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The indispensable George Lakoff has been very illuminating on the topic of the political brain this week. He explains how what appears irrational to liberals is experienced without a whiff of irony by the conservatives. One of the glaring inconsistencies I’ve noticed is the Tea Partiers’ insistence that the bank bailout was wrong and evil, coupled in the same breath with a denunciation of higher taxes on the rich.

There was no shortage of drama at the nation’s Capitol Saturday as House Democrats narrowly passed their final version of the health care reform bill — and the Illinois delegation was right in the thick of it. While every Illinois Democrat supported the bill, Reps. Dan Lipinski and Jerry Costello were key backers of the controversial amendment that secured its passage but has since deeply divided the party.

Fox Network’s numbers speaks for themselves. In the first quarter Fox was the second-most-watched network in primetime. It bagged the top spot among nine out of ten cable shows. It made CNN and MSNBC look like amateurish high school student broadcast facilities. In the second quarter Fox did even better with an astonishing ratings jump more than thirty percent higher than the first quarter. Their runaway number one audience, ad, and ratings recruiter is President Obama. Yet, Obama keeps pitching Fox. First he publicty tried to shoo everyone away from the network.

If you watched ORLY Taitz’s MSNBC interview on Monday night, you probably thought it was the nuttiest thing you’d see all week. But you were wrong… way, way wrong. Between the pop culture war , the townhalls gone wild , the Nazi comparisons and President Obama’s ” death panel ,” by week’s end, the volume of the crazy coming from the right had reached 11 .

But if you think the “liberal” media make up everything they write about Sarah Palin, you’re not reading, you just have a fetish for middle aged women who look like cheerleaders. But if you think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, you are willfully ignorant. But if you think that the majority of illegal immigrants are gangsters,you secretly wish they were Swedish,so you could welcome them with open arms.

Even as the right prepares to oppose Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, they’re finding it increasingly difficult to work up a proper fury. Partly that’s because there’s nearly universal agreement from people who have worked with Sotomayor. The American Bar Association gave Sotomayor its highest rating on Tuesday. The vote was unanimous, based on hundreds of confidential interviews with Sotomoayor’s colleagues on and off the bench, and a review of her opinions by scholars and practitioners. Partly it’s the support she has from national organizations.

Not Sarah Palin. Not John McCain. Not the Republican Party. No. The biggest loser is Clarence Thomas. Watch him as he sits but a few feet away from Barack Obama at the swearing in ceremony. Watch the furious, suppressed envy in his eyes. The hatred. The jealousy. In his small, simple brain he thinks: Him? That should be me taking the oath of office. I’ve done everything they wanted. Before Barack Obama was elected President, the highest-ranking black person in the government was Justice Clarence Thomas. He knew it and acted thusly.

When President-elect Obama said he’d reach out to the Republicans and all Americans, he was telling the truth. Apparently some people on the left hoped he was lying. Obama’s “sin” in their eyes is that he is keeping his promises. Other than the perpetually aggrieved paranoid cranks on the far right — FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, James Dobson etc., — most Americans (no matter who they voted for) are just glad that someone brimming with confidence, intelligence and good will is in charge of our rescue, at last !

It was surely an odd bit of timing on Monday, November 4–just the day before one of the biggest presidential elections in American history–that the Alaska State Personnel Board issued a finding by its chief investigator, Timothy J. Petumenos, that Republican vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, did not breach state ethics laws when she fired Alaska public safety commissioner Walt Monegan in July of this year.

ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it’s two thumbs up! Over at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren has been trashing the credibility of her own network’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for his report on Sarah Palin’s inability to identify Africa as a continent, while Bill O’Reilly valiantly defends Cameron’s honor.