How Tea Partiers get the Constitution Wrong.

America’s Holy Writ

Tea Party evangelists claim the Constitution as their sacred text. Why that’s wrong.

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Tea Partiers hold up the Constitution on Tax Day in Washington.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/17/how-tea-partiers-get-the-constitution-wrong.html

Since winning the Republican senate primary in Delaware last month, Christine O’Donnell has not had trouble getting noticed. When the Tea Party icon admitted to “dabbl[ing] into witchcraft” as a youngster, the press went wild. When she revealed that she was “not a witch” after all, the response was rabid. O’Donnell has fudged her academic credentials, defaulted on her mortgage, sued a former employer, and campaigned against masturbation, and her efforts have been rewarded with round-the-clock coverage. Yet few observers seem to have given her views on the United States Constitution the same level of consideration. Which is too bad, because O’Donnell’s Tea Party take on our founding text is as unusual as her stance on autoeroticism. Except that it could actually have consequences.

Win McNamee / Getty Images

Inside the Tea Party

Inside the Tea Party

Last month, the candidate spoke to 2,000 right-wing activists at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. She wore a black suit and pearls, and swept on stage to the sound of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Most of the speech was unremarkable: a laundry list of conservative platitudes. But near the end she veered into stranger—and more revealing—territory. O’Donnell once told voters that her “No. 1” qualification for the Senate is an eight-day course she took at a conservative think tank in 2002. Now she was revisiting its subject: the Constitution.

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | How to Start a Movement

Many thanks to Derek Sivers for his inspiring post. Check out his the full blog post on his site at http://sivers.org/ff. You can also watch him deliver his talk like on Ted Talks, http://blog.ted.com/2010/04/how_to_start_a.php. 

Transcript:

If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore - it's about them, plural. Notice he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire....

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading | Tim Ferriss

Quote: Parkinson's Law

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

The Empathic Civilization

Great new book from Jeremy Rifkin, "One of the leading big-picture thinkers of our day" delivers his boldest work in this erudite, tough-minded, and far-reaching manifesto. Never has the world seemed so completely united-in the form of communication, commerce, and culture-and so savagely torn apart-in the form of war, financial meltdown, global warming, and even the migration of diseases.

Here's an excerpt:

Author: Jeremy Rifkin
'The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global consciousness in a World of Crisis'
Posted: March 1, 2010

While our radio talk shows and 24-hour cable TV news programs incessantly play off the political rift between conservative and liberal ideologies, the deeper conflict in America has always been the cultural divide between faith versus reason.

At the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state era, the philosophers of the Enlightenment challenged the Age of Faith that governed over the feudal economy with the Age of Reason. Theologians and philosophers have continued to battle over faith vs. reason ever since, their debates often spilling over into the cultural and political arenas, with profound consequences for society.

Today, however, at the outset of a global economy and the biosphere era, a new generation of scientists, scholars, and social reformers are beginning to challenge some of the underlying assumptions of both the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason, taking us into the Age of Empathy.

The empathic advocates argue that, for the most part, both earlier narratives about human nature fail to plumb the depths of what makes us human and therefore leave us with cosmologies that are incomplete stories--that is, they fail to touch the deepest realities of existence. That's not to dismiss the critical elements that make the stories of faith and reason so compelling. It's only that something essential is missing--and that something is "embodied experience."

Great Ideas: Sustainable Dance Floor

The Sustainable Dance Floor generates energy as you bust a move by translating the vertical movement into electricity.

Design Ideas: Hiding your television

Great post on www.apartmenttherapy.com

The Power Of Distraction, Part II: Hiding TVs In Plain View

While I love watching movies, I will never love the look of a TV, but I love the idea of a bulky media cabinet even less...so what's a flick-obsessed aesthete to do? Well,Kyle's post on her TV curtain got me thinking about subtler ways to distract the eye from these mammoth eyesores. Here are some tips.