed from angry right wingers. I grew up in Iowa, which you may think is a hotbed of conservative thinking, but Iowans as a group are largely polite and logical. I swear that when I was a kid, back in the '80s and '90s, the political climate wasn't this vile, even though we had to argue uphill both ways in the snow. It wasn't until I landed in Denver, Colorado, that I encountered true right wing extremism in my daily life. The constant interaction of my left-leaning views, which to me had just been common sense views, with the visible and vocal conservatives in a swing state got me thinking. A lot. And this blog was born.

I have a few close friends who are members of the Republican party. They are smart and wonderful human beings. They just view things differently than I do. But in recent years I've encountered seriously close-minded, hateful conservatives spewing flimsy (at best) logic. These types shake my belief in the basic goodness of humankind to the core. People that can't tell the difference between "Soviet Communism and a Stafford Loan," (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone). I need to share my ideas via this blog and hope that you can join me through the comments or submit your own ideas for post topics. I prefer this venue to a Facebook status update (and subsequent flinging of one-line arguments from both sides) because of the potential for expanded thought here...and I hope you prefer it, too.

Oh, by the way, I'm not much more of a scholar than Sarah Palin is, so feel free to give my analysis a good thrashing or (hopefully) some supporting evidence that I failed to consider.