Sara Robinson

Last month's piece on how to talk to your conservative relatives over the holidays was apparently welcome and necessary.

It is that time again: Thanksgiving, the official kickoff of the 2008 holiday season. As you prepare to head once again into the family fray to spend quality time with your conservative relatives, it helps to note that most of the right wing's favorite anti-liberal slanders are rooted in some deeply-held—and deeply wrong—assumptions about who liberals are, and what we believe. Your best defense is to listen closely for these underlying myths and fables at work—and be prepared to challenge them head-on. Here's how.

There's an e-mail making the rounds this week:

STORE CLOSINGS AND LAYOFFS:

By the end of Dec. 2008 as announced Circuit City Filed Bankruptcy, they promised to keep all stores open for the holiday season, but afterwards, they plan on closing 155 stores nationwide.

It is that time again: Thanksgiving, the official kickoff of the 2008 holiday season. As you prepare to head once again into the family fray to spend quality time with your conservative relatives, it helps to note that most of the right wing's favorite anti-liberal slanders are rooted in some deeply-held—and deeply wrong—assumptions about who liberals are, and what we believe. Your best defense is to listen closely for these underlying myths and fables at work—and be prepared to challenge them head-on. Here's how.

There's an e-mail making the rounds this week:

STORE CLOSINGS AND LAYOFFS:

By the end of Dec. 2008 as announced Circuit City Filed Bankruptcy, they promised to keep all stores open for the holiday season, but afterwards, they plan on closing 155 stores nationwide.

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day in Canada. In many ways, it is the most Canadian of all the statutory holidays we have here -- more heartfelt than Thanksgiving, more widely observed than Canada Day, more essential to the deep strain of honor in the Canadian character than -- well, any day we celebrate up here.

We've earned the right to spend a few days basking in this well-earned glow. But let's not get complacent, either. The very fact that we won also brings us to a fresh moment of reckoning. We are no longer the loyal opposition; we are now the people in charge. And our next act of transformation will be to come to terms with that fact.

With one fell stroke, giving Americans universal access to health care will undermine some of the deepest and most persi

Our fellow Americans, at long last, are getting it. Not only is the Age of Reagan over; it's becoming increasingly clear that the entire post-WWII order has come to the end of its run. The world as we have known it is passing away; and with it, so does our ability to put much faith in the future.

Jonathan Raban, writing in the London Review of Books, gives us a keen insight into what happens when you let conservatives build cities:

Conservatives are twisting the facts beyond the breaking point to support their revisionist history about a law that encourages lending in low-income communities. But don’t be fooled: the financial crisis was caused by conservative financial follies and bankers run amok and nothing more. Here's how you can fire back at 11 basic myths about the Community Reinvestment Act and the role of government regulation in this Wall Street mess.