I was quite impressed with this op-ed from David Brooks which helps me to look at myself and how I view the world.
He's right that in current political times, we turn to those blogs or newspapers that support our view and that can be narrow minded at times...
Though I do not agree with Mr. Brooks at times, this is good article of something I've been thinking for awhile...how to read and listen to reasonable republican ideas, concerns, etc.
Republican sites that I do enjoy reading are currently..Daniel Larison over at American Conservative Magazine, Ed Kain over at True/Slant and Ordinary Gentleman, David Frum (sometimes) , Daily Beast, and at times to Marc Ambinder - The Atlantic.
What he mentions about President Obama is what I've always thought for awhile which I support. ^_^
Full article is here at David Brooks
Some quotes from it:
Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy -- from his book ''The Audacity of Hope'' to his joint-session health care speech last September -- he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.
In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don't live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.