"When did we get to the place in America to where we can't have disagreements without demonizing each other?"

Two major mechanisms determine which variants will become more common or rare in a population. One is natural selection, a process that causes helpful traits (those that increase the chance of survival and reproduction) to become more common in a population and causes harmful traits to become more rare. You proceed to discuss genetic drift, an independent process that produces random changes in the frequency of traits in a population. Genetic drift results from the role that chance plays in whether a given trait will be passed on as individuals survive and reproduce.

So you proceed to discuss how these random mutations occur in the genomes of organisms. Which naturally brings you to a discussion of  changes in the DNA sequence of a cell's genome and and which causal agent for change is more important, including discussions of radiation, viruses, transposons and mutagenic chemicals, as well as errors that occur during meiosis or DNA replication.^[25][26][27]

Frank is sure that there are more environmental reasons for direct changes in the DNA sequences in the living cell and Adam is furious that Frank is missing the entire point of evolution as a process that relies upon millions and millions of years for it to work. Now you are finishing your third beer and Williams from accounting happens to show up bringing his beer from the bar directly to your table. He sits down and begins discuss how we know the world is 6,000 years old and how the fine research of Bishop Usher bears all this out.

What do you do? I mean I already know what you are thinking. How could anyone dispute that the missing link between the Ape and ourselves is NOW SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO ME.

Solution? Well you naturally order tequila shots all around and begin a new discussion:

How about those Mets?

GLOBAL WARMING

You are your buddies are down at the local sports bar a couple hours before the Red Sox meet the Yankees at the new stadium. This is also the time to get into a serious but friendly debate about global warming.

Tom, who works at the local news outlet begins the discussion with the fact that global warming appears to be  the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the last century.^[1][A] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century.^[1] The IPCC also concludes that natural phenomena such as solar variation and volcanoes produced most of the warming from pre-industrial times to 1950 and had a small cooling effect afterward.^[2][3]      

 Herb, your brother in law adds that increasing global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts.^[7] The continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice is expected, with the Arctic region being particularly affected. Other likely effects include shrinkage of the Amazon rainforest and Boreal forests, increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions and changes in agricultural yields.

And Harry who works as a part timer in the steno pool at the newspaper begins discussing the great sea that is becoming the North Pole and its affect on the North Sea alone. As the discussion continues you notice the bartender has raised the sound on the big screen which is currently turned to CNN.

Senator Imhofe: For these reasons I would like to discuss an important body of scientific research that refutes the anthropogenic theory of catastrophic global warming. I believe this research offers compelling proof that human activities have little impact on climate.

This research, well documented in the scientific literature, directly challenges the environmental worldview of the media, so they typically don't receive proper attention and discussion. Certain members of the media would rather level personal attacks on scientists who question "accepted" global warming theories than engage on the science. ...

Such a policy would induce serious economic harm, especially for low-income and minority populations. Energy suppression, as official government and non-partisan private analyses have amply confirmed, means higher prices for food, medical care, and electricity, as well as massive job losses and drastic reductions in gross domestic product, all the while providing virtually no environmental benefit. In other words: a raw deal for the American people and a crisis for the poor.

Now you are thinking, hey, since when did Imhofe ever ever care about the poor and disenfranchised? When did Senator Imhofe ever vote for an increase in the minimum wage, work to free the minorities who are stuck in prison with no hope due to meaningless drug laws, work to see that 47 million people could receive health care and that an even larger number could receive better health care, or vote for anything that ever helped one poor person in his entire political career.

Well you are in Texas after all, and the bartender is kind of in charge of the big screen tv and he is a human being and stuff.

So rather than taking a life, you pull out your 45, and fire three times into the screen and go over to Herbie's house to watch the game.

RACISM IN AMERICA

Frederick Douglass

Calm and courteous for the most part.

Oh yeah, I would say, if there is no racism today (as Scarborough says because he went to high school with blacks decades ago) why is the unemployment rate twice that for Blacks as it is for whites. Why when you visit places like Georgia have a prison population that is 70% Black?  Not even getting into the fact that Georgia has the third highest prison population per capita in the United States--which makes that fact even worse.

As immigrants, historically speaking, African Americans were the only group that DID NOT ASK TO COME HERE.

And do we miss the point when we decide to blame the entire friggin problem on the South?  When, at the time that Civil War broke out in this country it was illegal for a free Black man to even be in Illinois?

And after examining scores of statistics and arguments for the cause of racist bias in this country, there is are issues concerning how to 'make things right'. 

On the right of course there are those who refuse to see a problem at all. Its over for Joe Scarborough. I mean look at Denzel Washington, Michael Jackson (well maybe don't really look hard at Michael Jackson), Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Jordon, and Tiger Woods. There are hundreds of multimillionaires among African Americans and now, of course, we have a Black President of the United States. Game over.

God I get angry with those people. Talk about turning your face to the wall.

But lets go back again to the arguments here at TPMCafe about these issues. Long blogs and longer comments. Very spirited debates.

And then an old face appears on the front page of TPMCafe yesterday. Our old friend Pat Buchanan said:

Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review -- all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.

This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated "with the base alloy of hypocrisy."

First, Sonia Sotomayor was number one in her class at Princeton. So if we were to go back 30 years, Sonia would be one of only thirty people in the entire country who could claim that title. Getting to Yale had nothing to do with her cultural, ethnic or racial background. Nothing. YALE  gets down on its ivy league knees begging for people like this to go to their prestigious law school. They wanted this student in their law school before they even saw her picture and certainly felt good that they beat HarvardLawSchool to the punch.

WHAT IN THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT?

One prefers the old bigotry.

I had already discussed this unrequited hatred in my post: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/dikkday48yahoocom/

In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration of blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government side by side with the capable." (Washington Post, 1/5/92) http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2553

In another memo from Buchanan to Nixon: "There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks...why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system." (Boston Globe, 1/4/92)

In a column sympathetic to ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan chided the Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi "costume": "Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks." (syndicated column, 2/25/89)

I already noted Jamison Foser's column in MediaMatters on June 8: http://mediamatters.org/columns/200906080008

In a memo Buchanan wrote while working in the Nixon White House, he dismissed a massacre in which 67 blacks were shot to death by South African police as nothing more than "a few South African whites mistreating a couple of blacks." Concern over the shooting, Buchanan wrote, was "racist and ideological." That's right: Buchanan denounced concern over white South African police officers massacring 67 blacks, rather than the shootings themselves, as "racist.

[I]t is difficult to share the wild enthusiasm about the news that Nelson Mandela will be released, that South Africa, too, may soon enjoy the blessings of "majority rule."

But, where did we get that idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe this. They did not give the Indians, who were still living a tribal existence, the right to vote us out of North America. When they created the Republic, they restricted the franchise to property-owning males, believing that not every man was qualified to rule, nor every people prepared for self-government. If the past 30 years [of African history] taught us nothing else, it has surely taught us that.

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Well sometimes screw civil discourse.