Benjamin Franklin, newspaper publisher (National Portrait Gallery)

First let me say that I make no claim to being a professional journalist. I try to work within the parameters fo journalistic ethics, but I am a commentator first and a condenser and relayer of news second. We look for stories that not only reflect our own interests, but the interests of the people who we know read us. I believe as Thomas Jefferson did, that ” left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Others have sports heroes, I have news heroes – Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Andrea Mitchell, Molly Ivins, Fahreed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, Cristiane Amanpour.

So this past week has been especially painful for me, culminating in a moment this evening when the unthinkable happened – I got really pissed off at Brian Williams, and normally I have the greatest respect for him.

All week long, the supposedly “liberal” press has been criticizing President Obama for “fumbling” with the the announcement about the contraception requirement in the Affordable Care Act. The press ignored the fact that the administration had put into the requirement a year’s leeway for religious organizations to reach a compromise that would allow women access to free preventative medical care and still respect the religious tenets of churches. They ignored the facts. They allowed themselves to be drawn into the debate between advocates of women’s health and the religious right. They allowed themselves to be diverted from what the press is supposed to do – present the facts. They babbled on and on about the “debate” in the culture wars. They were taken in. They were used by the right to present a distorted message.

The President didn’t fumble, didn’t miscalculate, didn’t overreach or anything else he has been accused of. He was blindsided. Even hours after his press conference concerning the compromise, the press was not hearing what he had said – that the year’s grace period was intended to give churches the time to figure out the best way to compromise.

We expect Fox News and the rest of the right wing propaganda machine to distort what the President says, or ignore what he says. We do not expect it from the mainstream press.

2009 installation of Archbishop Timothy Dolan

The hysteria from both the Catholic Church and the Republican Party over a provision in the Affordable Care Act is the most callous abuse of religion since a bunch of Church leaders and nobles in Europe decided that they couldn’t possibly convince anyone to invade the Holy Land if the recruits were told they were fighting to secure a trade route to China that didn’t involve paying taxes to Arabs. So, they invented the lie that the Holy Land had to be rescued from the infidel Muslims.

Along the way, those Crusaders butchered Jews and Turkish Christians. And the lost the war, several times.

Catholics have more or less traditionally voted for Democratic candidates since John Kennedy. My in-laws were not the only Catholics in America whose walls were adorned with matching, framed portraits of Christ and Kennedy. Hispanics also tend to be Catholics, and to vote Democratic. The Republican Party was not making any headway in getting either group to go over to the Republican camp, partly because the Party has aligned itself for so long with the anti-Catholic Christian evangelicals (Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin should sit through a few late night hours of Christian radio) and partly because they are so determinedly anti-immigration. So, along comes the ruling about the birth control provision in the Affordable Care Act and how it would apply to any church-owned business that hired non-Catholics, served non-Catholics, and did not exist to proselytize. In 28 states, Catholic schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and other services already have birth control coverage in their employee health insurance plans. But Archbishop Dolan and a few other bishops, conservatives all, see a chance to convert Catholics to the party of “ban abortion, ban same-sex marriage, ban sex.” Everyone can just ignore the fact that their admission they would accept the provision with a co-pay shows that this whole thing is political, not religious. They can turn a requirement that they already have in more than half the states into a battle cry over religious freedom!

And the Republican Party ate it up. This was perfect. They had something to use to drive Catholics and Hispanics away from the Democratic Party. As a consequence, every Republican who get in front of a microphone has called this “the Obama administration’s war on religion.”

This not about religious freedom. It is not about contraception. It is about a political party that will use anything, any bigotry, any fear, any hyperbole, any hysterical shit to win votes. That is all this is about.

The Republican Party in general and the Tea Party branch in particular have pushed all the appropriate buttons in an economic crisis. They have blamed immigrants for taking our jobs. They have blamed blacks for both having unfair advantages through affirmative action and being lazy welfare-teat sucking lowlifes. They have blamed homosexuals for the disintegration of our allegedly moral society. They have blamed unions for destroying jobs in America. They blame Muslims for everything imaginable, starting with the destruction of our constitution through imposition of Sharia law. They have blamed socialists for the financial problems of our government…anyone and everyone to divert attention from the real causes of our recession and job losses. They have gone so far as to purposefully confuse people about socialism and fascism so no one will see how utterly fascist they are according to the definition of fascism given by the man who invented it. Mussolini himself called it corporatism. They take advantage of the blurred history they have created in the schools they control to convince their followers that the myths are the facts and this nation was some kind of perfect, Christian Happyland before those evil commie hippies appeared in the mid-1960s.

The bad part of this “debate” is that the Democrats are arguing the wrong thing. They are focusing on access to birth control instead of clearly calling out the Republicans and the bishops for their callous use of the Church to get votes. This is just the latest Republican three-card-monty to get votes – voter ID laws that have been proven to be unnecessary, redistricting with creative gerrymanders, union-busting laws to cut off campaign funds, hysterical predictions of the end of civilization if gays can marry and women can have safe abortions. All of these things are desperate measures which only prove what liberals and progressives know – if the American people were not being smoke-and-mirrored by all this crap, they wouldn’t vote for Republicans.

Related articles

• Analyst: Obama could lose Catholic vote over HHS mandate [I say Should, not could] (deaconforlife.blogspot.com)
• President Obama’s decision brings the imposition of Federal Law & religious conscience to the fore. (worldviewtonight.wordpress.com)
• Catholics and Birth Control (spaninquis.wordpress.com)
• Obama birth control policy divides Democrats (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• The Assault on First Amendment Freedom of Speech and Religion (ayearningforpublius.wordpress.com)
• Obama Should Not Yield To Reactionary Bishops (duanegraham.wordpress.com)
• Republican Party sees influx of voters in Oklahoma (newsok.com)

Michele Bachmann (AP, Charlie Riedel)

At the C-PAC revival meeting today, Rep. Michele Bachmann told the audience that “Until Barack Obama, no American President had ever told the world that the United States was not a Judeo-Christian nation.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and dead wrong.

Two of them did, George Washington in approving the draft version and John Adams in signing the treaty. Authored by diplomat Joel Barlow, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson, approved in draft by President George Washington, read to the United States Senate on June 7, 1797, and unanimously approved, signed and proclaimed to the nation by President John Adams, from the Annals of Congress, 5^th Congress:

“Treaty of Peace and Friendship Between the United States

and the Bey and Subject of Tripoli of Barbary.

Article 11: As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and as the said States have never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Islamic] nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinion, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

And this lady claims that she is a great reader of history? Really? Or is she just another conservative who only reads the historical mythology that suits her version of what America has been and ought to be? After all, this is the woman who ignored the fact that one of the men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima was not allowed to vote in the nation he was defending because he was a Native American, just so she could wrap her little Tea Party laughable rebuttal to the State of the Union address in that Iwo Jima flag.

This is why states like Texas and Arizona don’t want so-called “revisionist history” taught in their schools. It’s also why Bachmann home-taught her own kids.  Historical facts would rob conservatives of the justification for their propaganda.

That, in one paragraph, is what has been wrong with “No Child Left Behind” from the very beginning. Without a national curriculum, without even state-wide curriculums, any standardized test is a trap.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have a cure for this stupidity – grant waivers from the “No Child Left Behind” requirements so that states have more flexibility to educate children instead of teaching them how to pass the tests.

Ten states have now been granted the waivers – Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. New Mexico had applied, but needs to iron out some small parts of their proposal to get the waiver. Twenty-eight other states are preparing to apply for the waiver.

“No Child Left Behind,” with its standardized tests and punishment of schools and school districts that failed to reach certain benchmarks with those tests was a bad idea. It went at the problems of education in America backwards. Without a national curriculum, without a nationalized standard of course material, national standardized tests were only going to serve to show the differences between state curricula and individual school board interpretations of those curricula.

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and a group of educational specialists developed the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. It was a structure system for public schools, grades kindergarten through 12^th. It set out instructional objectives and goals, by saying that at such and such a grade level, children should have learned multiplication or gerunds. It was never adopted nationwide, though you will find copies of it in every college and university library with a education department. The problem became more evident as more families moved from town to town, county to county or state to state. My niece never learned to write a research paper because she moved from Florida to Georgia to Vermont in the wrong sequence, too early in Georgia, too late in Vermont. My daughter moved from Florida to Georgia, was a year behind in math and couldn’t take physics on schedule as a consequence. That happens all the time all across the country.

So, when the United States Department of Education, under the direction of Congress, created these benchmark exams for schools, no one took into consideration the idea that not every eighth grader in America had taken the same classes.

The state waivers will address the individuality of each state, and create their own benchmarks for judging how their schools are preforming. What they won’t get is a unified education system.

When the state of Georgia decided to re-write their entire K-12 curriculum over a decade ago, they published the proposed curriculums for public input. Reading the public objections was a lesson in how diverse our education systems are and how deeply some parts of the nation are entrenched in regionalized individuation of history and science. It is something we see every few years when the Texas School Board nixes scientifically accurate or historically factual textbooks for ones that reinforce Creationism or white superiority.

The inescapable fact is that the United States is not keeping up with the rest of the industrialized world in education. We keep slipping further and further down the list every year. The waivers don’t address that. The can’t. The only thing that would is the one thing we cannot do in this country – establish a national curriculum with national standards and national recognition that we really do a bad job of educating our children. That flies in the face of the conservative determination to retain local control of schools. But the waivers will allow some states to improve their schools without the pressure of improving scores on a standardized test that doesn’t match the state curriculums.

Related articles

• Oklahoma freed from some No Child Left Behind education mandates (newsok.com)
• Georgia to receive waiver from No Child Left Behind (ajc.com)
• You: 10 States Given Waivers From No Child Left Behind Law (nytimes.com)
• Massachusetts among states granted No Child Left Behind waiver (boston.com)
• Colorado Gets No Child Left Behind Waiver (denver.cbslocal.com)

Catholic League leader Bill Donohue issued the usual run of statements while Catholic leaders are trying to get the nation’s 70 million Catholic voters behind their outrage. Over 90% of Catholics support the rules that require contraception to be offered at religious based universities, colleges, and hospitals. Currently, those institutions are required to offer contraception in their health plans in twenty-eight states.

Donohue stated “Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church.” Which is, of course, rather inaccurate given that it was not until the 20th Century that the Catholic Church gained any real respect in the United States, including in terms of the government.

Donohue also stated that “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.” Given that 90% of the Catholic laity supports the rules, there probably won’t be any runs of people out into the streets.

Donohue, of course, is one of those old, white men that seem to have no real stake in this debate- like the majority of the Catholic hierarchy.

Pro-woman groups have already started saying that they will fight the Church over this. National Abortion Rights Action League President Andrea Miller stated “The Catholic hierarchy seems to be playing a cynical game of chicken and they don’t seem to care that the health and well being of millions of American woman are what’s at stake here.”

New York CBS noted that

Catholic leaders hope they will have more sway with the White House than usual because it is a presidential election year, hoping that if even a small percentage of Catholics back Obama’s opponent it could cost him the election.

When asked if this issue would affect who he would vote for in November, Wilton, Conn., resident Peter Taylor said, “Potentially, yes. I think it is a very serious issue, very meaningful.”

But not everyone views the situation as dire.

“I would certainly vote for Obama anyway. The church has to get up to date,” Manhattan resident Sue Thomas said.

DePaul University, the nation’s largest Catholic university, has admitted to providing contraception coverage. DePaul University spokesperson Robin Florzak informed ThinkProgress that “The employee health insurance plans include a prescription contraceptive benefit, in compliance with state and federal law. An optional insurance plan that covers such benefits is available to students, also due to previously established state and federal requirements.”

The University is disappointed with the Obama Administration over what happens, but hopes that it will lead to “effective national conversation on the appropriate conscience protections in our pluralistic country.” ThinkProgress notes that “Other Catholic colleges and hospitals, including Georgetown and the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, have also admitted to offering birth control benefits.”

Over half of the states have contraception requirements, and eight of those twenty-eight do not have opt-out clauses for religious institutions. In fact, the Administration’s new rules will expand conscience protections in those states.

Related articles

• Many Catholic Universities, Hospitals Already Cover Contraception In Their Health Insurance Plans (thinkprogress.org)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Iran’s currency, the rial, has been deeply devalued. Inflation is over 40% and unemployment is at 50%. There is not enough money in Iran’s treasury to keep subsidizing the poor, especially as their ranks are growing. And the people of Iran are watching huge amounts of money being spent on a nuclear program and military exercises in the Persian Gulf and listening to their leaders belligerently defy the West’s insistence that they cease their nuclear ambitions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have been in Iran for three days. For the first two, it appeared that the Iranians were going to engage in serious discussions about their nuclear program. Then, on the morning of the third day, Monday, a letter was handed to the inspectors that made it apparent things were not going to improve.

On Monday in Washington, President Obama signed an executive order that slaps new, tougher sanctions on Iran and its central bank. He said that the new sanctions were necessary because Iranian banks were being used to hide transactions. “I have determined that additional sanctions are warranted, particularly in light of the deceptive practices of the Central Bank of Iran and other Iranian banks to conceal transactions of sanctioned parties, the deficiencies in Iran’s anti-money laundering regime and the weaknesses in its implementation, and the continuing anc unacceptable risk posed to the international financial system by Iran’s activities,” Obama wrote in his letter notifying Congress of this action. Congress has pre-authorized additional sanctions against Iran.

The executive order prevents any Iranian assets under American control, including assets held in foreign branches of American banks, from being transferred, paid, exported or withdrawn.

Related articles

• Obama Follows Through On Promise, Imposes Sanctions On Iran Banking System – The Inquisitr (inquisitr.com)
• Obama orders Iranian Central Bank freeze in new wave of sanctions (guardian.co.uk)
• US levies new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank (telegraph.co.uk)
• Obama orders sanctions on Iran (thejc.com)
• Obama sanctions Iranian Central Bank – BBC News (bbc.co.uk)

U.S. and Soviet/Russian nuclear stockpiles, 1945 to 2005

Every four years, the United States government, in the person of our sitting president, reassesses our nuclear policy and strategy. It’s that time again.

Among the choices to be made are the scope of our nuclear arsenal, how our nuclear weapons are deployed and who they are aimed towards, and if the United States would ever again be justified in using a nuke in a first strike.

There are a range of variables that will determine the President’s decisions. It is not as simple as it was during the Cold War when we built up an arsenal to match or exceed that of the Soviet Union, and aimed all our nukes in that general direction. Intelligence experts and military analysts will present the President with their best view of the stability and friendliness of the nations that hold nukes. They will assess the potential for further proliferation of nukes and the use of nuclear power for energy.

An assessment of our enemies and the kind of war we would fight with them is also part of the process. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan proved what the Army College said ten years ago, that a war in the Middle East would be a regression in the advancement of warfare.

President Obama would like to reduce our stockpile of nuclear weapons, and see the rest of the world reduce or eliminate their stockpiles. When announcing the administration’s long-range plans for our military last month, the President said, “It is possible that our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force, which would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our inventory as well as their role in U. S. national security strategy.” The implication was that the push to reduce our budget will help him do what he wants about nuclear weapons.

It is not a position that the Republican side of Congress will approve. Ever since the public wondered why America didn’t drop a nuclear bunker buster on Saddam Hussein’s presidential compound, there has been a portion of the right wing that advocates nuking Muslim countries just because they are Muslim. There is a belief in some parts of our society that having nukes keeps us safe and using them would make us safer. They are the same people who do not comprehend the consequences of any nuclear weapon being discharged anywhere.

How the President handles this – if he chooses to create a disarmament strategy, if he fights for it – will effect how voters view him in the election. The number of Americans who think nuclear weapons are a good thing is a minority. The number willing to use them to wipe out whole populations is small. Most of us would prefer to, if not put the genie back in the bottle, at least get rid of the excess bottles. What the White House needs to realize is that we like the President better when he is fighting for what we and he believe in.

Related articles

• Nukes, We Need Upgrades … (tarpon.wordpress.com)
• Near-majority approves of military force against Iran to stop nuclear-weapon development (hotair.com)
• Santorum: Iran would nuke Missouri (thehill.com)
• Obama’s Golden Opportunity on Nukes (alternet.org)
• Pentagon’s Ex-Mideast Chief: We Might Need Nukes to Deter Iran (wired.com)
• Senator Puts U.S. Nuclear Arsenal in Doubt (usnews.com)

The visit is campaign related, but details are sketchy right now.

Vermont overwhelmingly voted for Obama in 2008, and will likely vote for him again this year. It would, of course, be nice if President Obama toured more of Vermont than just Burlington given that the state has some major successes as well as some failures. The area around Rutland City, for instance, has lagged behind the rest of the state in terms of job creation, and has seen a spike in drug related crimes of late.

Mitt Romney

“FoxSpeak” is that peculiar manner in which conservatives managed to twist a liberal’s statements 180° to mean something that was not said, just so the statement can be vilified. Though Repubican presidential nominee candidate Mitt Romney may suffer from too many incidents of letting his mouth get in the way of his political brain, yesterday he proved that he has mastered the art of “FoxSpeak.”

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta laid out for the press on a trip to Brussels the very thing so many have been calling for for the past ten years – an exit strategy for Afghanistan. While campaigning, President Obama had promised us not just an exit strategy, but an exit from Iraq and Afghanistan. When he took up occupancy of the Oval Office, the facts prevented him keeping that promised immediately. We are now out of Iraq, and Panetta told Congress that the administration “hopes” it will be able to withdraw our combat troops from Afghanistan during 2013, and leave a small contingent to continue training the Afghans. The whole exit strategy depends on two things – the situation on the ground and the decisions of the Afghan government, which is very clearly determined to create its own internal peace and get the American troops out quickly.

The key word in Panetta’s presentation was “hope”

Romney used a visit to a Las Vegas factory to criticize Secretary Panetta. He told the factory workers, “The president’s mistakes, some of them are calculated on a philosophy that’s hard to understand, and sometimes, you scratch your head and say, ‘How can he be so misguided and so naive?’ Today, his secretary of defense unleashed such a policy. The secretary of defense said that on a day certain, the middle of 2013, we’re goint to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan. He announced that. He announced that. So, the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it. Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with a tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops? It makes absolutely no sense. His naivete is putting in jeopardy the mission of the United States of America and our commitments to freedom. He is wrong. We need new leadership in Washington.” Romney has said that any decision he makes in Afghanistan would be based on the advice of the generals on the ground.

It was perfect “FoxSpeak” – create words that were never said so the administration can be called weak, incapable of defending our country, incompetent, naive. In the thrall of some foreign philosophy. “FoxSpeak” requires their audience to ignore facts like the deaths of Osama bin Laden and most of the top ranks of al Qaida. It requires ignoring the successful end of the war in Iraq. It ignores the way in which the United States is standing toe-to-toe with Iran waiting for them to blink. Like every other criticism of the administration, Romney’s rebuke is dependent upon having listeners who are programmed to believe the worst of any Democrat, Progressive or liberal.

Secreatary Panetta did not say anything new on that flight to Brussels. The 2013-14 timeline has been discussed for a couple of years already. Romney’s remarks can be interpreted as both his own ability to deny the true words of those in the administration and as an indication that the right wing media has managed for two years to never disclose to their viewers and listeners that this timeline existed.

Related articles

• Romney: Panetta’s Withdrawal Announcement ‘Misguided’ (abcnews.go.com)
• Pentagon pushes to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible (rt.com)
• Romney: Afghan troop announcement “naive” (cbsnews.com)
• Plan for early end to US combat role catches Afghan officials by surprise (csmonitor.com)
• Mitt Romney hauls out the weak-on-defense canard over Afghanistan withdrawal plans (dailykos.com)

I once made the mistake of saying something nasty about Ronald Reagan. My mother informed that I was free to disagree with him, but I would, under penalty of hellfire, respect the office. Jan Brewer’s mother didn’t teach her any manners or any respect for the office. She got into a heated exchange with the President on the tarmac of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport and actually waggled her finger at him as though he were an errant little boy.

Brewer spent the rest of the day doing damage control. According to Brewer, she handed the President a letter, contents unknown, and wanted to talk with him about Arizona’s stunningly brilliant economic recovery. According to Brewer, he told her he was “disenchanted” with the description of　their 2010 meeting in the White House in her book Scorpions for Breakfast. She felt “minimized, to say the least.” She says she wants him to visit the border and see what her state has to contend with – you know, show him those headless corpses in the desert. In a Fox News interview last night, she called the talk a “terrible encounter” and called the president “thin skinned.” “I want our borders secured. I want our nation protected. He wants amnesty,” Brewer said. “We’re never going to agree. I don’t know why he was surprised by my book. Brewer claimed that by handing him a hand-written letter inviting him to the border, she was “trying to be very gracious,” but the president “reacted in a very negative manner… that kind of left me breathless.

The White House responded with a statement: “The governor handed the president a letter and said she was inviting him to meet with her. The president said he’d be glad to meet with her again, but did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book.”

This is the sales pitch for the book, written by Brewer herself: “Friends: America can no longer tolerate illegal immigration and my message to President Obama is simple: “Do your job! Secure our borders!” My new book Scorpions for Breakfast describes my on going fight against President Obama Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary Napolitano to stop the illegal immigration crisis facing our country. I will continue to fight until the border is secure for all Americans!” Even in print, she yells at the President.

Got all that? In that blurb, she accuses the President of not doing his job and says that she is fighting to secure the border for all of us. Forget the 400,000 illegals turned back at the border last year. Forget the 400,000 arrested and deported. Forget that the number of illegals getting across the border is at the lowest point in a generation. And, while you are at it, forget the fact that anti-Hispanic Senate leader Russell Pearce has been recalled and unelected and Sheriff Joe Arpaio is facing multiple criminal, civil and ethics charges for his actions. Forget that the newly elected director of school content was elected on a pledge to “stop la raza” and Tucson sent goons into classrooms to remove books written by Native Americans and Hispanics. Forget the fact that most of the sheriffs on the border don’t support the “papers please law” because it interferes with real crime fighting.

Brewer’s depiction of herself as a gun-toting defender of America against a tidal wave of criminals (who, by the way, only commit a misdemeanor by being in this country without papers) is essential to her political survival at this point. Everything else in her administration is turning out very badly.

Her cuts to Medicaid killed people who were waiting for life-saving transplants. The state suffered revenue losses when Hispanic businesses left after the “papers please” law was passed. Both the Hispanic and Native American populations – close to 40% of the state’s population – are furious over the removal of books by their authors from schools. And Brewer has just entered the anti-union brigade of the Republican Party by the sneakiest path possible.

She has offered state employees a choice between a 5% raise in salary or their rights as employees. If they will give up their right to appeal demotions and terminations without cause, she’ll give them the raise. Brewer has set aside $53.7 million of her $8.96 billion state budget to do what one state employee characterized as “blackmail.”

Of course, the Republicans are cooing about how no state employee who works hard has anything to worry about and all the ruckus is just the unions overreacting, but Arizona state workers have no collective bargaining rights as it is. In their view, changing the rules this way would put all their jobs in jeopardy and allow them to be fired without cause close to retirement, saving the state their pensions. The employees are citing the rules as protection against cronyism and discrimination in their workplaces. Cronyism is an accusation that could stick to Brewer since she “hired” a private contractor with deep connections to herself to operate Arizona’s prison system and the private management has ended up costing more than running the prisons as state operations.

Piece by piece, the Republican agenda is falling apart. One by one, those at the state level who thought they had a mandate to turn their states into corporate subsidiaries are facing strong opposition. And, finally, most of us have stopped laughing at the ludicrousness of the birthers and begun to see the depths of disrespect these people have for the office of the President of the United States. Disagree with the man all you want, but you will face hellfire for disrespecting the office.

Related articles

• Jan Brewer ‘felt a little threatened’ by President Obama … really? (thegrio.com)
• Jan Brewer, Obama Face Off Over Book, Immigration Issues (tribuneofthepeople.com)
• Jan Brewer and Barack Obama in Heated Exchange on Runway [Video] (inquisitr.com)
• Governor Jan Brewer Pointing In President Obama’s Face (buzzfeed.com)
• Jan Brewer: “I felt a bit threatened” by Obama (newblackwoman.com)
• You: Ariz. governor says Obama was ‘thin-skinned’ in airport exchange (latimes.com)

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels

Here is the Daily Show’s take on Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union Address, or what we like to call Mourning in America. Let us be honest, Daniels seems to have figured out that the only way for the Republicans to make in roads against President Obama is to tell Americans about how they should stop having hope for the future. In fact, they should just give up and crawl under their beds because the world of tomorrow is going to be worse than it is today. In fact, tomorrow, the Sith will take over world, Emperor Palpatine will destroy democracy, and there will be no hope for tomorrow.

Yes, the Republicans have decided that tomorrow is not brighter, and that America is screwed.

The State of the Union Address, 2012

I’m going to get the sappy part out of the way first. When a President arrives for the State of the Union Address, he shakes hands with everyone who can reach him. When he reaches the front of the chamber, where the extra chairs have been placed to accommodate the Senators, Supreme Court and Cabinet, he can choose to go down the front row shaking more hands. Last night, President Obama shook hands with the members of the Supreme Court and near the end of the front row, reached Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The President didn’t shake her hand. He gathered her up into a huge bear hug and rocked her, nestling her head against his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time they have seen each other this year. Captain Mark Kelley’s retirement ceremony was held in the White House. But this was more than just “I’m so glad to see you.” This was also good-bye because Gabby had already announced her retirement. It was one of the most spontaneous, honest, warm, loving human things I have ever seen a President do with an adult, and I’ve lived through 12 presidents. It was beautiful.

Now, down to the speech……

The pundits were right. The State of the Union Address was the first salvo of the Presidential election, even if the Republicans haven’t figured out who is going to be their nominee. We know who will be the Democratic nominee and he gave his first campaign speech last night.

A State of the Union Address is supposed to be, by Constitutional definition, a report to Congress of the, well, the state of our union. It has evolved into a wish list for Presidents. It is the opportunity for the President to say what he wants out of Congress. President Obama’s first two State of the Union Addresses were sort of like Oliver Twist time – “please, sir, may I have some more?” – with him asking Congress to send him bills that would support his agenda. Didn’t work. Even when the Democratic House in 2009 and 2010 gave him what he wanted, most of it died in the Senate because of the Republican filibuster. He had to give up critical parts of his health care law and financial services reform laws just to get the things passed. This time, there was no asking please.

I like watching the opposition’s reactions. At one point, I was sure I saw steam coming out of Eric Cantor’s ears. I thought as the speech went on he was going to chew up and swallow his lips. There probably isn’t enough Maalox in Washington for the dyspepsia that John Boehner was experiencing. This speech was game, set and match to the President.

Unlike last year, it is not the specifics that matter. What matters is that the President laid out things that would benefit the 99% and not one single thing he asked for will happen. Not one. We will not see a program that allows the Defense Department to purchase green energy instead of fossil fuel based energy. We will not see a Senate rule change that restores the majority rule that our founders believed in. We will not see infrastructure work or the ability of homeowners to refinance at “historically low” interest rates. We will not see laws that do buttkiss about eliminating the unfairness of the tax code or restructures regulations to make them more efficient and less obtuse. We will not see the money to support joint projects between businesses and community colleges to train people for the jobs of this century. We will not see support for college financing or more work-study jobs. It ain’t gonna happen.

The entire Republican election strategy for 2012 consists of making sure that as little as possible gets done in Washington so they can call Obama a failed president. They already call him the worst president in history and get away with it because their base is so grossly undereducated they’ve never heard of any of the presidents between Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Well, they probably have heard of Teddy Roosevelt just because Dubya admired his “big stick” foreign policy without understanding what a progressive he was and how he fought government corruption all his public life. We can expect that the Republicans in Congress will do everything they can to screw this nation so they can blame the President.

It is incomprehensible to everyone how the Republicans cannot understand what it means when a Congress has a 9% approval rate. Sorry, they are up to a whopping 12% this week. These are the lowest approval ratings in the history of approval ratings. No matter how low the President’s rating is, it has never gotten near that.

And the overnight polls are even more bad news for them. They show 91% of Americans approved of what the President proposed last night. Only 9% disapproved.

We are supposedly a nation addicted to instant gratification. The Republicans are playing on that. They are pushing the idea that because the recovery is taking time it isn’t working. They are playing on the “right now” instead of the future. I don’t believe that we are incapable of focusing on the long term.

The President’s speech was not about the “right now” it was about the long term, about moving into the 21^st century, not taking our country back to the 19^th. It is a more focused message than “Yes we can” and “Hope and Change” were. It is a message that says there is a future, but not if we don’t change with the times and adjust our thinking. It shifts the responsibility for creating that change from the government to us in many ways. We must be willing to see past the now to the future.

I am 63 years old. I don’t have a lot of future left to me, but I want to see us firmly in the 21^st century before I go. I want to see stem cells being used to replace damaged and eroded tissue so that people can live without pain or disability. I want to see us playing on a level global marketplace, not scrabbling to the bottom of the barrel. I want to see us finally realize that we have had the ways and means to educate all our children well. I want so much for the future. There is only one way to achieve that.

The Democrats had better have been listening last night and they had better grow cajones and backbones this spring. This must be a party-wide effort. We must regain control, total control, with no wussing out over eliminating the filibuster rule so that we can pass things with a simple majority. We must have a clear, unassailable majority in both the House and the Senate to drag this nation kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. In 2010, the party was a study in cowardice. They didn’t have the guts to listen to us and act accordingly. No, 76% of us did not disapprove of the health care bill. Half of that 76% were pissed off there was no public option. That changes the meaning of the poll, doesn’t it? They were listening to Fox News instead of listening to us.

There is more than enough evidence out there that this is our time – the Occupy movement, the strike-back against the right wing propaganda. We need more. We need the courage to demand that those who have chosen to represent us in court cases over abortion and gay marriage stop farting around and go for the First Amendment jugular. We need every Democrat who steps in front of a mike to be fully prepared for anything that might be thrown at him. We need all of them to get an infusion of Alan Grayson and Anthony Weiner, because at least those two men fought back. They lost, but they fought back. We all need to be United Wisconsin and realize that unions are not the enemy. Unions fought to get us safe working environments and decent pay and end sweatshops and death traps. Unions created our middle class. It is not a question of what is right for America. We all know what is right for America. It is purely and simply a question of us having the courage to fight for what we need.

Rick Santorum

Despite being the third man on the totem pole and the second choice among Social Conservatives, Rick Santorum is still out there campaigning. While campaigning at Community Christian Academy in Stuart, Florida, a woman asked the former Pennsylvanian Senator and reactionary Catholic why her gay son does not deserve the same rights as straight people.

Santorum responded by saying:

“Everybody in America should have the same rights, and I would agree with that. Everyone in America should have rights that are endowed to them by the Creator, those are unalienable rights. And your son, just like everyone else here, has those unalienable rights.”

“There are certain things that government does that gives people privileges in order to promote activity that are healthy for society and are best for society. And those things we promote would give people advantages or benefits, government benefits because we think that is healthy activity. Mothers and fathers coming together, forming healthy marriages, having children and raising those children. Every American child has the right, and the government should support the right to have and know their mother and father and be raised by their mother and father.”

So. . .according to Santorum, we will have to ban everything that is unhealthy in society, right? Shall we ban alcohol, smoking, fast food, trans fats, bacon, sodas, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, bacon, make up, sex, and so forth. In fact, we would have to ban anyone from having children if they cannot prove that they are from a loving and stable family with no strife whatsoever and enough money to raise children. So, in order to make sure that we have a healthy society, Santorum would have to impose a society that makes George Orwell’s vision of the future look tame.

Santorum is trying to push this off on the idea along the lines of ‘think of the children’. If every child in America has a right to know their mother and father, then it would require that the government not only outlaw divorce, but ban many popular fertility treatments and stop any and all attempts by straight couples to have children if they are not naturally fertile. Simply put, Santorum is trying to find a way to justify his position without actually having anything to justify it upon.

Of course, in other campaign stops, Santorum talked about freedom attacking his family left in Italy saying “all of my family, all of my grandmother’s relatives, they still live in Italy, they never came. When I go back and visit them they are nothing like my grandparents, my parents and my relatives here. They are very, very happy being ruled. They are very happy having a welfare state, a European Socialist state. It’s what they know.”

Santorum tried to come up with some means of attacking President Obama by saying that the President was “King George III reincarnated.” Santorum, of course, knows less about British History than he does about American History, of which he knows almost nothing anything. King George III was, by and large, a figure head with next to no power. Following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the British Parliament had the bulk of the power.

Santorum attacked Obama claiming that the President was waging a war on the wealthy saying “Mr. President, you’re the president of 100 percent of America, not 99 percent of America.” Of course, it should be noted that when the Republican Party is in power, they kowtow to the 1% without bothering to help the rest of the nation.

Via Post on Politics

Aubrey Sarvis

During last night’s State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama made mention of many of the sacrifices that America’s service members made over the years, including many lesbians and gays. He even directly addressed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which happened this past year.

These statements were greeted by outgoing director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network Aubrey Sarvis with some praise. Sarvis stated “SLDN was pleased to hear President Obama acknowledge the contributions and sacrifices of our service members, including gay and lesbian Americans who wear our nation’s uniform. The repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ would not have been possible without his vision and determination. And at SLDN, we are encouraged by his announcement of a new initiative to hire veterans, who are coming home to a very difficult job market.”

President Barack Obama

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has spent the time and effort to go through White House internal memos to gain insights into the legislative losses of the Obama administration.

Progessives complain that the President hasn’t done enough. The right complains he has bypassed the Constitution and done too much. Both claims are wrong. Until recently, President Obama has avoided doing the Bush thing – using executive orders to bypass Congress and signing statements to void laws. If he had done so, the Progressives would have nothing to complain about. Bush earned himself the professional political scientist s’designation as our third “constitutional dictator” after Lincoln and FDR, without the excuse of a Civil War and a Great Depression.

President Obama was elected on a list of promises, just as every president is. Bill Clinton was a rarity. With the support of a Democratic House and Senate, he fulfilled 73% of his campaign promises. The percentage of fulfilled promises was figured by the very conservative Florida Times Union before the 1996 election with a complete list of Clinton’s campaign promises and what legislative action had resulted. The list included the reform of the welfare system that Newt Gingrich is taking claim for. Sorry, Newt. If Clinton had gotten Hillary’s act together and put the health care reform package on the table in mid-1996, we would have had no need for Obamacare. It was the legislative action needed for the missing 27% of campaign promises. Most presidents don’t come close to a 73% fulfillment record. They learn very quickly that they have virtually no power. They can recommend, request and lobby, but they cannot write or pass laws. That’s the way the Constitution was written – the legislative branch writes the law, the executive branch implements and enforces the law, the judiciary branch interprets and rules on the law.

The right wing also claims that the President had a majority in both the House and Senate in the first two years of his term, and he forced legislation down our reluctant throats. Also wrong.

Almost 300 laws and appointments were stopped dead by the minority of the Senate through the filibuster. All any senator has to do is say “I object” and a bill is not debated or voted upon until 60 senators agree to release it from the penalty box. Through the filibuster, the Republican Party thwarted not just the will of the President, but the will of the people who elected him.

So, what were the President’s big losses? Lizza listed them, along with the reasons they were abandoned.

In 2008, Obama promised a “bold space program.” The hysteria over the deficit stopped those plans. A memo from the West Wing explained, “Especially in light of our new fiscal context, it is not possible to achieve the inspiring space program goals discussed during the campaign.”

Obama proposed a smart energy grid, something this nation desperately needs. Just ask the millions who end up with rolling brown outs in the summer or black-outs after storms. The full 21^st century visionary power grid involves solar farms in the deserts of the southwest, wind turbines in wheat fields of the midwest and a grid that controls and directs power efficiently and effectively, and preferably most of it buried underground. His advisers told him it would cost too much not provide enough short-term stimulus. They key words are “short term.” We are a nation addicted to instant gratification. We can no longer see the long-term benefits of anything.

The White House budget called for decreasing defense spending to preserve domestic programs. There was no way to get that past the Republicans. It is vital to the survival of any fascist regime that there be a powerful and eminent threat to our security. That requires a strong defense. The fact is that the military-industrial complex is alive and well and the Republicans will do anything to defend the incomes of defense contractors. The rest of us can starve to death in the cold dark.

Obama wanted a 5% increase on income taxes for those making a quarter of a million dollars a year, while retaining the Bush tax cuts on the lower income brackets. That would have brought in an additional $11 billion in revenue by 2015. There were higher taxes during the Vietnam War to pay for the war, instead of the tax cuts that Bush pushed through. The top tax rate was 90% during the Eisenhower administration to pay down a national debt equal to 125% of our GDP, much worse than our current national debt. The Bush tax cuts had not produced jobs or increased investments in America, just greater wealth for the already wealthy. The idea had to be sacrificed for unemployment benefits to sustain those who lost their jobs of Bush-onomics.

The White House wanted to scale back the budget for the State Department in its first budget. Secretary Clinton opposed any cuts. The dispute was seen as a weapon that the right wing could use, so the President lobbied for a bigger State Department budget. It turned out to be very necessary as the Middle East went wonkos.

There were aspects of both the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank that were stopped by the Republicans, thereby setting them up to fail. In the ACA, there was supposed to be a pilot program that would help determine the most effective treatments for patients. It was killed. In Dodd-Frank, there have been filibusters to prevent implementing portions of the bill, including the appointments necessary to get the required agencies up and running. It was determined in the White House that fighting for some of these things was pointless.

Early on, the President was forced to abandon his plans to get major stimulus spending and use Keynesian economics principles to help the economy recover. He was up against a chorus of right wingers screaming about over-spending, deficits, the national debt and socialism. The over-spending, the deficits and the national debt were never their concern during the Iraq and Afghan wars that cost nearly one trillion unfunded dollars or an unfunded Medicare drug program that included no provisions for bargaining for drug prices.

It’s a litany not of broken promises as the Republicans claim, but of dreams dashed on the rocks of partisanship. We elected the dream, the audacity of hope and promise of change. We ran headlong into an entrenched oligarchy with enough money and enough media control to persuade too many of our fellow citizens that the sky is purple and they have to reclaim this nation from some nebulous nefarious force, using code words for taking it back from minorities, immigrants, non-fundamentalists, gays, welfare queens and entitlement recipients, even when they themselves were recipients of those “entitlements.” We are losing our country to those who wish to take it back to the late 19^th century instead of forward into the 21^st. We can fight them for our future or let them drag us back into the past. It is time to take back our country.

Related articles

• The Broken Dreams of Obama’s First Term (maboulette.wordpress.com)
• Progressives Could “Tea Party” The Democrats (lezgetreal.com)
• The Obama Memos (arunwithaview.wordpress.com)
• Obama will challenge Congress in ambitious State of the Union (whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com)

Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum’s excuse for yesterday’s cowardice is that the woman he was speaking with was old and leaning on a cane. I have no doubt that if she was old, wearing black, leaning on a cane and started weaving evil spells at him, he’d have no problem tackling her.

This allegedly feeble woman, said that President Obama is “an avowed Muslim” and has “no legal right to be President.” Translation: he was born in Kenya. She is a believer in a twist on birtherism – a Muslim-sperm birther. After all, according to televangelist Franklin Graham (who isn’t half the man his father Billy is), a person is a Muslim if the sperm that fertilized his or her mother’s egg came from a Muslim. There is no free will in Graham’s world view. Muslims are Muslims by virtue of Daddy’s sperm and Jews are Jews by virtue of their mothers’ wombs. In that world view, there is no point in conversion crusades, is there?

Back to Santorum – the feeble old lady asked why nothing is being done to evict this illegal Muslim from the White House and Santorum’s response was that he’s trying – by running for the Presidency.

Bad news for Santorum. As I’ve stated before, MSNBC has a wide range of conservatives and Republicans who appear on their shows. The consensus among them today was that Santorum had proven that he is unfit to govern a diversified nation.

Something is seriously wrong in the Republican Party when Newt Gingrich is the sane one in the room. He at least defends the President’s birth and religion.

You know the math of the haves and have-nots, right? There’s the 1% and there are the 99%. There is another math involved in the Republican Party. There’s the 1% who finance the campaign and whose interests the Party defends at all costs. They overlap with the 1% who are the politicians who benefit from them and the media who shill for them. Then, there’s the 98% who blindly follow them, never fact-checking, never questioning even the most outlandish claims, never putting a single brain cell in gear. Are the 2% proud of their base or are they just happy that there are so many people in this country that they can control with the same ease that the Nazis controlled the population of Germany?

Republican spokespersons like to deny that the past four years have been about racism and religious prejudice. They don’t want to admit that they have played this card to the extent that they have turned this nation inside out with hate and fear. They will not see how they are doing exactly what was done during the Great Depression in Germany – find a scapegoat and blame them for the economy, any scapegoat to divert blame from the real causes of the Depression. So the Nazis blamed the Jews and immigrants and communists and homosexuals, and the Republicans tossed in Hispanics and blacks. Fascism draws its power from a combination of the two elements of human thought that inspire the most blind devotion – nationalism and religion. These are the elements leaders use to recruit cannon fodder for wars.

This is why the right wing media has gone out of its way to confound their listeners and viewers about the differences between fascism and communism. This is why Glenn Beck kept saying that Nazis were socialists when in fact the only thing socialist about them was their lie in including the word Socialist in their party name. This is why Rick Santorum’s grandfather is probably spinning in his grave faster than a nuclear centrifuge.

Benito Mussolini, who invented fascism, said it best: “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” It is time to pull off the velvet gloves and do a whole lot of honest name-calling backed with irrefutable facts.

Related articles

• Santorum’s Italian Connections (lezgetreal.com)
• Santorum To John King On Birthers: ‘I Don’t Feel An Obligation’ To Refute Them (mediaite.com)
• Ron Paul Tells Jay Leno Bachmann Hates Muslims, Santorum Hates Gays (lezgetreal.com)
• Dear Rape Victims.. Rick Santorum has a message for you (bazaardaily.com)
• Rick Santorum booed for suggesting gay marriage ‘harms’ children (topix.net)
• CONTEST: Can we bomb Rick Santorum? Maybe Newt too? (bazaardaily.com)
• Republican Establishment will use Santorum to stop Newt (bokertov.typepad.com)
• An Open Letter to Rick Santorum supporters – Tea Party Nation (gds44.wordpress.com)
• Newt Gingrich compares Muslims to Nazis (disclose.tv)
• The Republican Party: the Party of God and Money (fidlerten.com)

The Stanley Cup

It is a tradition in America for the President to celebrate winning sports teams, not just in international competitions like the Olympics but in our internal sports like World Series winners and Super Bowl champs. This week, the Stanley Cup winning Boston Bruins were invited to the White House for this traditional honor of their accomplishment.

But Tim Thomas, the Bruin’s Most Valuable Player, chose not to attend. On his Facebook page, he explained why:

‘I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.

‘This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

‘Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.

‘This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic.

Tim Thomas

The Bruins General Manager Peter Chiarlli told the Boston Herald that he had discussed the White House trip with Thomas, and stated that Thomas could be suspended for not showing up at a team event. The team management has chosen not to do so. Team President Cam Neely, told Comcast SportsNet New England, the team’s television sponsor, that, “Everybody has their own opinions and political beliefs. He chose not to join us. We certainly would have like to have him come and join us, but it’s his choice. It’s obviously not a choice most of the guys…well, all of the guys came except for Tim. But it’s his decision and his choice.”

The Stanley Cup was played from April to June and is part of an elimination where teams are progressively removed from competition. The whole National Hockey League championship system is a mystery to me, so I’m not even going to try here. What I do know is that the Stanley Cup is sometimes called The Holy Grail of hockey and winning it is more important somehow than whatever comes next in this elaborate elimination system. I can only assume that the June to January delay in honoring the team at the White House has something to do with this complicated system. (All apologies to hockey fans. I really enjoy hockey games, but I don’t understand the playoffs thing.) There is also a complex protocol for who gets their names engraved on the cup. The original cup did not have the bottom four layers to it. They have been added to accommodate those names. The important thing, in New England at least, is that the last time the Boston Bruins had this huge cup in their sweaty hands was 1972, so this year’s win is pretty important in New England. Let’s put it this way, I know a 94-year old lady who jokingly told her kids that she wants a plasma TV affixed to the inside of her coffin lid and a satellite feed to CSNNE so she can continue watching the Celtics, the Red Sox, the Patriots and the Bruins in the next life.

Tim Thomas is welcome to his opinions, as wrong-headed and Fox-fed as they may be. What he is not entitled to is insulting the office of the President of the United States of America.

Related articles

• Tim Thomas skips out on White House ceremony honoring Boston Bruins (inquisitr.com)
• Stanley Cup comes to the White House (whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com)
• Obama Snubbed by Boston Bruins’ Tim Thomas (usnews.com)
• Obama honors Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins (thehimalayantimes.com)
• You: Boston Bruins’ Tim Thomas Wrong in Not Attending White House Ceremony (bleacherreport.com)

Aubrey Sarvis, the outgoing Executive Director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, stated:

“This is a clear victory in the fight to achieve full equality for service members. In his 2010 State of the Union, President Obama committed to repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and indeed, it would not have been possible without his determination to do so. Even as we celebrate this milestone tonight, let us not forget that our work is far from done. While gay and lesbian service members may now serve openly if they choose, they are still not serving equally. They are without the same protections from harassment and discrimination that are afforded others, and legally married gay and lesbian service members do not receive the same recognition, support, and benefits for their families as their straight married counterparts. We must keep fighting until the mission is complete.”

Newt Gingrich, by Gage Skidmore

Contrary to conservative propaganda, MSNBC has more Republican analysts than Fox News has Democratic guests. And no one yells over them. But since the South Carolina primary, I’ve been wishing someone would yell over them once in a while. I am really getting tired of Michael Steele being the only Republican who admits how angry the Republicans are.

The analysts like to pretend the party is rational and thoughtful. They are either in deep denial or totally out of touch with what they have created. Rank-and-file right-wingers are bordering on insane. And one can pick out just a handful of men who are responsible for this climate of hate.

It began with newspaper columnists George Will and Cal Thomas back during the Reagan years, using the catch-phrases of the Cold War to describe the Democratic Party – “leftist” “fellow traveler” “pinko.” The drumbeat was picked up by Rush Limbaugh. It was Limbaugh who first crossed the line into hate speech. On the night Clinton was elected, Limbaugh still had his television show, and he announced there would be a new dog in the White House to take the place of the Bush’s dogs. Then, he showed a picture of Chelsea Clinton. To this day, right wingers call this accomplished, educated, gracious young woman a dog. They applied the communist-themed terms to President Clinton and a Democratic majority in Congress that helped Clinton fulfill 73% of his campaign promises, to great effect.

Into this stepped Newt Gingrich, who wrote the blueprint of language for Republicans to use in their discussion of Democrats. He issued it through his political action committee after he was elected speaker.

In a New York Times interview published on December 14, 1994, Gingrich said his goal was “reshaping the entire nation through the news media.” That was after he had labeled the Clintons “counter-culture,” equating them with the hippies of the late 1960s.

The pamphlet that Gingrich wrote and which has become the Bible of Republican politicians was called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Got that “Control” part? In the cover letter than accompanied the first distribution of the pamphlet to Republican candidates, Gingrich wrote “The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.”

Here is what Newt wrote,

“But we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.
This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used….
Contrasting Words
Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis… urgent(cy)… destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… liberal… they/them… unionized bureaucracy… “compassion” is not enough… betray… consequences… limit(s)… shallow… traitors… sensationalists…
endanger… coercion… hypocrisy… radical… threaten… devour… waste… corruption… incompetent… permissive attitudes… destructive… impose… self-serving… greed… ideological… insecure… anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs… pessimistic… excuses… intolerant…
stagnation… welfare… corrupt… selfish… insensitive… status quo… mandate(s)… taxes… spend(ing)… shame… disgrace… punish (poor…)… bizarre… cynicism… cheat… steal… abuse of power… machine… bosses… obsolete… criminal rights… red tape… patronageOptimistic Positive Governing Words
Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!
share… change… opportunity… legacy… challenge… control… truth… moral… courage… reform… prosperity… crusade… movement… children… family… debate… compete… active(ly)… we/us/our… candid(ly)… humane… pristine… provide…
liberty… commitment… principle(d)… unique… duty… precious… premise… care(ing)… tough… listen… learn… help… lead… vision… success… empower(ment)… citizen… activist… mobilize… conflict… light… dream… freedom…
peace… rights… pioneer… proud/pride… building… preserve… pro-(issue): flag, children, environment… reform… workfare… eliminate good-time in prison… strength… choice/choose… fair… protect… confident… incentive… hard work… initiative… common sense… passionate”

Where has twenty years of using the media to control the masses led us? To people who have disavowed the Bush insistence that not all Muslims are terrorists, to a rise in vocalized anti-Semitism and racial bigotry, to an explosion of dangerous right wing, anti-government militias, to open calls to assassinate our President and other leading members of the Democratic Party, to people who are calling for people to lock and load to hunt liberals, absolute refusal to admit to anything this President has done. This is the legacy of Newt Gingrich.

Of course, in the new lexicon of Gingrich, “change” is not a word being used positively, but to make fun of President Obama, and “passionate” is the word Gingrich used to describe his devotion to the nation that put Callista in Marianne’s bed.

As a side note to this – I am madly in love with Jimmy Williams, Senior Strategist of United Republic. He is a frequent member of the panel on MSNBC’s Now With Alex Wagner, at noon, and today he did the unthinkable. He challenged Karen Floyd, former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, to back up her statement that the Obama administration’s regulations stifle business. Floyd was struck dumb. She could not come up with a single regulation that stifled business, nor could she respond to the FACT that President Obama has ordered a total review of Federal regulations to streamline them, update and make them more business friendly.

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The Israeli "settlement" at Ariel -- hardly a kibbutz.

Do you remember when Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu visited the U. S. last May and Republicans insisted that by calling for Israel to return to the negotiations with the Palestinians and agree to land swaps that start with the 1967 borders, President Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus”? The idea that is running rampant among conservative evangelicals who support Israel at all costs and Republican politicians who pander to them and want to attract Jewish voters is that President Obama is somehow an enemy of Israel.

Last week, the idea reached horrific proportions when Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times wrote a list of things that should be done to protect Israel.

“Three, give the go-ahead for U. S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice-president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States policy includes hits helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Adler did two things in that one paragraph – he called for Mossad to assassinate our President and he called for the United States to commit genocide of the Palestinians, and anyone else Israel determines are their enemies.

Adler has claimed, since the shit hit the fans that he put the idea of assassinating President Obama out there to spark debate. If that was his real intent, he’s incredibly irresponsible. There are jackasses out there who would consider this an order, not a starting point for debate.

It is past time for a couple of massive reality checks.

First there is the issue of the level of hatred created by the Republican Party (Newt Gingrich has a lot to do with this one, with his manual for hate speech) and by the conservative and evangelical forces in America. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has recorded, we have a huge increase in anti-government militias during Democratic presidencies. They practically disappear during Republican regimes. It doesn’t matter how many people die, the call to arms goes on. The 168 men, women and children who died and the 680 injured in Oklahoma City, the 7 doctors, nurses, security personnel and escorts that have been murdered and the nine attempted murders by anti-abortion fanatics, none of this has registered a single moment of acceptance of responsibility from those who inspired the hate that caused these deaths. They sit back and say they are not to blame for some crazy person’s actions. They cannot be allowed to continue to deny responsibility. They caused this unreasonable level of hatred. They intentionally use the words that scare people into irrational actions. They tap into that part of our population who were fed anti-communism with their mothers’ milk and never figured out that communism is dead because they keep hearing about it from the right wing jerks who only care about creating a one-party fascist regime in America.

The people who believe that Democrats are demons from commie-hell have been so thoroughly indoctrinated by the right wing media that they are incapable of seeing reason. Facts mean nothing to them, because they have been taught that everyone except the anointed – Fox News and right wing radio – are lying. They are even capable of forgetting that their conservative god Ronald Reagan and his successor George H. W. Bush oversaw the death of communism in the greater world.

On this score, Adler needs to be made an example of. The Patriot Act is very clear about threats to Federal employees and their families. Adler crossed that line. He called for the assassination of our President by agents of a foreign government. Find the right statutes and arrest him. Prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. This kind of incitement must stop.

Second, there is the issue of Israel. For the past 44 years, Israel has occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. For 44 years, that occupation has been the recruitment poster for terrorists. Though there are many issues in the Middle East that the residents can blame America for, the easiest to focus on is the occupation of the West Bank. There has been a dynamic in the Middle East that made extremists reluctant to say “the United States is responsible for oppression in (insert nation here) by supporting a despotic regime.” It is less dangerous to say “the United States supports the oppression of the Palestinians.” Sixteen of the nineteen 9-11 terrorists were Saudis, young educated men who had no economic future in their homeland because of the way the Saudi royal family concentrates all the good jobs in their extensive family. But American support for the Sauds was a footnote in Osama bin Laden’s explanation for 9-11. He listed Israel and the Palestinians as the first cause.

Since 1988, when Jordan ceded ownership of the West Bank to the Palestinians, Israel has had the power to end the use of their nation as a reason to attack Western countries. Instead, they have let the Palestinian issue cause death and destruction all over the world. Thousands of innocents have died to protect Israel’s “right” to occupy and oppress the occupied people of the territories they conquered in 1967. The al-Assad regime has kept power in Syria as a foil to Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights. Hamas has risen to power among the Palestinians because of Israel’s policy of ten eyes for an eye. Iran’s combination of Islamic and secular despotism is built on Israel’s occupation. Under the rhetoric, almost all the nations surrounding Israel understand that after 63 years, it is not going away. But the occupation is a whole different matter.

Israel was the principle cause of 9-11. Because of 9-11, we invaded two countries. So far, we have lost over 6,000 American service personnel in the two wars, with tens of thousands injured, and nearly a trillion dollars spent on these wars. That is about as clear a line as one can draw – Israeli treatment of the Palestinians caused our wars.

Finally, what planet is Adler living on? He wants Vice-President Biden to vow to exterminate all of Israel’s enemies? How many millions of humans does he want us to kill? We already have the blood of nearly half a million Iraqi and Afghan civilians on our hands for Israel. How many more does Adler want? Would the annihilation of 3 million Palestinians satisfy him? How about 80 million Egyptians? Would 22 million Syrians be enough? Should we limit this genocide to just the Palestinians and the four countries that have borders with Israel – a total of 115 million people – or does he want to fan out across the Arab and Muslim world? What gives this man the right to demand that the United States of America engage in the Muslim holocaust?

It has taken a lot on the part of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party to make both Israelis and Americans, Jews and gentiles alike, question the course of Israeli policy in regards to the Palestinians.  It has taken the wholesale destruction of Palestinian farms and homes, the pushing of the Palestinians into every smaller areas of their own land, the building of suburban communities for the “settlers” while denying Palestinians and Gazans the materials to replace their destroyed homes.  It has also taken a determined effort on the part of the West Bank Palestinians to control terrorism and submit to Israeli rule to show the world that Palestinian and terrorist are not synonyms. 

Did you know that in one of the oldest forms of ancient Egyptian the name for the mountains to the east of the Nile Valley was “joo”? Archeology says there was not one Exodus, but several. Science says there is a series of natural events that could match the story of the Ten Plagues. History says that a Pharaoh named Akhenaten founded the first recorded monotheistic religion in the Mediterranean region, and that the exoduses began after his death. The facts suggest that the Biblical claim to Israel is a false one, based on an invasion, a conquest and the genocide of the Canaanites, something that is part of Maimonides’ 12^th century version of Talmudic law. In a Christian Europe that advocated the forced conversion or death of Jews, living under the protection of Spanish Muslims, Maimonides called for their obliteration in the Holy Land.

President Obama didn’t “throw Israel under a bus.” He told Israel it is time to stop expecting us to kill and die for their power trip in the occupied territories. Andrew Adler did not start a debate. He focused attention on some of the worst aspects of the right wing – the virulent, baseless hatred of Democrats, the blind support Israel and the arrogant hypocrisy of a nation born out of a holocaust and centuries of oppression demanding a right to do the same to others.

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Newt Gingrich, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances.”  First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

MSNBC, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Current-TV, The Washington Post, The New York Times, thousands of independent blog sites and newspapers around the country – these are the “liberally biased” “blamestream press” who are not to be trusted, who allegedly lie about everything…according to the right wing media and politicians. These so-called “liberal” media sources are exercising the right in our country to have a free press, free from censorship by government, free from control by one political party or another. They are as essential to our liberty as free elections and universal suffrage.

So, you want to know Newt Gingrich’s take on a free press? Here is it, in response to John King opening last night’s debate with a question about the interview ABC News conducted with Gingrich’s second betrayed and abused wife, Marianne….

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office, and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” After condemning Marianne’s statements as “trash” and “false,” Gingrich continued, “Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it, two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable asanything I can imagine. I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

“Decent people” Who the hell does this man think he is? Gingrich carried on a affair with Marianne while his first wife was fighting cancer. He carried on with Callista for six years, phoning Marianne in Georgia, telling her every night “I love you,” while Callista was lying next to him in Marianne’s bed. He asked for an “open marriage” after Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis for crissake! He can’t deal with “in sickness and in health.” He is asking for us to forgive him now, because he claims that at 68 and a grandfather he’s learned to keep his dick in his pants?!? And he has to arrogance to say the media keeps “decent people” out of politics?

Get this straight you whoring son of a bitch – we don’t need a First Skank in the White House who will be snubbed, or worse, by every decent First Lady and royal wife in the world. You can dress that woman up in all the designer clothes and Tiffany baubles your money can buy but it doesn’t change what Callista is – a homewrecker, an adulteress, a social-climbing predator who thought she could ride your fat ass into the White House – and you said that outright to your sick wife “Callista can take me into the Presidency.”

Don’t like that characterization? Well, we don’t like Republican trolls on the comment streams saying that all the females in the Obama family should be gang raped, right down to Sasha and Malia, that Michelle Obama looks like “a ho licking cum off her thick lips,” or the right wing media and politicians getting after our First Lady for the size of her butt. You think the “elite media” have protected the President? Bullshit. No one has protected him from the piles of crap that have come out of the right wing for the past four years. We are fed up with the right wing media saying that President Obama is “the worst president in history” like Hoover, Grant and Taft never existed.  Get over yourself, and stop thinking that just because Democrats have behaved decently for the past 20 years, since we chose not to go to court to challenge Ronald Reagan’s competency, means that we won’t go after Callista with the same venom and viciousness that your people have used on Mrs. Obama and his daughters.

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system. Back to the real issue….the press.

The only “free press” that the right embraces is the right wing media, so deep into the Republican Party that one Republican senator once commentated that they thought Fox News worked for them and they have learned that they work for Fox. Ordinary conservatives and Republicans have been seduced into believing that Fox is “fair and balanced” and the rest of the media is lying and biased. Read them on-line in any comment stream for a while. They will insist that this story or that story isn’t be carried by the “MSM” (mainstream media) because they are being told by Fox and talk radio that these stories aren’t being carried, when they really are. It’s just that the mainstream media is telling the whole story, not just the right wing side of it. Or the stories that the MSM don’t tell are outright lies, like the Philadelphia New Black Panthers story that Sean Hannity has been touting for three years.

—- Facts: a group of six men calling themselves the New Black Panthers roamed around a neighborhood festival calling for the murder of “cracker babies.” The Philly police investigated and decided that since all that was involved was obnoxious speech, there was no point in pursuing it. A couple of them then, trailing a “reporter,” planted themselves in front of what they said was a polling place, which had nothing on it to indicate it was a polling place, and said they were there to intimidate voters. They most resembled the hamsters in the Soul commercial. Seriously. They were that scary. The BUSH administration investigated and decided there was no voter intimidation. Hannity claims that Eric Holder ended the investigation because the New Black Panther were intimidating Republican voters. The whole story is bullshit, but it was filmed for the National Geographic Channel, which is now owned by NewsCorp, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News. Got all that? The mainstream media didn’t report it because it is bullshit.

Okay, that’s how the right wing media is operating – and all those idiot Fox viewers in the audience at the Thursday debate applauded Gingrich’s attack on the “elite media” because they are brainwashed. They are limited in their access to other news sources because Murdoch has bought so damned many local television stations he’s in every market, sometimes with no local competition. Cable systems in some communities don’t carry CNN or MSNBC to compete with Fox. I was in one last year in Virginia. Our free press guarantee has allowed these right wing propagandists to saturate the media markets and cut off access to the rest of the media.

Rupert Murdoch didn’t become an American citizen because he loved this country, but to get around the laws that forbid foreigners owning too much media. That’s why his son James is a British citizen. In England, NewsCorp literally bragged that they won the last election, getting the Liberals tossed out and the Conservatives in. That’s what they do at NewsCorp. They manipulate elections to benefit their politicians and their super-rich class and drive their agenda. Canada demanded that Fox had to be severed from their American operations before they would be allowed there.

Most historic fascist regimes were more honest about their attitude toward the press. They shut it down. The Republicans have the gift of Fox News and talk radio, so they don’t have to shut down the other voices in America. They just shout over them and make gullible people distrust the facts. I’m not using the term fascist facetiously. Fascism is not communism, as the right wing would want you to believe. They don’t want the word “fascism” attached to themselves, so they have muddied what it means. Though the definitions in Europe are more political, the simplest definition works here: In Communism, the state owns the means of production. In Fascism, the means of production own the government. Benito Mussolini, who invented Fascism, said it himself: “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” That is what the Republican party stand for these days – corporate power.

I just listened to a South Carolina Republican tell Martin Bashir on MSNBC that the mainstream media didn’t ask the hard questions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Bashir corrected him, and he kept insisting that the mainstream media didn’t ask hard questions because they didn’t ask Obama the same questions they asked Gingrich. Bashir, unfortunately, didn’t shoot back at him that President Obama wasn’t asked the same questions because he is not a serial adulterer. That is the power of the right wing media – black is white, white is black, lies are the truth and the truth is suspect. The rewrite history, even recent history, while decrying “revisionist history” that is in fact the insertion of facts into the myth. They paint themselves as victims of a vicious liberal media, while their entire party participates in the lies and manipulations of who and what the Democrats are. Then they convince their idiot chorus that the mainstream press is too easy on the President, when in fact the mainstream press judges the President quite fairly, and lets us all know when the President does something wrong.

I will let Martin Bashir have the last word here, because he has called out Gingrich on his authorship of the very thing he attacked John King for – “destructive, vicious, negative” rhetoric.

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Etta James, 1962

It seems anti-climatic. The great Etta James has been so very ill for so long, that her passing today is expected, and almost welcomed. The quality of life is as important as its being, and it has been a long time since Ms. James had any quality to her life. She died of complications of leukemia, had Alzheimers and a range of illnesses in her last years.

Etta James was one of the greats, right up there with Ella Fitzgerald and Ruth Brown. She was all voice and little visual. That’s hard to understand in the world after MTV, but that is how music used to be – voices mattered, not show or costumes or glitz, just voices. James was originally a rhythm and blues and doo wop singer, then as she aged, she shifted to jazz and straight blues. James understood that the music had to match the voice and it was not acceptable to keep singing the same music if her voice no longer fit that music. It’s a lesson others should learn, along with when to retire because the voice is gone.

Etta James and Beyonce Knowles, 2009

One of the last things we heard from Etta James was her objection to the recorded rendition of her most famous song, “At Last,” at all those inaugural balls three years ago. The recording used was that of Beyoncé portraying James in the film Cadillac Records. James felt that her original recording should have been used, and she got a bit testy about that. Covers may flatter the composers, but they can be insulting to the original performer, especially if they don’t add anything to the song. And, of course there was a pride factor beyond the song involved. Ms. Knowles didn’t have a third the experience and history that Ms. James did as a black performer or even as a black woman. For Ms. James, the election of Barack Obama was the fulfillment of more than a half-century of seemingly unattainable dreams. Even if Ms. James’ voice was not up to a personal appearance at one of these balls, her presence certainly was deserved.

Jamesetta Hawkins died five days before her seventy-fourth birthday. She was born in Los Angeles to the fourteen-year old Dorothy Hawkins. Her father has never been identified, but was rumored to have been a white man. It was about as bad a beginning as a life could have in this country in the last days of the Great Depression, in a segregated nation. Dorothy lived the only life she understood, kept by a variety of men, leaving her daughter in the care of others.

From that beginning, with the gift of a voice and the opportunities accorded to talented black singers as the world embraced their music in the 1950′s Etta James emerged. One couple among her caregivers, Sarge and Mama Lu, belonged to the St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles, and there, under the direction of James Earle Hines, Etta began to sing at the age of five. When she was 12, Mama Lu died and Dorothy reclaimed her daughter, taking to San Francisco. Within two years, Etta had formed her first singing group andmet Johnny Otis. It was Otis who flipped Jamesetta’s name into Etta James, and signed the group of 14-year-old girls to record an “answer song” to Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me, Annie.” Originally titled “Roll With Me Henry,” it was released as “Dance With Me, Henry,”to avoid censorship of what was deemed to be too racy lyrics. Years later, a recording was made of the original lyrics, as part of a group of songs which proved how dirty lyrics were before the 1950′s sanitation regime.

The recording launched James’ career, which was still going into the early 2000s. For the first eight years, under Modern Records, her career didn’t exactly take off. It was when she signed with Chess in 1960 that she found her best environment for growth and showcasing her talents. James’ last album, The Dreamer, was released this past November to critical acclaim, almost a year after she had quit touring because of her declining health. It was a career of great hits and deep lulls.

Performers create moments of exquisite beauty. Sound engineers and cameramen give those moment immortality. That is the beauty of the twentieth century. No one is ever really gone. We have only legend to tell us how beautifully Lilly Langtry sang or how impressive Sarah Siddons was on stage. We have Etta James’ recordings, and we have the ability to restore and refine those earliest recordings to bring out the true beauty of them, a beauty that would have been lost over time with the older methods of recording. We are blessed. Etta James will never truly die. She will always be available to us, to enrich our lives.

Thank you, Ms. James, for sharing your gift with us.

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Newt Gingrich, photo by Gage Skidmore

Oy vey…it should not be surprising that Newt Gingrich has decided to attack the media for his personal moral failings. Gingrich, and most Republicans, cannot stand the fact that they are being held accountable for their rhetoric. Many Republicans, including Gingrich, love to live under the motto “Do as I say not as I do”. Thus, it is perfectly alright for Gingrich to ignore what was once called Middle Class morality, but not alright for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans people, and anyone who is not willing to ignore morality and hide away their lives.

In tonight’s Republican debate held by CNN- only the fiftieth or sixtieth so far this cycle- Gingrich attacked the media for reporting on what his ex-wife Marianne Gingrich had to say.

The Huffington Post reported that the exchange went like this:

“Would you like to take some time to respond to that?” asked King.

“No, but I will,” responded Gingrich, receiving loud, sustained applause from the audience.

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that,” he said.

The audience gave Gingrich a standing ovation.

When King asked if he was finished, Gingrich said he would like to be allowed to continue:

Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.

My two daughters, my two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am, frankly, astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate.

“John, it was repeated by your network,” replied Gingrich. “You chose to start the debate with it. Don’t try to blame somebody else. You and your staff chose to start the debate with it. … Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren’t interested because they would like to attack any Republican. They’re attacking the governor [Mitt Romney]. They’re attacking me. I’m sure they’ll get around to Sen. Santorum and Congressman Paul. I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

Republicans are always surprised by the fact that the Democrats are given a free pass on the issue of sexual infidelity. Of course, the Democrats are not the ones demanding that women stay married while their husbands wander off to places like Argentina. It should not be surprising, though, that Gingrich, who has been divorced twice, has been willing to ignore questions about his morality…and it is not surprising that the Republican base is going to ignore them as well.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In the ad, a Maddow lookalike wearing glasses, a grey hooodie, and a curly brunette wig uses the same argument that Dr. Maddow uses in one of her MSNBC commercials talking about the demand for infrastructure jobs.

In the National Republican Congressional Committee, the lookalike states “We’ve got a project like this waiting for the President’s go ahead –- supported by Republicans and Democrats, labor unions. It’d provide energy security and up to 130,000 jobs.”

This is false, in fact. At best, it is possible that the pipeline could create some 20,000 jobs, but more likely it will create around 2,500 temporary jobs. The reduction in the cost of oil and gas might create more jobs, but it is unclear if this pipeline would be enough to see that happen, especially since at best the pipeline would supply only about 5% of America’s energy needs while ruining large swaths of the environment and providing a tempting target for terrorists.

What is more, analysts are not sure if they pipeline will ever reach full capacity as there is already an abundance of pipelines being used.

So, when NRCC Communications Director Paul Lindsay decided to try and explain this ad by saying “Even Rachel Maddow should be able to understand the benefits of a project like Keystone XL, which not only can help with our country’s energy needs but also has the potential to bring tens of thousands of jobs to a struggling American economy.” it appears that the person who needs to try and understand this project is the one defending it.

H/T Huffington Post

Last week, James O’Keefe decided to try and do a bit of muckraking by obtaining a ballot using the name of a dead person…a dead person who appears to have been very much alive.

No, Robert William Beaulieu of Nashua, New Hampshire is not a zombie. The 23-year-old was mistaken for Robert Paul Beaulieu, who was, indeed, dead. Project Veritas, headed up by O’Keefe, produced a video of a man with what sounds like an Irish accent asking for a ballot for a man who has a French last name.

Robert William is no relation to Robert Paul, who passed away a few months ago at the age of 84. The guy in the video is asked if Robert William Beaulieu was his name, and he repeated Robert Beaulieu. According to R.W. Beaulieu “I found out they were actually talking about me and not the man who passed away in October. The funny thing is, if they’d done any research, they would have found out the guy’s middle name is Paul and the guy specifically goes looking for William.”

R.W. Beaulieu has been in touch with the NH attorney general’s office about this, but he said that he was brushed off. He stated “I think they just want it to go away.”

Maybe it’s time to just stop trying to make that go away, huh?

President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, July 2, 1964, with Martin Luther King, Jr., as witness

The headline on the Christian Science Monitor story is “Martin Luther King, Jr.: How would American life be different without him?”

Answer: not much.

Humans have an innate desire to personify everything. We need to latch on to one person and believe that person was responsible for the totality of an historical event. Hence, we place the entirety of Nazi Germany into the person of Adolf Hitler, even though he was more mouthpiece than planner. We transform a common criminal named Robin the Hood into a champion of the poor and oppressed under a foreign usurper. We need that one person to be hero, and fight any attempts to spread the word “hero” to cover the unnamed soldier in the field. When we get too inclusive with the word, we seem to diminish the impact of heroism.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a talented orator and organizer. He was shot and died. He became the face of the civil rights movement. And in that elevation of him to the personification of the movement, we demoted thousands of people who put their lives on the line, who died for the movement, who did the day-to-day work of the movement to the periphery.

Do you remember the three civil rights workers who were brutally murdered in Mississippi in June of 1964? They were James Chaney, 21, African-American, of Meridian, Miss., Andrew Goodman, 20, white, Jewish, of New York, and Michael Schwerner, 24, also white and Jewish, of New York. Young men, just at the start of their lives, killed fighting for the rights of all men and women to be equals in this “land of the free and home of the brave.” And every once in a great while we are reminded that they lived and died.

Ever heard of the Scotts of Atlanta? No, I’m not talking about Coretta Scott King. She was from Alabama. I’m talking about the founders of the oldest African-American newspaper in Atlanta, and the core of a large multi-state African-American news empire. The paper was founded in 1928 by William Alexander Scott II. Six years later, he was shot and killed outside his home by “an unknown assailant.” That was the price of speaking out against Jim Crow laws, whites only primaries, and the far left rhetoric of many in the early civil rights movement. The Scotts were moderate Republicans, which makes perfect sense if you understand that the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats, were the racists at that time and the Northern Republicans were the advocates of equal rights. The parties changed positions after Lyndon Baines Johnson “betrayed” his party with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

W. A. Scott was replaced at the helm of the paper by his brother Cornelius Adolphus. Today, the paper is a once-weekly print publication and an on-line newspaper run by M. Alexis Scott, W.A.’s granddaughter. It is still a family business, with members of the Scott family in the principle editorial positions.

W.A. wrote the paper’s manifesto, “The responsibility of a Negro newspaper is to dispense to the public good wholesome information to enlighten our people…and to serve as a guide and organ of expression for the community.”

During the 1940s, the paper fought for school integration and voter registration. At its height, it had a daily circulation of 28,000 in 1945, purchased by almost 10% of the city’s total population. The paper drew a lot of its subscribers from the two premiere black colleges in Atlanta, Spellman and Morehouse. But it also angered many in the civil rights movement by calling for the use of the courts and the ballot box instead of demonstrations and sit-ins to effect change. In the end, C. A.’s choice was proven to be the more powerful one. Brown v. Board of Education did more for the movement than all the sit-ins at lunch counters. The sorry fact of the matter is, demonstrations eventually stop getting attention in the media and issues fade away with the short attention-spans of Americans. But Supreme Court rulings are almost eternal.

Never heard of the Scotts, have you? But they were on the front lines a year before Martin Luther King, Jr., was born.

There are so many men and women who fought for equal rights, not just the handful that have been elevated to “hero” status. It does not take away from the accomplishments of a Rosa Parks to discuss others who also refused to give up their seats. All of them left us with a legacy we can actually see in New York City’s Bushwick bus dispute and the fight in Israel against those who want to relegate women to the back of the bus.

My argument with Martin Luther King, Jr., is not what he did or didn’t do. It’s how elevating him to a god-like status has hurt the African-American community. He was a human being and just as flawed as any other human being and so much time and effort has been expended protecting his godhood from his humanity that the man gets lost in the myth.

Tell young people that they should emulate a god and they will back off the aspiration. It asks them to aim too high. They know instinctively that they can never lead a whole movement, so why should they try? This problem exists in every minority movement, not just the African-American community. Why should a young Native-American try to be Russell Means or a young Hispanic try to be Caesar Chavez? It’s too high a goal. It doesn’t relate to their daily lives. It’s like the focus on sports stars and entertainers as role models. Too many kids say they want to be a sports star or rap singer, and they are failures before they out of middle school because they lack the natural talent. But, to be the next William Alexander Scott II? Now, that’s attainable. Not the shot dead in the street part, but the entrepreneurial part. Be the next Melissa Harris-Perry – now that’s attainable. Black activists are crying because there is no current television show with black leads, but they fail to see the power of the black characters in ensembles – the surgeon, the police squad leader, the soldier, the scientist and teacher. These are ordinary people who have succeeded in attainable careers. S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lt. Anita Van Buren is a more important role model than some spy couple in designer clothes.

Sadly, the right wing has figured this out. That is why they, not us, refer to Barack Obama as “your Messiah” and “your Savior” and call him a “community organizer.” They want to elevate him above aspiration level while denying the simple things he did that make him a great role model – the college degrees, the university professorship, the strong marriage and fatherhood. One of the givens in white culture in America is the idea that anyone can grow up to be President. It is vital to the protection of their party that the idea of growing up to be President doesn’t spread outside the white upper class. Hence, they make it seem that Barack Obama is a god and no one can aspire to be a god, can they?

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should not just be about one man. It should be about all the men and women who made the civil rights movement happen, the good, the less than good, the obscure and the famous. It should be about honoring several generations of men and women, not just one. It should be about bringing the successes of the movement home to those who have not had the opportunity to share in it. Black History Month doesn’t cut it. It’s too many heroes and not enough ordinary success stories. It should be focused not just on the Tuskegee Airmen, but on the black army units who built the airfields that our pilots landed on across the Pacific, the men who worked under enemy fire without the ability to fight back. It should be focused on people like the Scotts, four generations of Atlanta business leaders and the real human problems that have been part of their lives – the seduction of one young man into the gangsta culture, the tragic death of another from a rare cancer and how he had done something very unusual among young fathers of any race – his life was very well insured before he became ill and that insurance provided for his widow and two young children, the educations they received and the careers they built outside of the paper. It should focus on the very high level of college enrollment among black women.

Heroes are wonderful things, until they make it harder for ordinary young people to see what they can accomplish. We need a little less Martin Luther King, Jr., and a lot more Coach Craig Robinson. Don’t know him? He’s the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State University, an ordinary black man in an ordinary job, but just as important as any god-hero because what Coach Robinson is is actually attainable by anyone who tries.

Related articles

• Martin Luther King Jr. Notes & Papers Debut Online (hiphopwired.com)
• Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr.! (thehollywoodgossip.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. archives: Reagan makes Martin Luther King Day official (thegrio.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day: A quiz on the struggle for a national holiday (csmonitor.com)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Died Intestate (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. and Tax (taxprof.typepad.com)
• Martin Luther King Jr. archives: The last days of Dr. King (thegrio.com)

Jon Huntsman

One more down…one thousand more to go, or so it seems. Jon Huntsman is set to drop out of the Republican Presidential primary and endorse Mitt Romney. Campaign officials have confirmed to various media groups, including The Huffington Post. Huntsman, who is the former Utah governor, has not been doing well in the various polls. According to an aide Huntsman “didn’t want to stand in the way of the candidate most prepared to beat Obama and turn around the economy.”

Romney will not be present when Huntsman delivers his statements.

According to the Huffington Post:

Once discussed as the candidate that the Obama reelection team found most challenging to face, Huntsman stumbled under the Klieg lights of the presidential campaign. One close adviser acknowledged, during the final days of the New Hampshire primary, that he found the transition from the world of international diplomacy to electoral politics “difficult to execute.” Complicating matters was fundraising, which failed to pick up after Huntsman’s initial entrance into the race.

Governor Romney's Official Portrait

Mitt Romney did that “gold-plated foot in mouth” routine again on Wednesday. When asked about income inequality in America on the Today show, Romney opined, “You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare….I believe in a merit nation, an opportunity nation where people by virtue of their education, their hard work and risk taking and their dreams – maybe a little luck – could achieve great things.”

Excuse me? This out of a man who had everything handed to him – a great Ivy League education, companies he could buy himself into, taking risks with everyone else’s jobs and lives – telling us we are suffering from some kind of gilt-penis envy? Seriously?

We didn’t elect Bill Clinton because we wanted some kind of socialist government or because he’s irresistibly charming. We elected him because he knew the price of a gallon of milk and a pound of ground beef. We elected him because Papa Bush didn’t know what a grocery store scanner was and Mama Bush laughed over her mother-in-law’s piano getting sucked out to sea after a nor’easter hit Kennebunkport, just after watching the devastation to ordinary citizens’ lives caused by California wildfires.

All the garbage about where Barack Obama was born and his stepfather in Indonesia was a diversion to make people forget that his life story parallels Bill Clinton’s in many ways – divorced parents, single mother, bad stepfather, moved around from pillar to post. Obama doesn’t talk about it as much as Clinton did, and that may be the mistake he makes. He could also ladle on the problems of being bi-racial, but he has chosen not to. Barack and Michelle Obama have barely touched on the journeys they took from the middle class and lower middle class to law degrees and college professorships. They only briefly talked about making mortgage payments and college loan payments while trying to raise a family. They make it look too easy. They are the merit couple, not the Romneys, and that fact is buried under the right wing propaganda about them. Affirmative action does not guarantee an idiot a place in Harvard. It just guarantees that the best black candidates have an equal shot at getting in to Harvard. It doesn’t guarantee grades good enough to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review. It just guarantees that a person will not be rejected by Harvard because of the color of his skin or the ethnicity of his parents.

Mitt Romney has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money for the past six years in his pursuit of the Presidency. He wants to be President the same way Kim Kardashian wanted to be married before she turned 30. The getting is more important than the being.

And while Romney was passing out the millions to get elected, millions of Americans were digging deep into their pockets and pulling out a five or ten dollar bill with the lint and donating it to hold free clinics that saved the lives of hundreds of people who have no health insurance. One man donated all his overtime pay to a small shellfish company in Louisiana so the employees who were losing their jobs because of the oil spill could have just enough money to get through for a short while. People donated money for the owners of a house that burned down while firefighters watched because the homeowner had forgotten to pay the extra fee for fire protection in his town. Ordinary people donated money for transplants when the Arizona legislature cut off funds for life-saving transplants for people who are on Medicaid because their medical conditions keep them from working.

What has Mitt Romney done for anyone other than himself for the past six years? Well, if he’s a good Mormon, he’s donated 10% of his income to the Church. That’s “income” not “wealth,” and the very rich have ways to limit their income without impacting their wealth. Maybe that’s why he won’t release his tax returns…he doesn’t want us to see his version of doing a “Leona Helsmley” to the IRS.

Watching the political pundits in the past week going insane over South Carolina has been fun. It is supposed to be a Tea Party-values voter state, but their Tea Party governor, Nikki Haley, has endorsed Romney. They are supposed to be dedicated conservatives, but Ron Paul has a strong following. They are supposed to be all kinds of things in South Carolina, but the polls have been all over the place and the people being interviewed are not giving the answers everyone expects. Christian values voters are saying they are more concerned with the economy than abortion. Small business owners are talking about Christian values. The only thing they are being consistent about is their hatred for the Obamas. Fox News and right wing radio are really big in South Carolina, and you can hear the right wing media talking points out of everyone’s mouths.

The conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney will be the eventual Republican candidate. That is why the powers behind the Republican Party want the other candidates to ratchet back any talk about Bain Capital. But it is not so much Bain Capital that is Romney’s weak point…it’s what he has spent out of his own fortune to be elected President. Mitt Romney is more than just the living, breathing epitome of the mentality of the 1%. He is the man who wants to buy the Presidency, who believes that his parentage, wealth and position entitles him to add the White House to his roster of homes. Mitt Romney is Bush 3.0.

Related articles

• Barack Obama’s strategists find rich pickings as feuding Republicans attack Mitt Romney (guardian.co.uk)
• Newt Gingrich: I Didn’t Admit Attacking Mitt Romney On Bain Capital Was A Mistake (huffingtonpost.com)
• Santorum: Mitt Romney Is Like ‘Your Boss’ (thinkprogress.org)
• WATCH: DNC Attack Ad Slams Bain Capital (huffingtonpost.com)
• Mitt Romney’s Biggest Donors? Bain Capital (newser.com)
• What does the South Carolina town where Bain cut jobs think of Mitt Romney’s jobs record? (dailykos.com)
• VIDEO: Mitt Romney Vs. The GOP – Bain Capital Edition (thinkprogress.org)

Every President since Jimmy Carter has promised to “streamline” the bureaucracy, cut the paperwork and red tape, make the government more responsive more quickly. Each and every one of them – Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush have made that promise. So far, the closest we have come is a paper reduction program overseen by Vice-President Al Gore, which was actually pretty easy to accomplish as the government moved into the computer age. The computers became a whole other issue.

So, now President Obama wants to eliminate the overlap in departments that deal with small businesses. Great idea. It goes along with his request of all departments to examine regulations and eliminate overlaps and outdated, useless ones. It is claimed that the consolidation with eliminate 1,000 Federal jobs and save $3 billion over ten years. Not bad, since the Republicans want to cut around $4 billion from the budget over the next ten years. It all sounds like a win-win for everyone, as long as those thousand jobs are eliminated by attrition, as people retire, and not by laying them all off.

So, what could possibly go wrong? Everything, starting with the fact that the right wing has gone around the bend over the idea. If this idea had come out of a Republican, as it did three times in the past 30 years, they would be cheering in the streets. But it has come out of the President-from-Hell, the man they have smeared, slandered, libeled, defamed, lied about, and blocked at every turn. And the President needs Congressional approval to restructure departments that were established by Congress and whose jobs were defined by Congress with laws. The last thing the Republicans want is to give President Obama something positive to point at during the next ten months. Some have even claimed that this proposal is part of Obama’s plan to grab unlimited power so that he can create a communist dictatorship. I’m not kidding. These are the same people who say that Obama has “overseen the greatest expansion of government in our history.” They don’t have a single thing to support that idea, but that’s what they believe.

IF the President managed to get approval for this, the next hurdle is getting it done. Federal agencies, hell, any agency, is extremely jealous of their territory. All those jokes and plot lines on TV cop shows about pissing contests over law enforcement jurisdiction are not jokes. They reflect the truth. The people who are working in the departments and portions of departments that would be effected are going to make this a very hard process. They will insist “you can’t do that” and “that won’t work” until the people trying to do this will back down and give in.

Then there is the matter of who designs this new super-agency. The folks who did Homeland Security were the kind of corporate minds that write flow charts, the kind who either never worked the line or have forgotten how to do the nuts and bolts of what is done on the line. Flow charts are very pretty graphics that show nothing important. The restructuring needs to be done by the people who actually do the work. Almost all of us have worked for some boss who made things more complicated, or with equipment that some genius designed that made our work harder, or in a building that was designed so badly it made work instead of improving it.

Once upon almost 40 years ago, there was a school system in upstate New York that let the teachers work out the best way to do their jobs. The teachers in each grade got together one week before school started and created a master lesson plan that was based on the reading textbooks. They matched the material in the reading lesson with the best lesson in the spelling book and the best one in the grammar book, so the three reinforced each other. It meant jumping from chapter 5 in reading to chapter 12 in spelling to chapter 2 in grammar, but the three worked together instead of splitting up things like adverb usage. Giving the teachers the power to create the best way to teach the material had very positive results in the school’s grades, and that was what mattered. That kind of involvement of the people who actually do the work is far better than having those decisions made by someone on the outside who doesn’t understand what would work best.

If President Obama can approach this re-organization from a bottom-up perspective instead of bringing in some “expert” to do it, this is truly a great idea. If he brings in an outsider, it will be no better than the creation of Homeland Security…a giant bureaucratic mess that costs more than what the splintered agencies cost us now.

Related articles

• GOP Warms To Obama’s Plan To Trim And Merge (huffingtonpost.com)
• Obama Seeks Greater Power To Shrink The Federal Government (huffingtonpost.com)
• Obama seeks power to merge government agencies (mercurynews.com)
• Department Consolidation: Obama’s Latest Hopeless Good Government Project (swampland.time.com)
• Obama to Merge 6 Government Agencies, Cut 2,000 Employees (usnews.com)
• The President’s Agency Consolidation Proposal (volokh.com)
• Obama seeks power to shrink government (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Rush Limbaugh (Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons)

Never thought those words would come out of my computer, but Limbaugh is busy making the case for Barack Obama.

Along with Ron Paul, Rudy Guiliani and Jim DeMint, Rush has attacked Republican candidates for bringing up the issue of Mitt Romney’s history at Bain Capital. Rush called the attacks “indefensible,” and that at least was a multi-syllable word. But what these guys are proving is what the Democrats are saying – the biggest issue in America is jobs and the Republicans aren’t interested in creating them.

It is important that Mitt Romney’s “jobs” history consists of destroying them. It is important for people to understand that Bain Capital killed the KayBeeToys chain for no reason whatsoever except to steal money from it to pay to Bain’s partners. It is important that people understand this concept of buying a company just to loot its assets and shut it down. This is at the core of America’s joblessness — the manner in which unregulated, unrepentant “capitalists” killed companies and jobs for personal wealth accumulation.

So, what does it mean to ordinary Americans when the conservative elite and libertarian godfather think it’s a bad idea for people to know this stuff? It means that under their leadership, companies like Bain would continue to buy up companies just to shut them down. It means that they have no interest in creating jobs or investing in our economic future. It means that they are all guilty of what Mitt is accused of – heartless, mindless, soulless wealth building for the 1% and spiraling poverty for the rest of us.

Related articles

• Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney: Former House Speaker Defends Bain Capital Attack (huffingtonpost.com)
• Newt Gingrich: I Didn’t Admit Attacking Mitt Romney On Bain Capital Was A Mistake (huffingtonpost.com)
• Mitt Romney Bain Capital Experience: GOP Candidates Blast Front-Runner (huffingtonpost.com)
• “Rush, Fox News Rip Gingrich Over Romney Bain Capital Attacks” (goodolewoody.wordpress.com)
• Rudy Giuliani To Newt Gingrich: ‘What The Hell Are You Doing?’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• DeMint: GOP hopefuls missed their chance to question Romney’s business record (thehill.com)
• Top Perry donor jumps ship after Romney attacks (thehill.com)
• Laid-Off Steelworker : Mitt Romney and Bain Capital Profited by Shutting Down Kansas Steel Plant (euzicasa.wordpress.com)
• Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin Calls on Mitt Romney to Release Tax Returns, Proof 100K Jobs Created at Bain Capital (themoderatevoice.com)

Sasha, Michelle, President Barack and Malia Obama, Dec. 2011

Did you know that the First Family have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money on extravagant vacations and Hollywood A-list parties? No? Well, maybe that’s because they haven’t. Just don’t try to tell that to any faithful viewer of Fox News or listener to right wing talk radio. Facts are never allowed to prevent them riling up a healthy level of conservative outrage.

Here’s the short facts – the President is paid $400,000 a year. It used to be $200,000 until the first year of the Bush administration. The President also has a $50,000 expense account. The government pays for government-related travel, even if it is done by the First Lady. The government pays for government-related parties in the White House. It does not pay for vacations or private parties. It does not pay for trips that are undertaken on behalf of the President’s political party.

According to the outrage-stirrers, the Obamas take constant vacations. The ignored facts? In the first 31 months of his administration, the President took 61 days of vacation, Dubya took 180 and Reagan took 112. They criticized the First Lady for taking her daughters to Africa at the taxpayers’ expense, even though the First Lady made several official visits. Not a single objection was raised to the Bush women doing the same thing, without the official visits, just a couple of photo ops. No one has actually kept track of presidential golf games, though I would bet Eisenhower holds the record for that, but at least President Obama doesn’t tell people to “watch this drive” after making statements to the press about our war efforts.

The newest outrage on the right is over a 2009 Halloween party. Only took them two years to get worked up over it.

For Halloween, Easter and the 4^th of July, the Obamas host parties for military families. After the first 4^th, the press didn’t make much fuss over them. There are apparently, rules concerning the press presence at these parties. They are requested not to photograph any of the military children so that they can be identified. This is done for their protection and privacy. For this particular party, director Tim Burton brought a few friends – Johnny Depp and Mia Wasikowska from the unreleased Alice in Wonderland, and Deep Roy from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also helped with the decorations, all of them taken from Burton’s movies. Now, that “unreleased” part is important to remember here. There were 2,000 members of military families at the lawn party. They were getting up close and personal with the casts of Alice in Wonderland, and would be going back to their homes, their schools and their friends talking about the costumes and the experience. It was a brilliant piece of publicity.

The press were informed of the party and invited to attend. There was nothing secret about this party.

After the military families’ party, there was a private party in the White House, for friends and staff members. The Burton group attended that as well. Mrs. Obama was wearing a leopard costume. Malia, who was 11 at the time, was dressed as the Morton Salt girl and carried a large container of salt all night. Nice sense of humor the girl’s got, making fun of her mother’s healthy eating initiative. Sasha, 9 then, was outfitted as the Queen of Hearts, in a costume based on the one worn by Helena Bonham Carter in the movie. Odds are, Burton arranged for the costume, since the movie had not been released and the costumes were not yet available commercially. Burton, Depp, Roy and Wasikowska were guests, along with about a dozen others Burton brought with him.

While the military family party would be covered under the White House’s entertaining budget, the private party was not. It was paid for entirely by the Obamas. And the press did know about the private party. Photos from it have been available for two years now.

The right wing is saying that the Obamas kept the party secret because it would be too embarrassing to be seen throwing an “extravagant Hollywood party” while the rest of the country is in deep financial doo-doo. That’s a load of candy corn. The party was not a secret, and no one is expecting the President to live like a welfare recipient.

There are very solid lines between what the taxpayer pays for with regards to the Presidency and what the President and his family pay for. The job comes with a $400,000 salary plus room and board. The “room” part means they do not have the single largest expense the rest of us have. They also don’t have car payments.

The taxpayer does not pay for the girls’ private school. That is a private expense, though it is one that the Secret Service prefers. Amy Carter attended public school and it was a nightmare for the Secret Service. The Bush twins, at college in Texas, were an even bigger headache. Chelsea Clinton attended Sidwell Friends. The school is accustomed to handling the security needs of high-profile families, in addition to being an exceptional academic facility.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s our President or the British royal family…the public never seems willing to find out the specifics of expenses and the divisions of private and public costs. Out of the mouths of those who wish to hurt come the big and little lies about those expenses. Prince Charles doesn’t receive a public salary and Michelle Obama does not have 100 people on her private staff. The jerks who put that one together included all the civil servants who are in the employ of the White House – the building itself, not the family who occupies it.

Getting bent out about the 2009 Halloween party is difficult territory for the right wing. To condemn the President, they must condemn a glittering, star-studded, once-in-a-lifetime party for the children of our military personnel, one of nine such parties in the past three years, parties held with a minimum of press hoopla and a maximum of attention to the pleasure derived by the military families who attend. And the conservatives are so programmed to hate everything this First Family does they can’t appreciate what these parties mean to the families of our men and women in uniform. Haven’t met one yet who could spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E.

The wild Hollywood Halloween party crew: Johnny, MIchelle, Malia, Barack, Sasha, Tim and Mia

Have fun perusing the extreme reactions to this party…..

Related articles

• Johnny Depp & Barack Obama: The Alice In Wonderland-Inspired Meeting We Never Knew About! (eonline.com)
• Inside Obamas’ secret Alice In Wonderland-themed Halloween party at White House (dailymail.co.uk)
• The Different Branches of Wingnuttia – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision (tbogg.firedoglake.com)
• President Obama Hosted Alice In Wonderland Party With Johnny Depp At White House: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• Pamela Geller, WND Column: Obama in Wonderland (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• Kept that under their hats (theage.com.au)
• White House Alice in Wonderland party under fire (tarpon.wordpress.com)
• Obama in Wonderland: White House threw secret #’Alice in Wonderland’ bash during recession, Michelle’s Million Dollar Rags (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• White House film party under fire (bbc.co.uk)
• White House Alice in Wonderland party under fire (nation.com.pk)

Balsams Grand Resort Hotel, Dixville Notch's polling place

At 11:30 p.m., the nine registered voters in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, gathered in the Balsam Grand Resort Hotel for coffee, cookies and doughnuts in advance of casting their ballots in the first primary election.  There are 2 registered Democrats in Dixville Notch, 3 registered Republicans and 4 undeclared, who could vote in either primary.  They voted at midnight, and at 12:04, a.m., the votes had been counted

And the results: Republicans: 2 Jon Huntsman, 2 Mitt Romney, 1 Newt Gingrich, 1 Ron Paul, Democrats: 3 Barack Obama

The important thing here is Dixville Notch just blew its reputation.  They consistently pick the eventual nominee, but with a tie, they may or may not have just annointed the nominee with a caveat.  At least they kept their record on the Democrats’ side.

Meanwhile, further south, in Hart’s Location there are 30 registered voters. This town gets far less press coverage, so there are no information on how many registered voters for each party.  It is also not being covered tonight.  Everyone had a reporter in Dixville Notch, but it is now 12:30 and we do not have results from Hart’s Location.   Sorry, folks.  I really, really need to get to bed.

Hart's Location Town Hall, polling place, 12:20 a.m.

Saint Anselm College, site of the Lesser Known Candidate Forums

We all know how few people managed to get on the Virginia Republican primary ballot, but how about the number who made the cut for New Hampshire? Think it comes down to President Obama and the six Stooges? Think again.

Vermont’s WCAX-TV’s news director emeritus, Marselis Parsons, gave us those of us who are not C-SPAN addicts the heads-up on this last night, in a trailer for his special report during Monday’s evening news show. Marselis was with WCAX for so long, no one can remember when he wasn’t, until he retired. Now, he files stories that interest him. Once a reporter, always a reporter.

The reason New Hampshire has such a large field is because if you have $1,000 and are a registered party member, you can just sign up. It’s that simple…no signatures to collect, no poll threshold to meet, just pay the money and sign an affidavit. New Hampshire is a semi-open primary. If one is a registered party member, one cannot vote in the other party’s primary, but if one is an independent (40% of us nationally say we are) one can choose which party’s primary one will vote in. In a closed primary, independents cannot vote. In a full-open primary, one can cross party lines.

C-SPAN has been showing the “Lesser-Known Candidates Forums” for these people, who never make the list for the major debates.

There are fourteen candidates on the Democratic Primary Ballot. The candidates are listed alphabetically in a way. The first three candidates are “T” and “W”, then it switches to “C” and goes alphabetically to “S” and you will not believe who is at the top – Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. Yup, that Randall Terry – the homophobic, anti-choice, take-no-prisoners Randall Terry. The rest of the group consists of Aldous C. Tyler, the “pagan” candidate from Madison Wisconsin; John Wolfe, Jr., the self-described “very progressive” of Chattanooga, Tennessee; Ed Cowan of Moretown, Vermont; Bob Ely of Lake Forest, Illinois; Craig “Tax Freeze” Freis of Lake Elsinore, California; Bob Greene of Mountain View, California; John D. Haywood, who advocates nationalized health, of Durham, North Carolina; Robert B. Jordan, the “drill now, drill everywhere” candidate of Garden Grove, California; Cornelius Edward O’Connor of West Palm Beach, Florida; Edward T. O’Donnell, Jr. of Wilmington, Delaware; Darcy G. Richardson of Jacksonville, Florida; Vermin Supreme of Rockport, Massachusetts, who is a perennial runner as the satirical candidate, and, of course, President Obama. Most of the candidates are further to the left than the President and are running because, on their personal issue, he hasn’t lived up to what they wanted from him. The exception is Terry, who believes that President Obama will go down in history as one of our worst presidents. Between his positions and his opinion of the President, it’s hard to explain why Terry thinks he’s a Democrat.

Richardson and Supreme are men, so this is a skirt-free primary. My view is that serious female candidates aren’t going to waste time, money or political clout on a nowhere candidacy.

The Republican field is even more staggering. There are thirty candidates. Also, listed alphabetically, sort of. The list starts with “S”, then “V” and “W” before hitting Michele Bachmann and continuing alphabetically from there down to Rick Santorum. Yes, Bachmann is still on that ballot, as is Herman Cain. That means there are 22 other candidates, only three of whom are nationally recognized – Gary Johnson, Fred Karger and Buddy Roemer.

The nineteen unknowns are Joe Story of Jacksonville, Florida; Linden Swift of Plainfield, Indiana; James A. Verstermark of Taylor Mountain, Kentucky; Vern Wuensche of Houston, Texas; Bear Betzler of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Timothy Brewer of Dayton, Ohio; Mark Callahan of Eugene, Oregon; Hugh Cort of Birmingham, Alabama; Randy Crow of Kelly, North Carolina; L. John Davis, Jr. of Grand Junction, Colorado; Keith Drummond of Katy, Texas; Stewart J. Greenleaf of Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania; Christopher V. Hill of Prospect, Kentucky; Jeff Lawman of Derry, New Hampshire; Benjamin Linn of Milford, New Hampshire; Andy Martin of Chicago, Illinois, Michael J. Meehan of St. Louis, Missouri; Joe Robinson of Newton, Massachusetts; and Kevin Rubash of Wilmette, Illinois.

The most memorable of the pack is Dr. Cort. He believes that Iran will launch a nuclear attack on America in the new future and warns of an Iran-Venezuela-Mexico pipeline” that the Iranians will use to smuggle a few nukes into the country. Dr. Cort also believes that Iran is hoping to bring about the revelation of a messiah by nuking us. That part is really amusing, since in Islam, Christ is the Messiah and they believe that He will return, preceded by the arrival of the al-Mahdi, a variation on the Christian belief in the Second Coming. The rest of the group reflects the divisions within the Republican party. They range from Tea Partiers to fiscal conservatives who are social moderates.

Several of the other primaries will have equally full ballots. None of the marginal candidates, with the possible exception of Buddy Roemer, believes they have a real chance. They want to have their voices heard and their input in the party platform. There is always that remote possibility. Some states allocate their delegates to the convention, and if enough of these marginal candidates can have delegates assigned to them, they might have leverage at the party level, as in “include my issue in the platform and I’ll give you my delegates.”

Given the size of the field, Mitt Romney’s 38% poll number makes more sense. John Huntsman, who totally bypassed Iowa and concentrated on New Hampshire, is polling in the number two slot.

Related articles

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Randall Terry Gets Glitter-Bombed By Performance Artist (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Man With Boot On His Head Glitterbombs Anti-Gay Racist Randall Terry (queerty.com)
• Vermin Supreme: When I’m President everyone will get a free pony (dangerousminds.net)
• Republican Candidates Become New Hampshire Tourist Traps (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Most Boring New Hampshire Primary Ever (politicalwire.com)

Jacob "Jack" Lew

The White House is set to announce that William Daley, son of one Chicago mayor and brother of another, will be resigning as the White House Chief of Staff effective January 31. He will be replaced by budget chief Jack Lew.

Daley’s appointment raised a lot of controversy when he replaced Rahm Emanuel last year. Emanuel left to run for mayor of Chicago, to replace the retiring Richard Daley. Bill Daley’s close ties to Wall Street were seen as a negative for the Obama administration among progressives who want heads to roll for the economic meltdown caused by Wall Street financial games.

The White House Chief of Staff is the President’s most senior advisor. He hires and supervises key White House staff, controls the WH staff system, manages access to the Oval Office and the information coming out of it, protects the President’s interests and negotiates with Congress and others. A disengaged President, like Ronald Reagan in his second term, can make the Chief of Staff a de facto shadow president.

Jacob “Jack” Lew was President Clinton’s budget director from May, 1998, to the end of the administration. He returned to Washington following the inauguration of President Obama to work as the 1^st Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, moving to the White House on November 10, 2010. The 56-year old is a native New Yorker and graduate of Harvard and Georgetown Universities. Though Lew’s career has been almost entirely in law, politics and academia, he does have one thing on his resume that will probably give the progressives the vapors. In June, 2006, Lew was named the chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit, that portion of Citigroup that deals in private equity funds, hedge funds, structured products, managed futures and real estate – in other words all the really rotten stuff at the heart of the economic collapse.

Lew is also prominent on the anti-Semetic right wing “Jews in Obama’s Inner Circle” list. Makes no sense whatsoever. The right wing extremists aver that President Obama is a secret Muslim out of one side of their mouths while condemning him for his Jewish staff members. It is one of those things that makes liberals want to hold up a mirror to the right wing and ask “Does this even make sense to YOU?”

Related articles

• Bill Daley Barely Lasts One Year Under Obama (zerohedge.com)
• Obama White House Details Revealed In New Book (huffingtonpost.com)

Rep. Ron Paul

There are those who will say that the rules that the Pentagon has laid down are stupid or ridiculous. One has to wonder whether or not that was what they thought back in the early 2000′s when Lt. General Jerry Boykin was busy making anti-Muslim speeches while in uniform and potentially inciting worse violence against American soldiers. In the wake of that controversy, rules about political speeches made in uniform were tightened, and those rules are now hitting Jesse Thorsen.

Thorsen is an Army corporal, and has appeared with Ron Paul repeatedly, and in uniform. This could get him into serious trouble, as it should be pointed out that the same rules have caught many an LGBT service member including Colonel Victor Fehrenbach. He was denied the clearance to go to a political function with President Barack Obama in uniform.

Thorsen is a big supporter of Ron Paul’s foreign policy, which calls for all American presences across the globe to be pulled down and all American soldiers no matter where they are stationed to be brought home.

It should be noted that Thorsen’s trouble is not that he is joining Paul on stage or being at his rallies, but rather that he is doing so while in uniform.

The Atlantic found this out about Thorsen:

He’s six feet tall, a Scorpio, has a tattoo of the Twin Towers on his neck, works as a bricklayer when he’s not in the Army, and he’s been arrested in Tampa for burglary. That information comes from Mugshots.com and Florida.arrests.org, which published Thorsen’s record. GQ’s Rob Fischer actually broke the story of Thorsen’s burglary charge earlier Wednesday and got a quote from Thorsen’s Lawyer, who said it was not serious. “Generally if someone’s not going to prison for burglary of a dwelling there’s real extenuating circumstances, like it’s probably just a trespass or whatever.”

Thorsen has billed himself as a 10-year veteran of the Army, but that is not accurate. Thorsen has served for ten non-consecutive years. He reenlisted in 2007 after a judge offered to end his probation for the burglary conviction early. He has served only a total of six years in the military, and four of those since reenlisting.

According to the Atlantic, the CNN interview with Thorsen was cut short by a technical glitch, which does happen, but Paul’s supporters are still furious about it, and took to his fora to scream that. They also note that “the Department of Defense orders its members to ‘avoid inferences that their political activities imply or appear to imply official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement.’”

The Atlantic finally notes that:

On a Ron Paul Forums message board Wednesday, commenters were already taking the Pentagon firmly to task for its policy against political speech while in uniform. “SUPPORT THE TROOPS! But don’t let them talk about something that matters,” wrote one. “Something tells me Jesse is going to get a lot of flack for speaking there. The military tells everyone in their ranks, not to talk to the media. They told us that back in the 60s,” wrote another.

Additionally, the dollar rose to a near 16-month high against the euro, a very good indicator of our economy’s strength in the global picture. Though the stock market is relatively stagnant, the price of our Treasury bonds is high, because the United States bonds are considered a very, very good investment worldwide.

Employment remains 6.1 million below the start of the recession. There are 4.3 people for every job opening. We still have 23.7 million either unemployed or underemployed in this country.

The job gains are good news for President Obama and the Democrats, though, to hear the Republican candidates, the drop in the unemployment numbers didn’t happen. They will continue to insist that the President’s policies kill jobs.

Now, it is up to the Democrats to show that, if it hadn’t been for the Republicans obstructionism, we could have created even more jobs than we have been able to.

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• 200,000 new jobs boost for US economy – and President Obama (mirror.co.uk)
• ‘Job Killer’: President Obama Guilty, or Innocent? (abcnews.go.com)
• U.S. unemployment rate drops to 8.5% (thehindu.com)
• Unemployment rate falls to 8.5 pct., hiring surges (newsok.com)
• Unemployment Rate Lowest in Nearly 3 Years (blippitt.com)

Government employment since 1946. Orange federal, green state, pink local, blue total.

President Obama has included a half-a-percent pay raise for Federal employees in next year’s budget. You read the right, a half-a-percent, 0.5%, one penny for each $2.00 of salary, a dollar for each $200.00. The Republicans will probably block it, because according to them, Federal employees are overpaid and over-benefitted. Both are bald-faced lies.

Those who watch Fox News and listen to right wing radio will tell you that Feds get free health care, are grossly overpaid and retire at 75% of their last salaries. The facts are very different. In the late 1970s, Federal rank-and-file employees made 60% of what private sector employees made in the same jobs. That is, where there were comparable jobs. There is no such thing as a private sector forest ranger or probation officer. They can only be compared to state employees. Federal pay is up to around 80% of private sector these days, except in highly professional fields. The doctors and scientists who work at the CDC, for example, earn better than a doctor in private practice. It is these professionals who are cited by the Republicans, not the file clerks and court security officers and forest rangers. All Federal employees have, once again, been subjected to pay freezes to “balance the budget.” Congress and the White House have been trying to balance the budget on the backs of Federal employees since Reagan.

That “free health care” that Feds are supposed to get? Not hardly. The only person who gets free health care is the President. The rest pay for it, and some pay through the nose. The Feds enjoy an insurance exchange, with multiple plans to choose from and a couple of national fee-for-service plans. The employees pay more than half the premiums and co-pays and deductibles that can be killers. One of those national plans has four separate deductibles – prescriptions, doctors appointments, hospitalization and testing. When we left them in 2005, it came to a total of $1,600 in deductibles for the two of us. A full-range fee-for-service plan for a family can run almost $500 a month with a 20% co-pay and $600 in deductibles. It is not Cadillac health benefits. General Electric has Cadillac benefits, not the Feds.

When Reagan was president, someone told him that Federal employees didn’t pay into Social Security. To “save” Social Security, Reagan ordered the Feds into the system. What no one told Reagan was that Feds didn’t get Social Security either. They were not part of the problem. The Federal retirement system was entirely self-contained and self-sustaining. Now, Feds pay into Social Security and make contributions to a much smaller pension system, just as they would in private industry. They also have a 401k plan of sorts called the TSP. The government makes contributions to this plan, and will match any employee’s contributions. The money is invested in stocks, hence helping the stock market.

And no, no Congressperson gets full pension after one term at the age of 40. That’s such complete bullshit. The rules are pretty complex about when and how anyone in the system gets their pensions. The important thing is, it’s not free money for life.

Just as in Social Security, a Federal pensioner loses $1 for each $2 they earn above the earnings limit. If they are also collecting Social Security, they lose $2 for ever $2 above the limit – one from Social Security and one from the pension. And, if they have retired before turning 62, they can collect their pension, but it gets cut drastically on their 62^nd birthday, a full sixty days before they can collect reduced Social Security benefits. Feds don’t have the option of waiting until 66 to collect Social Security. They are forced into it at 62.

A penny raise for every $2 earned is hardly a huge amount of money for an individual. But the Republicans will drag out every one of their lies about how overpaid the Federal rank-and-file are and allow the lies about pensions and benefits stay out there among their base, and they will get election points for denying Federal employees a few pennies raise. The Feds have a few unions, the principle ones are the Civil Service and the Federal Judiciary. They have limited collective bargaining powers, mostly limited to providing a union rep in the event of dismissal. They have no power to negotiate salary and no legal right to strike, as Ronald Reagan so dramatically proved. The Federal employees unions are a waste of the word “union.”

My husband was fairly typical of a Federal employee. In thirty years, he never topped the national median wage. Every time he got a raise, he’d lose it to increases in taxes or contributions to health premiums. If he actually managed a bigger take-home check after a raise, it was a miracle. When he became a Fed, during the Carter administration, there was only one reason to choose Federal employment over private sector – the benefits. Four Presidents and their Congresses have stripped that incentive for working for the Federal government. The budget cuts that have reduced the Federal workforce as also a disincentive to work for the Fed – too much work and too few people to do it. The population has expanded, but the number of people who have to serve it has shrunk.

Of course, the Republicans in Congress would never dream of dragging themselves back to their Carter-era pay levels or make serious dents in their expense accounts or reduce their in-Washington and at-home office staffs to a significant degree. That would impede their ability to do their jobs, which next year are scheduled to be performed on a whole 109 days out of a potential 260. Since our children are in school for 180, maybe the legislators should get paid what public school teachers get?

Related articles

• White House proposes pay increase for federal workers (hotair.com)
• Federal Salary Cuts To Pay For Payroll Tax Extension? (lezgetreal.com)
• Santorum criticizes Ronald Reagan on Social Security (hotair.com)
• 5 little-known facts about Social Security … Bankrate.com (ynative77.wordpress.com)
• White House seeks to end government pay freeze (alternet.org)

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

The National Organization for Marriage has shot themselves in the foot again. . .this time, they have posted a video that supposedly makes DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz look intolerant and hateful…well, that is what they wanted to do. What they really got was a video of a well spoken ally who makes her points in a clear manner without so much as batting an eyelash.

NOM is trying desperately to show that they are being bullied and that they are the victims hen it comes to the supposedly intolerant Left. Fortunately, their attempts tend to fall flat.

H/T Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters

Jon Stewart, 2008

Wait! What do you mean other Presidents have made recess appointments in the past? The Daily Show has always been at its finest when hitting the political issues hard, and last night was no exception. They went into the fact that President Barack Obama made a recess appointment, and why he was forced to do so because of the Republican Party.

Detroit's Renaissance Center

To the fiscally hysterical, it was bad enough that some phantom president pushed a bailout for the banks and President Obama was left to administer it. When Obama dared to want to loan money to the auto industry while they worked themselves out of bankruptcy, taking huge amounts of company stock as collateral, well, that was MARXISM! The government was taking over private industry! Loan, secured with collateral, repayment schedule, repayment made – yup, that’s definitely communism, isn’t it?

Chrysler and General Motors took the loan deal. Ford didn’t. But all three are finally out of the doldrums and recording profits in the 2011. That will be their first across-the-board profitable year since 2004, three years into Dubya’s supply-side economics policies.

GM will probably post a 26% increase in profits to about $6.1 billion. Ford’s profits will come to amoung $7 billion, up from $6.6 billion in 2010, which was the best year they had since 1999. Chrysler posted a loss in 2010, but is on track to be profitable in 2011. Oh, and both Chrysler and GM have repaid most of their loans.

Now, if our President is a real gentleman, he won’t say “I told you so,” to the Republicans. If he’s a gentleman. But if he’s a political animal determined to win re-election, he’ll put the music from the “imported from Detroit” commercials in the hold-music cycle for the White House phones and use it for his campaign theme music.

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Recess appointments - Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama

The last Congress passed the financial reform law, and a major part of it is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Elizabeth Warren was everyone’s first choice for the directorship, but the Republicans in the Senate made it clear that wouldn’t happen. So, now, Warren is giving Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown an uncomfortable time in his re-election campaign. He deserves it. Brown’s vote for the law cost us some key components.

President Obama’s second choice is Richard Cordray, former Ohio Attorney General. The Senate ended up tabling his appointment because the Republicans filibustered it, along with just about every appointment the President has made for the Federal judiciary and department managements. Calling them “The Party of No” is just too little at this point. Better to call the Republicans in the Senate “The Party of Destroy the Government.”

The Constitution calls for the Senate to “advise and consent” on certain presidential appointments. It also provides for the president to be able to make appointments while the Congress is in recess for ten days or more. That happens at least twice a year, at Christmas and in August. For the past three years, to prevent any presidential recess appointments, the Republicans “convened” for a few minutes three days a week, a “pro forma” process that means the Senate is not really recessed.

Today, President Obama told them to stuff it up their “forma.” He appointed Cordray. There is nothing in the Constitution that allows either party to do this “pro forma” convening of the Congress when the leadership is in recess, particularly when the chamber involved – the Senate – has been formally recessed by its leadership. For two years, the Republicans blocked recess appointments with their little attendance trick even though they were not in control of either chamber.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell characteristically went ballistic over this appointment. He called it power grab that “fundamentally endangers the Congress’ role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch.” Hallelujah! The President is fighting back at the excesses fo the legislative branch. Talking Points Memo wrote that the Republicans were engaging in an “extra-legal attempt to nullify a key portion of an act of law,” in trying to stop Cordray’s appointment.

Well, duh, that’s the whole point. They want to prevent the financial reform act being implemented before they can take back the Senate and White House and repeal it.

The last time we had a President whose appointments met with this much resistance was Bill Clinton. His judicial appointments were held up primarily by Senator Jesse Helms. When the Democrats took over the Senate, Vermont’s Pat Leahy, new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had such a backlog of unfilled benches it took months to rubber stamp them and send them up for a vote. Justice was being denied for political theater.

According to the Congressional Research Service, Ronald Reagan made 240 recess appointments in 8 years (30 per year), George H. W. Bush made 77 in 4 years (19.25 per), Bill Clinton made 140 in 8 years (17.5 per) and George W. Bush made 171 in 8 years (21 per). In the last three years, President Obama has made 28 recess appointments. That’s an average of 9.3 per year.

One of Dubya’s recess appointments was John Bolton as our Ambassador to the United Nations. Remember him – bushy white mustache, thought the U.N. should be terminated?

So, Senator McConnell, would you like to explain how this is “excesses of the executive branch” when Reagan did it three times as often and Dubya more than twice as often? The simple fact is Democrats use this less often than Republicans, so which party is more prone to “excesses”?

Related articles

• Republicans furious over Obama recess appointments (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
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• David Arkush: President Obama Appoints Cordray to Head CFPB Over Republican Obstruction (huffingtonpost.com)
• Noted fan of using pro forma Senate sessions to block recess appointments suddenly not such a fan (hotair.com)
• What is a recess? Constitution doesn’t specify – Boston.com (boston.com)

Rep. Michele Bachmann (photo by Gage Skidmore)

Michele Bachmann is out, Rick Perry is reconsidering, Rick Santorum is riding high, Mitt Romney can barely win, and Ron Paul is still going strong. That is right, the 2012 GOP Primary Season has begun to weed out the worst performers. Bachmann was quite late trying to end her campaign.

The campaigns now shift focus to New Hampshire where the second round of weeding out will occur.

Bachmann used the usual spiel who decided to try and wrap herself up in patriotism, hatred for President Barack Obama, and a sense of desire to push tyranny. She, herself, seems to lack any understanding about what the words of Benjamin Franklin actually said about freedom and democracy as she pushes every single idiocy about “Obamacare”, and continued the idiotic theory that there is tax-payer abortion within that.

Bachmann also pointed out that she wants theocracy without noting the irony of what that means when it comes to the Constitution.

Simply put, Bachmann quit while showing that she had no clue about anything that she had ever stood for. Oh, and she kept stumbling. Bachmann showed a complete and total lack of understanding regarding the way the world works, the way things will go.

She finally called upon everyone to stand behind the person whom the Republicans eventually choose as the nominee. She also wrapped herself up in her religious beliefs while ending her campaign, and never noted that she has pushed theocracy all the time in order to try and make it so that this nation does not have equality or freedom.

The Pentagon

The Joint Chiefs of Staff can now welcome to their ranks a new member. Air Force General Craig R. McKinley became a member of the Joint Chiefs on 31 December after President Barack Obama signed the controversial 2012 National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA. General McKinley represents that National Guard Bureau on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

McKinley stated that “We are grateful for the efforts the executive and legislative bodies have gone to in placing the chief of the National Guard Bureau on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We look forward to working alongside the other Joint Chiefs to provide our nation’s senior leaders with a fuller picture of the nonfederalized National Guard as it serves in support of homeland defense and civil support missions.”

The 2012 NDAA provides some $670 billion in Defense Department spending and Energy Department nuclear spending. The bill also includes a controversial and unconstitutional provision regarding the indefinite detention of American citizens.

JCS reports that “Other provisions that affect the National Guard include re-establishing the position of vice chief of the National Guard Bureau at the three-star level while rescinding the two-star position of director of the bureau’s joint staff.”

Jan. 20, 2009, the last good day of the Obama administration

Still obsessing over the NDAA? Have you started blaming President Obama for the bank bailouts that Bush passed? Are you calling him a failure because Gitmo is still open and we still have troops in Afghanistan? Do you think he doesn’t respect the Constitution? Congratulations. You have morphed from a liberal to a Limbaugh ditto-head. Just a little further down the road and you will be accusing him of getting illegal immigrants to vote, of using the New Black Panthers to intimidate voters in Philadelphia, skimming millions out of the Treasury, and orchestrating an elaborate fraud over his birthplace from inside his mother’s womb.

The indefinite detention provisions were inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act for one reason, and it had nothing to do with national security. If the President vetoed the bill, he could be accused of undermining our military (or hating the military, as some rightwingnuts would put it). If he signed it, the liberals and progressives would go nuts over the denial of Constitutional rights. It was pure Karl Rove – provide the rope, eliminate all avenues of escape, and watch the liberals hang themselves.

And you did. Instead of seeing this for what it was – a political campaign attack – you went ballistic over infringement of rights.

This isn’t the first one. Ever since Barack Obama was inaugurated, the Republicans have created box canyons for him. If he compromises to get part of his agenda passed, the liberals attack him for not getting all of it. If he refuses to compromise, the Republicans can accuse him of hurting Americans. And the whole left side of this country has decided to get terminally stupid and play stooge to the Republican plan for one-party rule. You are not listening to the how of how things are being done, only the results. You have become as deaf to the word “filibuster” and as ignorant of its power as the Republicans who view it as their savior from creeping socialism. The late Michael Crighton once observed that the Japanese fix the problem, the Americans fix the blame. You want to blame someone for the past three years? Blame Harry Reid. Twice, he had the power to end the filibuster rule and restore the Constitutional powers of the Senate majority. Twice, he wussed out – holding on to that power in the event the Democrats would ever be the minority again.

This is how elected dictatorships happen — with the full, blind co-operation of the opposition. This is how opposition parties are de-clawed and castrated – with their own knives. This is how, when the corrupt gain complete control of a government, they outlaw opposition parties.

The NDAA debate has been going on for weeks. The President signed the bill into law just three days ago, with a four page signing statement. So far, Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic and CBS News is the only analyst out there who sees this for what it is. So far, Cohen is the only one saying “this is what the President wrote, this is what it means and this is what it undercut.” In his view, this is a battle over the limits and extents of legislative and executive powers. In my view, it’s a campaign maneuver to undercut the President’s support in the next election.

When I and my children were in school, somewhere during the junior high/middle school years, we took a semester of world geography and a semester of civics. I don’t know when that stopped being taught, but the number of people in this country who are clueless about what is and isn’t in the Constitution is frightening. The Constitution laid it out fairly clearly – the legislative branch writes the laws, the executive branch enforces and implements them, the judicial branch interprets them and determines the guilt of those who break them. Three branches, three areas of authority and responsibility. The President cannot write laws or terminate them. Only Congress can legally do that.

The Constitution says nothing about signing statements that void rightfully passed laws, or about executive orders to bypass Congress, or about filibusters blocking debate and votes. All these things have been created in the last 222 years to bypass the provisions of the Constitution.

You have been so blinded by the propaganda that you could not step back, take a deep breath and believe that a Constitutional Law professor would not agree to gut the Constitution for any reason. You have become so accustomed to the idea of a President who flaunts the law, issues executive orders to bypass the Constitution and signing statements to void laws that you could not believe a President would do the right and proper thing within the limits of our Constitution.

President Obama finally decided to use the power of the signing statement, a power he is not granted by the Constitution, to delay the implementation of an un-Constitutional provision in a law. He broke a promise to us in order to do that. He promised not to be the next Constitutional dictator, an extension of the Bush-Cheney administration, in the only area that he could fulfill that promise.

So, the Republicans are calling this one a win. They forced the President to break a campaign promise and they got all of you to turn against him. Congratulations. You are now Limbaugh ditto-heads.

If you really want to blame President Obama for something, he has made one enormous mistake that he should be called out on. He refused to prosecute the members of the Bush-Cheney administration for their illegal and unconstitutional abuses of power. Barack Obama chose not to put this nation through that trauma. Bad choice. For the preservation of our Constitution and the soul of our nation, he should have.

Related articles

• Progressives Could “Tea Party” The Democrats (lezgetreal.com)
• What The NDAA Is And Isn’t (lezgetreal.com)
• What The NDAA Is And Isn’t – Part 2 (lezgetreal.com)
• The NDAA’s historic assault on American liberty | Jonathan Turley (guardian.co.uk)
• Happy New Year: Obama Signs NDAA, Indefinite Detention Now Law of the Land (worldtruthtoday.wordpress.com)
• Bachmann Blames Occupy Iowa Protesters On President Obama (lezgetreal.com)
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• Obama’s NDAA Signing Statement is Just Smoke & Mirrors (mountainrepublic.net)

Rep. Ron Paul by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons, Flickr (original photo by Gage Skidmore)

“Ron Paul is disgusting.”  Those are the words of Rick Santorum, and if anyone has noted just how fanatical the supporters of Ron Paul can be, it would be this blog.  Santorum may be about to get a lesson on that one.  Santorum said those words according to a FOX News producer, and they were made after an interview Tuesday morning.  Santorum blames the Texas Representative and former OBG/YN for a series of robo-calls which have insinuated that Santorum is both pro-choice and against the Second Amendment.

Santorum, Paul and Mitt Romney are tied in the polls in Iowa, even though those are all kind of iffy.

Ron Paul is not exactly the most mainstream Republican candidate as he tends to be more Libertarian than Conservative.  Last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that he could never vote for Paul because “the choice of Ron Paul or Barack Obama would be a very bad choice for America. I think it’s very difficult to see how you would engage in dealing with Ron Paul as a nominee.”

Ron Paul’s ideas are considered to be more than a little ‘out there’ by a majority of Americans, but he has had a loyal following for some time.

Via The Hill

The Infamous 'Pink Bits' Map

Showing that his grasp of history incredibly weak, GOP Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum blamed the fall of the British Empire on their development of a social safety network, and tried to make it seem like this would be the fate of the American Empire should this network continue to be developed under President Barack Obama.

Santorum stated in Sioux City, Iowa that “If you look at every European country that has had world domination, a world presence, from the French to the British — 100 years ago, the sun didn’t set on the British Empire. “If you look at that empire today — why? Because they lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their mission, who they were and what values they wanted to spread around the world. Not just for the betterment of the world, but safety and security and the benefit of their country. We have taken up that cause. We have a president who doesn’t believe in America.”

Santorum also tried to follow through with the conspiracy theory that the United States was being handed over to the United Nations. In Boone, Iowa, he stated “This is a decision about what kind of America you are going to hand to your children and grandchildren. Are you going to leave an America that is more and more dependent on bigger and bigger governments that do the things that families and churches and local communities should do?”

By 1912, the British Empire was well underway to its decline in power. By 1922, the British Empire had already lost the first of its major foreign holdings, at least in over 100 years, with the breaking away of what is now the Republic of Ireland. That process began in 1916. The rise of the Irish Republican Army, the successor to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was a large part of the reason why the British Empire began to decline.

In 1946, the British Parliament passed the law that created the National Health Service. This was two years before India broke free from the British Empire. The actions of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had more to do with the further crumbling of the British Empire. Over the next two decades, Britain, weakened from two devastating world wars, lost grasp on power over its colonies with the last of the colonial possessions being handed over to China in 1997. That being Hong Kong. By that point, the British Empire was long gone.

The reason why the British Empire fell had to do more with the realities of how badly World Wars I & II destroyed the center of the Empire, and how much information had spread regarding the needs and beliefs in freedom and liberty.

In other words, Rick Santorum knows nothing about British History.

Via Huffington Post

Tim Carpenter, Progressive Democrats of America

President William Jefferson Clinton fulfilled 73% of his campaign promises in the first two years of his eight-year term. He had a Democratic Congress and Senate. Then, Newt Gingrich and his “Contract On America” won the House. It was downhill all the way for Clinton after that. (Just for the record, not one of the things in the “Contract On America” ever made it into law.)

The last president we had before Clinton who got that much out of Congress was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson had been in the House for so long and knew so many secrets about members and others (including J. Edgar’s secret wardrobe) that he could literally blackmail his way into the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and every other great achievement of his term. He also shamelessly took advantage of our national trauma in the first months after the Kennedy assassination to get a lot of stuff done.

When Barack Obama took office he had a Democratic majority in the House. But in the Senate, there were not enough Democrats to end a filibuster and during the last year of the Bush administration, when the Democrats had the majority in the House, the Republicans in the Senate had discovered the power of the filibuster.  All any of them had to say was “I object” and a bill was sent to legislative limbo, never to be seen again. 

During his campaign, Obama made a lot of promises. He promised to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He promised to close Gitmo. He promised real health care reform and a single-payer plan. He promised new regulations for the financial industry. He promised jobs and economic growth. He promised help for those facing foreclosure. He promised us almost every progressive wet dream we have ever had. And he delivered none of them.

Now, progressives are threatening to punish him for his failures. In Iowa, the group Progressive Democrats of America is organizing people to vote “uncommitted” in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Tim Carpenter, founder of the group, said “I believe we need an inside outside strategy. We’re not asking everybody in this room to vote for Barack Obama. We’re not voting for Barack Obama. We’re organizing uncommitted slates to go the caucuses on Tuesday to challenge Barack Obama because he gave up on his promise to single payer. He took too long to get troops out of Iraq. There’s still troops in Afghanistan. And we need a financial transaction tax.”

There are days when I really despair of ever finding an educated voter in this nation. This is one of them.

There is no single payer plan or public option because if the Democrats had not given that one up there would be no health care law at all. There are no new regulations on the financial industry because if the Democrats hadn’t given up some provisions there would be no law at all and the Republicans are refusing to finance what was passed. What will it take to get it through progressives’ heads that this is not a dictatorship? The President should not enact laws without Congress. This President is not George W. Bush. He will not, absolutely will not, issue executive orders that violate the division of authority in our Constitution. He absolutely will not exceed his Constitutional powers. That’s one of the reasons we elected him in the first place. To put an end to the de facto dictatorship of the Republican party.

The Progressives can get all stupid and pull a Tea Party revolt on the President or they can learn the meaning of the word FILIBUSTER. It means that the Republicans in the Senate killed almost 300 bills and appointments. We have half a dozen unfilled ambassadorships, a crisis in the Federal judiciary because of unfilled judgeships, openings in the middle management of almost every cabinet department because they will not allow hearings for the approval of appointments. The Republicans blocked important bills and dumb little “pickle week” bills. The Republican filibuster is singularly responsible for the past three years producing the least amount of legislation in our nation’s history.

This is not Obama’s fault. And if the Progressives really want to get all the things that Candidate Obama promised us four years ago, they will do the things that will get results, not screw up the process by dividing the vote.

We need to regain the majority in the House. That means keeping every Democratic seat and taking an additional 25. Thirty would be better. Fifty to sixty would be ideal. We need a strong majority in the House. There are currently 193 Democrats, and 218 is the majority threshold. The Republicans have 242. We would be best served with 250.

We need to control the Senate. No more Conservative Democrats fouling up the works by voting with the Republicans. We technically have 51 Democrats, 2 Independents and 47 Republicans in the Senate. The Democrats can count on one Independent (hell would go sub-zero before Bernie Sanders voted with the Reps.) We need 60 strong Democrats in the Senate to end the tyranny of the filibuster. Ben Nelson is already leaving, so there’s one DINO out the door. If we can’t get rid of the rest of them, we have to compensate. There are only 33 Senate seats up for election next year. We need to take as many as possible.

We need strong candidates for the House and Senate and we need a unified Democratic Party prepared to get down and dirty in this campaign. We need to shout the facts from the rooftops and put down the lies whenever they occur. We have the momentum of the Occupy movement and the frustrations of the 99% if we just tap into it instead of getting divided over something that the President had no control over.

Remember how Kennedy told us to “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”? Well, this is that moment…that time when you really can do something for your country, yourselves, your children and grandchildren. You can come together as a force for change, for the change we hoped for four years ago. You can fight for the power to put this country on the right path to recovery and growth. It will not happen if the Progressive wing of the Democrats divide the base and pull votes away from the candidate we need.

The Progressives need to get over themselves, stop pouting in a corner over what could not be done in the first four years and give the Democrats the power to save our country.

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• The Schoen/Caddell Calls For Hillary 2012 Are Getting Progressively Dumber (huffingtonpost.com)
• Why Obama’s Second Term Will Be the Best (538refugees.wordpress.com)
• Republicans Block Obama Appellate Court Nominee (abcnews.go.com)
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Rep. Ron Paul

Now, imagine if the fear mongering went away? This two and a half minute commercial by Representative Ron Paul is something of a problem since, well, President Barack Obama has already pulled the troops out of Iraq. What Paul is trying to do here is make it sound as if Obama agreed to pull all troops out of everywhere and not just out of Iraq. He fails to note that the last troops pulled out of Iraq last month, in fact.

It is also problematic that Rep Paul seems to think that the American presence in bases across the world are opposed by all local residents. There has been stiff opposition to the closure of many bases due to the economic damage that would ensue.

About the only thing that this ad gets right is the fact that closing many of these bases would certainly help the budget, but then, so would not buying badly designed equipment.