Author: Brian

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong‘s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt‘s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.

“We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore”, Garrison Keillor, 2004

“Somehow, a president whose platform consists of Mitt Romney’s health care bill, Newt Gingrich’s environmental policies, John McCain’s deficit-financed payroll tax cuts, George W. Bush’s bailouts of failing banks and corporations, and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rates has been recast as the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx sat down for a beer with Friedrich Engels.”

— Ezra Klein, New York Review of Books

While commenting on Romney’s 47percent beliefs, Rhet said: 

Americans generally believe that anyone who doesn’t “make it” in America is either just not trying or is a born loser.
But somehow when a person fails in Africa, or Guatemala, or Mexico or anywhere else they are totally worthy of sympathy.
This is the nature of our fake meritocracy here in the USA. If you fail you deserve it, if you win you deserve it.
Meanwhile when people like Romney cheat like hell to “win” nobody notices how he and his ilk rig the game against the majority, ensuring they will lose.

Ayn Marx 666 said: 

This is because America is God’s Special Country, and the religion born of Calvin and Rand (or Spencer) identifies the Elect with the winners, and the losers with the Damned—and sympathy is wasted on the damned, they deserve all they get.

“I regret that my poor choice of words caused some people to understand what I was saying.” 

New Yorker’s Christopher Weyant.

Mike Lofgren: 

We can devise all the clever schemes imaginable to clean up politics and get money out of campaigns, but it won’t work until the American people collectively give up on certain fond illusions: 

the Horatio Alger myth, American Exceptionalism, and the whole mass of magical thinking that boils down to the belief that God loves America because we’re so virtuous, handsome, and smart, and that we, too, could win the lottery.

Well, we’re not necessarily any of those things.

The truth is that we lucked into adverse possession of a mostly empty continent in a temperate zone with lots of resources, and straddled east and west by two huge moats. We had firearms and resistance to smallpox, and the original owners didn’t. Virtue had very little to do with it.

And now, thanks to globalization, our original advantages matter less. Go to certain areas of the once-industrial Midwest. Some of the places look like Dresden after the bombing. We are in a tough, competitive global environment, and we simply cannot afford to squander our potential by playing the world’s policeman abroad and running a healthcare/service economy at home where half the population empties the bedpans of the other half. And plutocracy is not a stable political basis for a successful nation-state. As Lincoln said, we must disenthrall ourselves.

Just 1,082 donors—a group small enough to fit inside a single high school gymnasium—accounted for 94 percent of all individual donations to super-PACs from January 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012. Those 1,082 donors amount to just 0.00035 percent of the US population. 

Lawrence Lessig:

A tiny number of Americans — .26 percent — give more than $200 to a congressional campaign. .05 percent give the maximum amount to any congressional candidate. .01 percent give more than $10,000 in any election cycle. And .000063 percent — 196 Americans — have given more than 80 percent of the super-PAC money spent in the presidential elections so far.

These few don’t exercise their power directly. None can simply buy a congressman, or dictate the results they want. But because they are the source of the funds that fuel elections, their influence operates as a filter on which policies are likely to survive. It is as if America ran two elections every cycle, one a money election and one a voting election. To get to the second, you need to win the first. But to win the first, you must keep that tiniest fraction of the one percent happy. Just a couple thousand of them banding together is enough to assure that any reform gets stopped.

Some call this plutocracy. Some call it a corrupted aristocracy.

“Do you want to know which states got the lion’s share of federal spending?”