Conservatives

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Some conservatives are in a mild panic about the possibility that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will succumb to pressure from Democrats and the liberal media to uphold "Obamacare." This from a Wall Street Journal editorial: "You can tell the Supreme Court is getting closer to its historic Obamacare ruling because the left is making one last attempt to intimidate the justices.

As the Supreme Court begins its new term Monday, its sixth with John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice, the reality is that this is the most conservative court since the mid-1930s. Since Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, conservatives have sought to change constitutional law, and they have succeeded in virtually every area. During the first years of the Roberts court, it has consistently ruled in favor of corporate power, such as in holding that corporations have the 1st Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts in independent political campaigns.

Top 10 lists are standard fodder for media: the 10 best dressed, the 10 best-looking, the 10 most wanted, etc. But the International Institute for Species Exploration, headquartered at Arizona State University, has a new take on such lists. For the last five years, the institute has been issuing a top 10 list of the quirkiest, most bizarre and just plain interesting new species discovered the previous year.

With so many scientific issues becoming battlefields in the culture wars - from climate change to stem-cell research to evolution (see above) - we hardly needed a new study to tell us that scientists have become a favorite target of the right. Yet a paper written by University of North Carolina doctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat and published last week in the American Sociological Review also contains a highly counterintuitive finding. Common sense, as well as past research, suggests that distrust of science correlates with lack of education; the less education a person has, the more likely he or she will favor traditional beliefs or religious dogma over scientific evidence.

A few years ago Ann Coulter published a book titled "How to Talk to Liberal (If You Must). " With all due respect, Coulter, one of my favorite conservative eye-pokers, was wrong. There is no "how" in talking to a liberal. You can't talk to a liberal, period. Believe me, I've tried. I've got a liberal mother, four liberal siblings and their assorted liberal offspring, and a horde of liberal friends (I went to college and grad school). Whenever I advance to them even the mildest of challenges to liberal orthodoxies, on topics ranging from the welfare state to illegal immigration to abortion, I'm greeted with name-calling, obscenities, shout-overs and, finally, the grave-like silence of ostracism.

Reduced sentences for drug crimes. More job training and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders. Expanded alternatives to doing hard time. In the not-too-distant past, conservatives might have derided those concepts as mushy-headed liberalism ? the essence of "soft on crime. " Nowadays, these same ideas are central to a strategy being packaged as "conservative criminal justice reform," and have rolled out in right-leaning states around the country in an effort to rein in budget-busting corrections costs.

As the Republican presidential race has shown, the conservatives who dominate the primaries are deeply skeptical of science — making Newt Gingrich, for one, regret he ever settled onto a couch with Nancy Pelosi to chat about global warming. A study released Thursday in the American Sociological Review concludes that trust in science among conservatives and frequent churchgoers has declined precipitously since 1974, when a national survey first asked people how much confidence they had in the scientific community.

Congress gave final approval Thursday to a temporary extension of parts of the Patriot Act, a step that merely postpones a burgeoning political debate over the controversial anti-terrorism law and its implications for civil liberties in the United States. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, forming an unusual coalition with Republican leaders to prevent three key surveillance provisions favored by intelligence officials from expiring at the end of the month. But an equally unusual coalition opposes the extension.

Conservatives have been very critical of the Golden Globe-winning film "Avatar" for its mystical melange of trite leftist themes. But what they have missed is that the essential conflict in the story is a battle over property rights. "Avatar," written and directed by James Cameron and set in 2154, is the story of young American Jake Sully, who joins a military mission to the distant moon Pandora, which has a supply of an expensive and almost impossible to obtain mineral (thus its name, "unobtainium")

Re "Gay marriage clause added to defense bill," May 19 Conservatives recently pushed legislation through the House that would prohibit same-sex marriages from being performed at military chapels. This prohibition would even apply to chapels that are located in states where same-sex marriage is otherwise recognized. In 2009, conservatives overturned regulations that banned firearms in national parks. The logic was that people should be permitted to carry firearms in national parks located in states where it is otherwise legal to carry them.

WASHINGTON -- Overcoming objections from conservatives, Congress gave final approval to legislation to reauthorize the nation's Export-Import Bank, sending to President Obama's desk a key priority for the business community. The Senate passed the measure 78-20, but only after dispensing with several GOP amendments to do away with the bank or scale back its lending authority. Conservatives in the House and Senate have fought the bank as a form of “corporate welfare” as it provides financing for entities to purchase U.S. exports in a way they say props up some companies and harms others with unfair competition.

The pace is picking up on the massive conservation project in process at the Southwest Museum in Mount Washington. The end is almost in sight: Only 36,000 objects to go! In 2003, when the poverty-stricken institution merged with the more affluent Museum of the American West under the umbrella of the Autry National Center in Griffith Park, the first priority was to save the Southwest's collection of about 250,000 Native American artworks and artifacts. Second only to the holdings of the National Museum of the American Indian inWashington, D.C., the collection had been inadequately housed for decades and further damaged by earthquakes, water and insects.

Re "A tale of two narratives," Opinion, May 6 Historian Joseph J. Ellis writes that conservatives were the central feature of the founding of the United States. But using the dictionary definition of "liberals" as being open to change and reform, it's obvious the opposite is true. The conservatives of 1776 were loyalists who fought with the British. The French, Russian and American revolutions were all the work of liberals to escape oppressive governments and to start new, democratic systems.

After more than 35 years in the Senate, Richard G. Lugarof Indiana was ousted Tuesday by a tea party challenger in a Republican primary that showed how hard it is for a veteran lawmaker known for his ability to compromise to win reelection in the current political environment. The 80-year-old senator, a leading voice for his party on foreign policy, was pummeled for weeks by Republican rival Richard Mourdock for his breaches with conservative orthodoxy. Among them: Lugar's support of citizenship for some illegal immigrants and his votes to confirm President Obama's Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who dropped out of the race after presenting an energetic challenge to Mitt Romney from the party's right flank, jousted over gay marriage and contemporary culture with Jay Leno on Tuesday, the day after he endorsed his former rival (see videos below). Before they ever so gently crossed political swords, though, Santorum presented Leno with a gift, the sartorial symbol of his unexpectedly long-lived campaign: an American-made sweater vest from Bemidji Woolen Mills, a Minnesota company.

I recently played poker with a bunch of Republicans. My husband and I, both bleeding-heart liberals, are part owners of a cabin in the Sierra outside Fresno, a very conservative area. The Camp Sierra Assn. president has an annual poker game, and this year we, the newcomers, were invited. No one mentioned politics. We talked instead about our kids and Las Vegas and the odd warm weather. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of very good Scotch. I had fun even though I lost $4. When the game was over, we walked home with our across-the-road neighbors and invited them in for a final nightcap.

Ours is the only civilized country in the world that refers to narrow-minded bigots, racists and militant war hawks as "conservatives." KARL ZERK Los Angeles

The most famous speech in American history begins this way: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. " Lincoln's eloquence at Gettysburg was lyrical but not historically accurate. For no such thing as a "new nation" had been proposed in 1776; only a temporary union of sovereign states, declaring their independence from Britain, then presumably going their separate ways.