Cross-posted from www.eurotrib.com

Imagine if the Pope had the kind of temporal power Putin (That's President Putin, SIR!!!, Your most  Majestic Highness, Lord of Lords, Star of our firmament, etc, etc) holds in his cool hands right now?
  There he stood, in the mindblowing halls his ancestors lived out their megalomanic arc of Russian history, they so impeccably maintained and bespeaking the kind of Imperial omnipotence that era's architecture loftily declaimed, yet his demeanour held no apparent regality.

  He lanced his guests' boils of pretension with delicate, statesmanlike precision and a dry glee, perhaps consciously uncomplicit with a western audience, as if he was thinking how he would tell the boys at the fishing club later how these bigshots tried to put one over him, and he reminded them right smartly to mind their manners!

  No 'putin' much around our Vlad.

(in which the author is moved by fond nostalgia thinking of great times in the good ole u.s.a.)

the best of america is the best to the world....rhythm sections that MEAN IT, gloriously swampy, funky, dirty-cool clean-hot music that sizzles like texas lightning and reeks of missississipi mud.

the delta... great vagina of lovin' music and the warmest, sonorously satisfying dialect i've ever heard my mother tongue metamorph into.

 two things hit me here about gwb's energy speech: the utterly predictable swing to nuclear/hydrogen/coal, as those well-entrenched dino fossil-fools suck the treasury dry while perpetuating the top-down, centralised control grid system, and funding the republican lobby, and at the same time giving the finger to alternatives, by putting them WAY down on the list, thus condemning them to under-investment while the tax breaks go to embedded fat cats....bizniz as usual, an extension of the old paradigm, when global warming wasn't part of the picture.

  I want to address what I believe to be the weakest point in the Democratic Party's platform, a hole the Republicans are driving a truck loaded with weapons of mass distraction right through and onto the other side into the hearts of many people.

  I hope others will comment and shed some light on this for me.

            I find it interesting how the meaning of such familiar words and concepts as liberty and liberality are being reframed.

    For example, the root of both words is from the Latin word for freedom, yet they have apparently become descriptions of two political poles. I say apparently because perception may as well be reality in today's politics, yet i believe it is vital for us to parse how the message becomes the identity, in the sense of how such a meme can supply a sense of belonging, giving a seemingly stable point of reference to folks who feel at sea without one.