Category: politics

Stunning no matter how familiar.
When God arranges votes, what arrogance appears!

Friends implored Reed—the former executive director of the Christian Coalition and one of the key architects of the GOP congressional takeover in 1994—to get back in the game.

As Reed tells his audience at the Mayflower, a phone call from Sean Hannity persuaded him. “I wanted to know that this was not me,” Reed says, “that this was not any ambition of mine. I wanted to know that this was the Lord.” Reed breaks into a sly grin as he recounts Sean Hannity’s bargaining: “Ralph, God is speaking through this phone line right now and he’s using me to deliver the message.”

[link] Note: Hannity is a premier news anchor; never revealed as a political operator; merely characterized as a ‘journalist’.

Shameful Days,
more critical than budgets or war,
because we let lies arrive.

Too polite:

…constituencies with the means and the bureaucratic endurance to get what they want slowly hack away at the government over time, carving out exemptions to their civic responsibilities…

Hedge-fund gazillionaires pay less than half the top tax rate paid by most middle and upper-middle class Americans.

Matt Taibbi:

• Constituencies with the means and the bureaucratic endurance to get what they want slowly hack away at the government over time, carving out exemptions to their civic responsibilities while ordinary people suck the proverbial egg.

• A 100% or 200% tax break for hedge fund and private equity billionaires is not the sort of thing that one passes instantly, by standing up in front of big campaign crowds and urging on a mob; it takes a long time and a lot of behind-the-scenes baby steps.

• Once upon a time, we didn’t make very many distinctions about taxable income. Whether you made your money driving trucks or buying and selling stocks, you made what you made and you paid the rate outlined in your bracket.

• Then a movement coalesced behind the idea that the government should give a tax break to those persons who made their money investing…

Washington Post

Oops. Republican debt will be $1.5 trillion higher than under the president’s budget.

Details. Details. Details.

The deficit would be $200 billion larger under the ‘Pledge to America’ than it would be with Barack Obama.

The ‘Pledge to America’ accrues $11.1 trillion. By 2020, their federal deficit would be 6% of GDP, the federal debt would exceed 93% of GDP, and interest payments on the debt would be $1 trillion per year.

“The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP.

[It] will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. [Rolling Stone]

at Washington Post:

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church.

What will future generations condemn us for?

!

Lisa Miller at Newsweek:

The conversation stretched on for nearly an hour and a quarter.

The president began by complimenting my multi-colored striped socks. “If I wasn’t president,” he laughed, “I could wear socks like that.”

You’ve passed more progressive legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Yet your base does not seem nearly as fired up as the opposition, and you don’t seem to be getting the credit for those legislative victories.

When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, “Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable.”

When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?

“Well, I’ll tell you that given the state of the economy during my transition, between my election and being sworn in, our working assumption was that everybody was going to want to pull together, because there was a sizable chance that we could have a financial meltdown and the entire country could plunge into a depression. So we had to work very rapidly to try to create a combination of measures that would stop the free-fall and cauterize the job loss.”

Dammit.

Karl Rove is virtually entirely funded by billionaires. 91%

Their manipulation of attack advertising is…?

Double Dammit.

With the exception of Mitt Romney, Murdoch has all of the major potential Republican candidates for the presidency are on Fox channel’s payroll.

Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and, of course, Sarah Palin are on exclusive contractual strings that prevent its stable of Republican stars from being interviewed on any other channel.

Triple super-duper dammit.

Top 20% took 85% of America’s wealth.
Top 1% take 23.5 % of all reported income.

Is trickery really so difficult to understand?

What bugs me more than gaggles of political phonies
is the very poor results of the wealthy.
Oh the poverty of wealth in this era.
sloppy sloppy sloppy.

Robert Reich:

Republican Economics as Social Darwinism:

John Boehner, the Republican House leader who will become Speaker if Democrats lose control of the House in the upcoming midterms, recently offered his solution to the current economic crisis: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, lead a more moral life.”

Actually, those weren’t Boehner’s words. They were uttered by Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary, millionaire industrialist Andrew Mellon, after the Great Crash of 1929. But they might as well have been Boehner’s because Hoover’s and Mellon’s means of purging the rottenness was by doing exactly what Boehner and his colleagues are now calling for: shrink government, cut the federal deficit, reduce the national debt, and balance the budget. And we all know what happened after 1929, at least until FDR reversed course.

Boehner and other Republicans would even like to roll back the New Deal and get rid of Barack Obama’s smaller deal health-care law. The issue isn’t just economic. We’re back to tough love. The basic idea is force people to live with the consequences of whatever happens to them. In the late 19th century it was called Social Darwinism. Only the fittest should survive, and any effort to save the less fit will undermine the moral fiber of society.

Republicans have wanted to destroy Social Security since it was invented in 1935… Republicans also hate unemployment insurance. … Finally, like Hoover and Mellon, Republicans want to cut the deficit and balance the budget at a time when a large portion of the workforce is idle.

This defies economic logic. When consumers aren’t spending, businesses aren’t investing and exports can’t possibly fill the gap, and when state governments are slashing their budgets, the federal government has to spend more. Otherwise, the Great Recession will turn into exactly what Hoover and Mellon ushered in – a seemingly endless Great Depression.

It’s also cruel. Cutting the deficit and balancing the budget any time soon will subject tens of millions of American families to unnecessary hardship and throw even more into poverty.

Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon thought their economic policies would purge the rottenness out of the system and lead to a more moral life. Instead, it purged morality out of the system and lead to a more rotten life for millions of Americans.

And that’s exactly what Republicans are offering yet again.

The anarchist fortunes of Koch, all the odder as co-founders of John Birch Society and Top 10 polluters in the USA, are insider Fiorina backers — the buy is is is offshore drilling, pipeline oversight, clean tech roll back.

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The midterm election is largely being financed by a small corps of wealthy individuals and corporations whose names may never be known to the public. The full brunt of that spending is going to Republican candidates.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain

Torrid argument does not good policy make. Republicans are setting up an across-the-board 20 percent cut in non-security discretionary spending. There is management required to get government fit, but raw bullies have not the wit to do it.

A. Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

B. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic.

C. The only way to balance the budget by 2020 while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut (c) is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government.

Tax cuts & Republican donations.
Bush tax cuts cost us $2.7 trillion in the first eight years.
The 25 top speculators average $1 billion each given tax rate of 17%.
People earning over $200,000 but paying no tax skyrocketed under Bush.
Twice before so much is held by so few—the late 1920s and the robber barons in the 1880s.

We a nation not ours.

White House view:

“On the economy, you said earlier this is going to take an ‘enormous amount of time.’ How long?”

“Well, I think it’s going to take several years from–I think getting through a recession as deep as the one that we were faced with, the sheer amount of job loss, the shock to the system, shock to our financial system, the change in our housing market. We’re dealing with, in many ways, if you look at what happened and what cascaded downward all at a certain period of time, you’re dealing with sort of the perfect storm.”

Three million protesters marched in France yesterday. [woot]

What a phenomena.

Timothy Noah writes at Slate. This 30-year trend “may represent the most significant change in American society in your lifetime,”  “and it’s not a change for the better.”

Part 1
Introducing the Great Divergence:
Trying to understand income inequality, the most profound change in American society in your lifetime.

Part 2
The Usual Suspects Are Innocent:
Neither race nor gender nor the breakdown of the American family created the Great Divergence.

Part 3
Did Immigration Create the Great Divergence?
Why we can’t blame income inequality on the post-1965 immigration surge.

Part 4
Did Computers Create Inequality?
No. The tech boom’s impact was no greater than that of previous technological upheavals during the 20^th century.

Part 5
Can We Blame Income Inequality on Republicans?
Yes, but for the very richest beneficiaries the trend has been bipartisan.

Part 6
The Great Divergence and the Death of Organized Labor:
How has the decline of the union contributed to income inequality?

Part 7
The Great Divergence and International Trade:
Trade didn’t create inequality, and then it did.

Part 8
The Stinking Rich and the Great Divergence:
Executive compensation took off in the 1980s and 1990s. Is it to blame?

Part 9
How the Decline in K-12 Education Enriches College Graduates:
When the workforce needed to be smarter, Americans got dumber.

Another type of regulatory capture? Being outright dumb.

Reporting from Sacramento — Scores of people convicted of crimes such as rape, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon are permitted to care for some of California’s most vulnerable residents as part of the government’s home health aide program.

It’s a gray area they say. No it’s not. It’s just sloppy and lazy. And dumb.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Rally to Restore Sanity

It’s set up as a joke, but there’s a serious point at the heart of it.

Dana Blankenhorn asserts, “It may be the most important political event of the year, putting the politics of our time on trial and calling for its rejection.

“He’s calling a new generation to renew the work before us, reasonably, honorably, purposefully, sanely, quietly, which is all the President is asking of us as well, and what our history demands of us.”

Ezra Klein reacts to the GOP’s Pledge to America:

Their policy agenda is detailed and specific — a decision they will almost certainly come to regret.

Because when you get past the adjectives and soaring language, the talk of inalienable rights and constitutional guarantees, you’re left with a set of hard promises that will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars, take health-care insurance away from tens of millions of people, create a level of policy uncertainty businesses have never previously known, and suck demand out of an economy that’s already got too little of it.

Economist Mark Thoma sums it up:

There don’t seem to be any new ideas here, just a promise to undo what’s been done since the Republicans lost power.

Why would we want to return to the policies that brought us
→ a stagnant middle class even in the best of times,
→ widening inequality,
→ out of control financial markets,
→ the biggest recession in recent memory,
→ declining rates of health care coverage,
→ threats to Social Security and to social insurance,
→ tax policies that reinforce inequality
→ big holes in the budget,
→ false claims that tax cuts more than pay for themselves, and
→ two wars that have brought Social Security and Medicare — programs vital to middle and low income households under increasing financial pressure?

Comment snippets:

• Didnt they have a ten point Contract With America when Gingrich took over? Let’s see… one was to run a balanced budget.

• The plan is to cut transfer payments that provide food and health care to children while cutting taxes, increasing defense spending, the deficit and expanding the size of government under the guise of protecting morals.

• Hey. Some of us get off on that kind of thing. Kall it Kinky Economics. Trickle down was just foreplay.

Republicans are now pledging to stop their spending spree? These Republicans that took a record $236 billion surplus into a record $1.3 trillion deficit? Sick.

The ship of State has a large hole in the bottom where the fuel tank used to be. The Reagan Solution is to chop more holes while invoking Reagan’s name.

“I’ve made clear over the last 20 months, when Republicans were in control of Congress we made our share of mistakes,” Boehner said.  Banana republic, here we come.

“When I hear Democrats griping and groaning and saying …

‘the health care plan didn’t have a public option’, and … ‘the financial reform — there was a provision here that I think we should have gotten better’, or, ‘you know what, yes, you ended the war in Iraq, the combat mission there, but you haven’t completely finished the Afghan war yet’, this or that or the other, I say ‘folks, wake up’.

“This is not some academic exercise, as Joe Biden put it, don’t compare us to the Almighty; compare us to the alternative.”

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Have Americans gone mad?

Republicans need to make a net gain of 39 seats to retake the House of Representatives. The consensus is they will, and probably with something to spare; some analysts are even predicting a repeat of the 52-seat swing in 1994, when a pugnacious minority leader named Newt Gingrich led Republicans back to command of the House for the first time in 40 years.

You sense a flailing around for the vanished certainties once encapsulated in the notion of ‘the American Dream’, and a venomous search for scapegoats in the establishment that has failed them.

emphasis: venomous

Big stink in California about jobs. Right wing says taxes and regulations push out businesses such as military contractors in southern California. But this isn’t true.

Northrop Grumman moved 300 white-collar jobs to be closer to its key customers, federal agencies in Washington, not because of high taxes or cumbersome regulations. About 30,000 employees remain, the bulk of its California workforce.

Jobs lost as a result of business leaving the state total about 11,000 a year — less than one-tenth of 1% of California’s 18 million jobs.

To restore 2 million jobs lost under G. W. Bush, she says a governor just needs to be a ‘marketer-in-chief’. Yup. That’s it.

With a national record for campaign spending, Meg Whitman stumps to ‘turn California’s economy around’. She’ll use the tired tricks of the RNC: A bully appointing political friends. Eliminate 40,000 state jobs. Emaciate agencies. Strip green tech incentives. Bust education and the safety net. Inflame hot-button issues. Chase farm workers.

Typical plutocratic junk.

LA Times finally lifts a thin cover to dig up the shallow advertising muscle behind the tea party insurgency. You can bet this paper is much polite. And this investigation much too light:

√ Sal Russo began in 1969 with Ronald Reagan.
√ Key promoter in conservative political circles.
√ Pivotal player in wingnut rising.
√ Started the Tea Party Express.
√ Large database mining.
√ Millions of dollars crafting caustic ads.
√ “He’s a talented political operative who has been doing this a long time.”
√ Cheap commercials at about $3,000 not $30,000.
√ The Alaska boost of Joe Miller. The Nevada boost of Sharon Angle.
√ Delaware backer. Long list of wacky candidate clients.
√ A bus with six or eight people and Sarah Palin, a fundraising machine.
√ Always raising money to run more ads.

Here’s another look at self enrichment to snooker honest, unsuspecting, passionate Americans.

Just swing your head in a complete circle and stick out your tongue ?

“The exact phrase ’separation of Church and State’ came out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth, that’s where it comes from.

“So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they’re Nazis.” —Delaware Republican Glen Urquhart

Jefferson’s text: [link]

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Want to start your own hate group? [link]

• Find people who believe that they are owed something
• Give them a back-story like: “we were great once, but…”
• Tell them what they know is lies
• Offer them praise and acceptance
• Scare them with (insert catastrophe)

And so he is sad.

His income is $455,000 per year. He’s complaining about taxes.

He’s like most working Americans, he says. Once his bills are paid each month, there’s hardly anything left over. How can he be considered rich?

The median household income in the United States today is $50,000. Half of all households make more than this. Half of all households make less. 90% of households make less than $100,000 a year. Less than 1% captures more than $455,000 a year. By any standard, he’s really rich.

He thinks that he ought to be able to pay off student loans, contribute to retirement savings vehicles, build equity, drive new cars, live in a big expensive house, send his children to private school, and still have plenty of cash at the end of the month for the $200 restaurant meals, the $1000 a night resort hotel rooms, and the $75,000 automobiles.

But why does he think that’s the way things should be?

Nicholas Kristoff:

In America, bigoted comments about Islam often seem to come from people who have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims. In their ignorance, they mirror the anti-Semitism that I hear in Muslim countries from people who have never met a Jew.

Republican globalists.
Oh maybe it isn’t so much left, right or nuts, but a current crop of officeholders with entirely lazy souls.

Schwarzenegger visited Tokyo as part of an Asian tour as he looks for foreign contractors and funds to help with a high-speed rail network that will include a route between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Japan is offering a loan. Chinese, South Korean and Europeans too. China’s Ministry of Rail yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bay Area Council.

As Rome burns and a’that. California is a mess with a huge budget fiasco and intense layoffs. A state $20 billion behind year after year, facing mushrooming long term obligations, will sink $40 billion on mere political pride? That is p-p-p-purely poor pursuit.

What offshore train repairs a 15% poverty rate?

History is marking California’s dramatic decline. Never fixed by a zippy train, folks are sadly confused about how it’s economy was stripped and are steered away from pointing to the factors and players responsible.

Chris Hedges again:

The corporate state, whose interests are being championed by tea party leaders such as Palin and Dick Armey, is working hard to make sure the anger of the movement is directed toward government rather than corporations and Wall Street.

Some rants well bejewel rage.

Chris Hedges:

There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the press, the educational system, the financial sector, labor unions, the arts, religious institutions and our dysfunctional political parties, which can be considered democratic. The intent, design and function of these institutions, controlled by corporate money, are to bolster the hierarchical and anti-democratic power of the corporate state. These institutions, often mouthing liberal values, abet and perpetuate mounting inequality. They operate increasingly in secrecy. They ignore suffering or sacrifice human lives for profit. They control and manipulate all levers of power and mass communication. They have muzzled the voices and concerns of citizens. They use entertainment, celebrity gossip and emotionally laden public-relations lies to seduce us into believing in a Disneyworld fantasy of democracy.

The menace we face does not come from the insane wing of the Republican Party, which may make huge inroads in the coming elections, but the institutions tasked with protecting democratic participation. Do not fear Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. Do not fear the tea party movement, the birthers, the legions of conspiracy theorists or the militias. Fear the underlying corporate power structure, which no one, from Barack Obama to the right-wing nut cases who pollute the airwaves, can alter.

If the hegemony of the corporate state is not soon broken we will descend into a technologically enhanced age of barbarism.

h/t Zo. Oh so do capture exquisite snippets.

We are ignoring serious attack:

Consider what the Limbaugh crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world’s scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception.

Virtually all the world’s governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill.

It’s a species of theater, repeated so often people have become inured, but if you take it seriously it’s an extraordinary charge. For one thing, if it’s true that the world’s scientists are capable of deception and collusion on this scale, a lot more than climate change is in doubt.

These same institutions have told us what we know about health and disease, species and ecosystems, energy and biochemistry. If they are corrupt, we have to consider whether any of the knowledge they’ve generated is trustworthy. We could be operating our medical facilities, economies, and technologies on faulty theories. We might not know anything!

—David Roberts

“If we don’t change the way we do democracy, nothing else is possible.”

‘The high-leverage issue of unlimited corporate power.’
‘Our focus should address a radical change in assumptions.’
‘We must use power to radically limit the role of concentrated power.’
‘We somehow have to change awareness sufficient to create a critical mass.’
‘It’s imperative that we actively use unfolding disasters to generate changes.’

Oh, geesh. Frustration without experience is despair.

Should we all adopt the old saw, er, the new truth: Reuse. Recycle. Revolt?