As a side note, the anti-Catholic component was anti-immigrant with the Know Nothings. Anti-Catholic was code for anti-Irish (the poor Irish Catholics who came to the United States).

I am not trying to paint the historic movement as heroic - though certainly they are presented that way in sanitized history.

The cruelty of the current system is just a manifestation of the amorality of corporate organization where the bottom line is profits - not people. That real people are being mobilized to express their outrage at GOVERNMENT competing with corporations is so convoluted as to make one dizzy.

But seriously, group think is problematic wherever it occurs, and you are right that the narrower the circle the more magnification of the group think bias.

We have an urban bias in this country. We also have class and race biases. All of them are tied into the technological divide. One of the consequences of this is a divide in access to information and verifying information.

Regarding solving the problems of space travel... there may be numerous ways to engage in space travel that may be more "natural" for some than for others. What if out there in those "empty" reaches it's not empty - like the ocean isn't empty? What if all those spaces are teeming with life - where they live and grow on the energies of the universe and swim their way through what we perceive as vacuum? If humans, upon venturing into their natural domain, are seen as a possible snack that's doesn't make them bunnies or nazis.

Watching Fox News myself through this farce, I heard, teabagging Washington and like comments as number of times.

Regardless, the point is not teabagging, but "Tea Party" which is the focus of my post.

Nativist movements are frightening things an yes they are to the right of Himmler. What I do not know about earlier renditions of nativist movements is the monied/corporate influence behind them. I suspect given the ongoing fight from the mid 1800s forward to expand the rights and power of corporations under the Constitution, is that the influence was certainly there.

What is different (at least in my lifetime) is that there is very little attempt to even disguise the corporate and monied interests behind the extreme right. That went out with the Bush administrations. I guess, that doesn't faze the folks on the streets (or being bussed in).

What they are doing is the hard press tactics by which the so-called Christian Right took over the Republican Party as part of the Reagan Revolution. Now, they are pushing even further right to a narrower and narrower litmus test. What is interesting to me - astro turf or not - is that folks can be so blatantly pro corporate after the Grand Theft Wall Street we are still watching unfold. How people reconcile the obvious conflicts is beyond me.

I think that where those not in that camp go astray, is to assume that they will tear up the Republican Party leaving the Democrats standing by default. That is not a good strategy to pursue. For example, in the NY 23 district where Democratic Owens won with 49% trailed closely by Conservative Hoffman (45.9%) after Scozzafava dropped out and threw her support behind Owens. (NY Times election 2009 results)

I don't think there are just space bunnies OR sace Nazi's. I imagine that there is a diversity of intelligent life "out there" - some even more voracious than "western man" has proven to be. But then, I think that there is a lot of intelligent life right here (some likely smarter than humans) that in our hubris we do not recognize.

I would recommend Sherri Tepper myself. She comes up with a variety of life and social organizations that fall into this latter category - intelligent life that humans don't recognize as either intelligent or life.

I do think that sci-fi is instructive regarding how some societies see themselves.

I would tend to disagree on Card's "Ender" series as "space Nazi's" unless you count the humans as the Nazi's. Ender forged a multi-species alliance after being "gamed" into the almost total destruction of the Hive after all. And it was the attempt to destroy an artificial intelligence which took on "true" life, that lead onto a multi-human, multi-species, reincarnation of same. Interesting series that.

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Thanks flowerchild!!

Back when I made my first run at college in 1972, I went to a land grant college in Missouri. The tuition was $50 a term and core text books were rented for $10 a term. Both those figures are for the TERM - not the class or hour. When I went back in 1978 (to the same school) things had gone up some. Tuition was $250 a term, core texts still rented at 35 a term. I have no idea what they are now.

By the time I started completing my doctorate in 1994, graduate tuition at the University of Oregon was about $250 a CREDIT. By the time I was awarded by doctorate in 1997, the graduate tuition was about $300 a CREDIT. Today it is $424 a credit.

I have been working in higher ed since 1991. Around 1995 a "new" thing hit my college - turning higher ed into a business. It was the follow-on of the privatization/corporatization "movement. The focus increasingly sifted from providing an education to making programs "pay" for themselves. Various college services like the print center and bookstore, went from being services to being "profit centers." The further this shift in what education and higher education was supposed to be about to "running it like a business" has gone, the less funding there has been for education putting more an more costs on students.

This has been fueled by the "kill government" movement, which has maneuvered corporate taxes out of the mix and left strapped taxpayers with stagnant wages the primary source of government funding. Hence, less money in government coffers means less services that government can meet - and education is a biggie for cuts.

Given that the "privatize everything" crowd has gone explicitly after education, I cannot help but feel that killing the public education system from K-higher education has been part of the plan all along. A population without basic skills don't have the skills to be an active and watchdog populace. Privatization (that conservative, neo-conservative, and Libertarian ideal) is nothing more than transferring power (and wealth) to corporations.

Public education, and public higher education, is almost on the ropes - just where those who have manipulated this scenario and the public wanted it to be.