The website for my recently published book, The Nutcase Across The Street, is now finished. Check it out.

People complain that our leaders in Washington can’t seem to get along well enough to get much done, but the real problem is what their rhetoric does to the rest of us.

As of late, it appears that these two groups have somehow been divided, with the centrists joining the liberals and the libertarians joining the conservatives, but I have always seen them as two sides of the same coin.

This is the time we need true compromise, but not the variety of compromise wherein nobody gets quite what they want. This only breeds contempt and merely “buys time” while perceived injustice continues, putting off conflict for another day. What we need is the sort of lasting compromise wherein everybody gets exactly what they want. To be fair, there may be some issues on which no such compromise is possible, but far too often when such compromises are presented, they are rejected because those in power cannot afford to lose the issues of division they use in their campaign platforms.

The author of this article has some of the same suspicions I’ve had for a long time; the two major parties collude on certain issues and not always in ways fair to the rest of us. Crony capitalism and the welfare state tend to go hand in hand and both major parties are guilty. Hopefully, understanding this will be the first step to overcoming partisanship. We need to stop defending our preffered parties when they screw up and remain true to our principles.

Furthermore, it shows yet another reason why labels are more trouble than they’re worth. Most people are against both crony capitalism and excessive welfare states (it seems) and so most people don’t fit the left-right paradigm. I had wanted to call both crony capitalism and welfare forms of socialism, but this would only confuse people; the word socialism means different things to different people. I had wanted to say that remaining true to our principles and rejecting both major parties was what the tea parties were all about, but the "tea party" label has become tarnished. People would assume I was endorsing violence, anarchy, big business, racism, or a mere front for the GOP to take down Obama. None of this is true.

I recently found a couple of links at the Coffee Party website you may find interesting. Why is politics so divisive? What drives it? How did we get here? One woman makes the case that it is the news media and lays out how it evolved over time.

Be sure to check out her other post on how "argument culture" hurts America.

I was recently perusing RealClearPolitics and came across this video of a man (perhaps unknowingly) setting up a new narrative to current events that opposes the one I have found personally more useful.

I was perusing RealClearPolitics.com recently and came across Jimmy Hoffa's recent "declaration of war on Republicans." There are serious problems with his statement, but probably not the ones you think.