Well said.

One more thing. As you know, America has a mixed economy so some of our institutions are socialist already. The two most obvious being the post office and the military.

Could they both be privatized? Sure. Must they be privatized? I, for one, say no.

However, I have not been talking about anything that I would call useful to anyone in their right mind. I am glad that you found Truthout innocuous now. It wasn’t earlier, I can assure you.

Things change, I guess.

There has been considerable moderation of the words and statements over the last few months and years in many of the leftist sites I have known, except perhaps at DU (Democratic Underground) and Daily Kos and the like.

Some have simply shut down, and others have tempered their fervor, the reason for which might be traceable to the then coming demise of Bush and Co and BDS, on the one hand, and to simple exhaustion on the other. It is hard to maintain the high adrenaline rush these sites exhibited for so long, and the invective thay all pitched at the US, at Republicans, and, especially, Conservatives. That they have toned down, or gone, now, in no way says that they are less threatening to the US.

Having said this, I have exactly no idea what can be done about it, if anything. Free speech is still operative, and it must remain so. We are trapped by our principles to allow hate speech to go unchecked.

I still have a sample of a radical, revolutionary statement I captured on one site that was indicative of the genre, if you are interested in reading such. I used to have many pages of their stuff from many sites, collected with the idea of showing them to someone, say, in the FBI, but they went out with my old PC and its dead hard drive a year ago, and I turned, frustrated, to other things.

Which reminds me: there was real fear expressed on Warblogging and on a few other sites that they were being monitored for possibly subversive activities. That just might explain some of the tamping down…

It is larger because practically every step of our new President, and so many of his words are indicative of a socialist mind, and his staffing of compatriots from his former church into WH positions does not quiet the nagging fear that we actually have a socialist President. Stay tuned!

A survey reported in the Reader’s Digest found that 2% of US responders to the question of whether they hated America or not, boldly answered YES.

Not quite the fraction of a percent you suggested, and, yes, not up to the threat level of 10% yet, either, if you believe that none of the responders held back on the question.

That still leaves about 6 million people in the US that really hate the nation and are willing to say so openly (given that the survey is sufficiently accurate).

Does this not cause you any alarm? It does me.

I went to truthout.org. I did not see revolution. I did not see dangerous radical, extremist ideas. I saw well intentioned people who disagree with me on many issues.

According to the website they want:

to save the whales
to get young people a piece of the stimulus bill
to prevent new tax cuts
to build schools with federal money

They are Americans participating in political discourse, that have a different viewpoint than we do. That’s all.

Here is an example of their reporting on the Iraq war:

http://www.truthout.org/021709S

Is it slanted? Sure. Is it the Russian revolution of 1917? I think not.

My point is that getting some exposure to how other people think and feel might lead to some shared understandings. I’ll get nervous when we start referring to people at Truthout.org as Marxist revolutionaries.

Well now, just how many of those nuts would run around saying that is what they want to do to all and sundry? If I were contemplating something drastic, it would be with people I trust and of like mind, not some incredible number of casual associates that I sometimes run with.

Try going to some leftist websites and, if you can stand it, dwell there for a week or so, to pick up on just what these moonbats are contemplating. I can name off-hand about 25 of these by their nicknames, because I have debated them and drawn them out, despite the abuse that goes with that territory. Each of them had their own sites too. It is (or was) quite a network, that I would guess catered to many hundreds or thousands, which was a complete shock to me. Some of the names were: “justinj”, “JMF”, and “Anonymous”(of course!).

One site of this ilk has shut down, because the owner seems to have run out of juice. This was Warblogging, owned by “George Paine”. His daily hits were in the hundreds, and a few allied sites such as “Truthout” hit over a thousand per day. It came out that Paine had a real job writing for the editorial page of the Christian Science Monitor at that time.

Even allowing for the tendency for people to go overboard when they are protected by false names on the web, I still was totally convinced of their dedication to very radical change in the US.

After all, it doesn’t take a majority to effect major changes in a society. It doesn’t take even 10% if they can worm themselves into key positions while disguising their true intentions, which was the case in Russia.

I run with an incredibly diverse group of people and I have never actually met anyone who wants to “spark a revolution along Marxist lines.”

I bet the number of American citizens that want to destroy “our Republic” to be less than a tenth of a percent. Sometimes these nut jobs come from the right. Think Timothy Mcveigh.

Read the novel “The Turner Diaries” and tell me those rightists love our nation.

Does anyone remember Justice Kennedy’s remarks about seeking guidance from European legal practices in order to make decisions here in the US? I suppose he is now well-versed in Sharia Law…

Has anyone here read the three Humanist Manifestos and parsed them line by line?
Over 50 Congressmen, apparently all Democrats, have signed up to this Secular Humanism direction that strongly pushes for an international government and the relaxation of our sovereignty in favor of UN rule, among other less-well disguised intentions.

How about reinstalling the so-called Fairness Doctrine to be the law? Feinstein, Pelosi and others have championed that idea in order to shut the rightwing talk shows down. Watch for it!

It was Franklin that said…”you have a Republic, if you can keep it!”

I do not see these ideas, and many more of similar intent from the left, to be simply “different” and acceptable kinds of change.

I believe the term anti-American is most correct for those who would destroy our Republic.