Black Liberation Theology and Republican Hypocrisy

The right wing political tacticians are testing the waters to see if the strategy and tactics of the 2008 election they lost can be retooled.  There were lines drawn, ethical boundaries which to his credit John McCain would not cross.  Not so much his fake family values Vice Presidential candidate, popsie half-term governor Sarah Palin, the queen of twit and quit.
Let examine what the two main areas are that the right is trying on for size, calling Obama a Muslim, and black liberation theology.  But if he was Muslim, that's fine; we have no religious test for office.

We have liberation theology, and we have faux pundits like Sean Hannity trying to link the president to Islam through religious figures like Louis Farrakhan.  Herman Cain, the right wing's token negro and full time Uncle Tom has come out and condemned Obama as well for his affiliation with Reverend Wright's church .........why does Cain get a pass for the same thing?
It is true that President Obama grew up exposed to a greater first hand knowledge of Islam, living in other parts of the world during a part of his childhood.  At no time did he join that religion, and if knowing about it, more so than any of the other candidates,which is likely to be incredibly helpful in his role as President, is wrong, are we to condemn everyone who has a familiarity with other religions? to be consistent, we then have to condemn everyone who has studied world religions or taken comparative religion classes.  Those are required at some religious affiliated institutions of higher learning, and they are elective classes used to fulfill humanities requirements in others.
What the tame conservative liar Cain DOESN'T happen to mention, which makes him a flaming hypocrite as well as an apparent serial sexual harasser and possible adulterer, is that he himself is prominently affiliated with and claims to have been strongly influenced by a black liberation theology church with ties to Islam, Malcolm X.  That would be the prominent Antioch Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia, under the leadership and preaching of Rev. C.M. Alexander.  According to this bio, Cain is an associate minister of the Antioch Baptist church (my emphasis added - DG):

Cain also serves as an associate minister at Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta, which he joined at the age of 10.^[37] The church is part of the National Baptist Convention^[38] and is politically liberal and theologically conservative; the church's senior pastor, Rev. Cameron M. Alexander, does not share Cain's political philosophy.^[39][40]

So apparently Herman Cain is all too familiar with being a long time, active member of a church that preaches black liberation theology, while disagreeing with the senior pastor.  Except in this case it was the senior pastor who repudiated the politics of Herman Cain, unlike Obama repudiating the views of Rev. Wright.

I don't recall ever seeing or hearing a single right wing pundit criticize Herman Cain or question him about his religious association with a church that has been prominent for black liberation theology.
Newsvine's Bonos Rama did an excellent article on Herman Cain and his religious views, which make Cain's puppet speech recently criticizing Obama all the more clearly hypocritical.  From the newsvine piece:
If it is true that a person can be held responsible for the words of their preacher and can be said to embrace their preacher's philosophies by sitting in a pew, why has no one on the right spoken out about Herman Cain's pastor, Reverend C.M. Alexander? Reverend Alexander is affiliated with the extremely liberal Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta, Georgia. The main page of Antioch's web page mentions how Alexander was drawn to liberation theology:

Like early African American preachers, Alexander is drawn to the power of those texts. Indeed, during slavery, black prophetic preachers saw the Bible as a tool for social justice. Rejecting the racist politics of the white church, which erroneously taught that God ordained slavery, early black preachers chose to worship a God of liberation.

The church's website also mentions that Alexander considers Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X to be one of his influences:

Influenced by civil rights luminaries like Malcolm X, Mary McCloud Bethune, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays and Rosa Parks, Alexander says he’s always been involved in civil rights in one way or the other.

http://www.antiochnorth.org/ourpastor.htm
Now, Malcolm X was an avowed racist who taught that white people were a race of devils, and also proclaimed the following:

"The common enemy is the white man."
and
"I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American.... No I'm not an American, I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.... I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of a victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare."

So why has Cain been sitting in this church for years, listening to his preacher, who espouses liberation theology and counts Malcolm X as his influence -- and IS HIMSELF A MINISTER IN THAT CHURCH? If the right is correct and sitting in a church makes you responsible for all of the philosophies espoused by its preacher, and if liberation theology is, as they claim, racist, then Cain should have to answer for sitting in a church that espouses the philosophies of Malcolm X and liberation theology. So why has the right given him a pass on this?
******************
President Obama seems to have conducted himself in a manner far more consistent with family values than Herman Cain has.  President Obama has done more to clarify how his views differ from those of Reverend Wright than Herman Cain has.  And as for being 'anti-American', as distinct from being legitimately critical of some aspects of America, including government, I would point out that Rev. Wright has a very distinguished CV in terms of performing his patriotic duty, one that is rather more distinguished than that of Herman Cain:

In 1961 Wright left college  and joined the United States Marine Corps and became part of the 2nd Marine Division attaining the rank of private first class. In 1963, after two years of service, Wright joined the United States Navy and entered the Corpsman School at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.^[11][12] Wright was then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Wright was assigned as part of the medical team charged with care of President Lyndon B. Johnson (see photo of Wright caring for Johnson after his 1966 surgery). Before leaving the position in 1967, the White House Physician, Vice Admiral Burkley, personally wrote Wright a letter of thanks on behalf of the United States President.^[13][14][15]

I think that service gives Wright the right to have a constructively critical opinion of some aspects of the United States.  Further black liberation theology is just one subset of a larger theology of Christian Social Justice that is not race specific.
Apparently the right is only concerned with anti-white racism; anti-black racism is perfectly acceptable in religious bigotry in their candidates.


I don't have a problem with Mitt R-money's religion; I have a problem with Mitt R-money being a liar, and espousing disaterous economic policies, I have a problem with him not standing up for what is right against Rush Limbaugh, and for his past apparent racism and bullying.  And he was cruel to his dog.. I believe R-money is, as Rick Parry called him, a vulture capitalist, or more correctly a vampire capitalist (sucks all the resources out of companies until they are dead). I think Herman Cain is simply a pig with incredibly poor ideas about economics who should learn to keep his hands to himself, along with his more private body parts, and who should be less of a flaming hypocrite. He will never be president of the United States; I doubt he could get elected local dog catcher, and that is unlikely to change. His time to be the token black person the GOP trots out to replace Michael Steele, is likely to be short lived until they can find some other black conservative to take his place.

To give you an example of what is so objectionable about Mitt R-money and Herman Cain, and what THEY think is ok, Big money man Ricketts, who is spreading around big amounts of cash all over Wisconsin on behalf of Scott Walker, and who put up millions for the campaign to smear Obama, including the criticism of his association with Reverend Wright, is seeking corporate welfare for the upgrades and repairs to the stadium where his baseball team plays THAT HE OWNS.  Because while he spends his own money to play politics in the millions of dollars, he wants the city to subsidize his business assets.  From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Ricketts family, the eighth ownership group  in the 136- year history of the Cubs, acquired a 95 percent controlling interest in the team, Wrigley Field and 25 percent of Comcast Sportsnet Chicago in 2009. Joe Ricketts' children -- Pete, Tom, Laura and Todd -- are on the board.   

The Cubs team, which claimed back-to-back World Series titles in 1907 and 1908 and hasn't won the championship since, is seeking support for a proposal to relax Wrigley's landmark status and boost its advertising and sponsorship revenue.

The possible changes range from more outfield signs to street closings every game day to make space for street fairs. The stadium is among the city's top tourist attractions.The team also wants to use about $200 million in projected growth from existing amusement taxes to construct a building near the stadium to house its offices, a restaurant, parking, hall of fame, pro-shop and ticket windows.

Because this is how Republican policies work - spend money to end government spending for others, while hijacking as much public money for personal profit and advantage as possible, without regard to the hardship taking money from the pockets of ordinary, 99%er citizens might cause.  The right are hypocrites, supporting hypocrite policies and hypocrite politicians.  It's a bonus for them when they can throw in a little racism, religious bigotry and general intolerance and divisiveness.  THIS is why I oppose the right.  This is why YOU should oppose the right too.

World Bank definition of corruption - use of public office for private gain.  Sounds like Ricketts to me; he appears to be paying for the election of public officials to contribute to his private gain.

GOP, Conservatives, on the wrong side of history - Shep Smith Nails It

Conservatives have been on the political right, but they have not been on the right side of history since some conservatives (by no means all of them) were the driving force behind abolition of slavery. They have been wrong on the overwhelming majority of other positions they have taken.  It is too clear a pattern to ignore, and it is something that our modern conservatives should consider in forming their positions.

The right is wrong, consistently wrong.

Because conservatives are trying to go backwards in history - to reverse civil rights, to reverse feminist gains of equality, to reverse the sexual revolution which gave us contraception and legal abortion allowing women to participate equally in living their lives with men, and now, trying to go backwards from the gains same sexually oriented human beings are making - they are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history. Conservatives have favored segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, Jim Crow laws, anti-evolution laws, comprehensive sexual education, revisionist history, bad science, bad economic policies, and bad social policies like removing minimum wage and child labor protection. They aren't doing well so far, and they haven't corrected their far right extremist course yet. How long do they have to continue finding themselves on the wrong side of history before they stop going backward? They don't live up to the values they claim, and in many cases violate them far worse than what they accuse others of doing, making them the party as well of rampant hypocrisy. Shep Smith nails it:

Fact or Fake? The Ann Romney Controversy Continues, and fact or fiction for Crate Gate?

I don't know if this woman really worked for the Davies family when Ann Romney, nee Davies, was growing up or not.

But I do know that Mitt Romney does NOT have any respect for the hard work of stay at home moms; or maybe His- Mittens-on-your-money ONLY respects wealthy women who stay at home with their servants doing all the real work,  busily sort-of-raising their families on the rare occasions the kids are at home from boarding school?  (Heavens! You wouldn't want Ann Romney to break a nail telling someone else to go take care of her five boys, now would you?  That is the kind of work poor people are for, according to Republicans - poor children cleaning toilets for rich children; poor adults chasing around rich children, and cleaning the houses of rich adults.)

The DIGNITY of raising children......how does that work when you look at actions, and any words not immediately expedient coming out of Mittens the LIAR? 
(How DUMB are Conservatives, anyway, to believe these candidates? Seriously, there are lying politicians......but did someone tell the Mitts-ster lying was a 2012 Olympic event?)
I don't believe Ann Romney, OR Mitt Romney is remotely in touch with the economic concerns, or any other kind of concerns for American women.  Or American men EITHER. Or American children.  Not even American DOGS.  There appears to be some serious challenge to the various - and they change like his positions - Mitt account of CrateGate, the dog on the roof incident.
The only people for whom "I don't care about poor people" Romney seems to have either respect, or an interest in their concerns are extremely rich people, and special interests.

For my friend and sometimes co-blogger Laci's amusement, as someone who spoils their dog more than anyone:

Nut or Mitt,
Kids or Dogs or Women,
The right abuses all of them

Saint-horror quit when he clearly couldn't win his home state.
I included this because it so clearly represented
the race backwards to the worst of the 19th century
by the 21st century GOP, as their vision of America

Latest Attempt to Tar baby Obama with Obamacare, Discredited

A former figure from the bad old 'Shrub' days has emerged to try to heap discredit on the reductions to the deficit in the Obama health care reform popularly called on the right 'Obamacare'.  (The term 'tar baby' of course refers to the Uncle Remus stories as a metaphor.)
Except that we've all seen how Republican math and especially the disasterous Republican economics work -- not very well.
It is so much Koch Brothers crap, and pretty inferior crap at that, not that the threshold is very high at the best of times.  I have to wonder if it might be that this is being trotted out now because the right is not so sure that the legislation will be axed by the SCOTUS after all. 
If that is true then they must need something new to feed to Faux News-ance, in part because the Murdoch media is totally on-board with any schlock, facts be damend, and does little research.  They're willing to engage in broad misrepresentation and little if any real journalism ever.
So, here is what FOX won't tell you, but we will.  Besides, they need something to take the heat off of them as new Murdoch scandals hit the news cycle.
From the New York Times:
The Bogus Obamacare-Deficit Study

By Jonathan Chait

The Washington Post has an apparent blockbuster story today. It reports that a new study finds that Obamacare will increase the budget deficit, not decrease it, as the Congressional Budget Office has found:

President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

That sounds pretty legit, right?
Actually, no. It’s not even remotely legit.

The first thing to understand here is that this is not a study by a government agency. It’s a paper by Charles Blahous. Who is Charles Blahous? He’s a Republican policy guy. By tradition, the president appoints a member of each party to serve as a trustee of Medicare and Social Security. Blahous, who served under George W. Bush and was active in his attempt to introduce private accounts into Social Security, is the Republican trustee. But the other trustee, Robert Reischauer, has zero to do with his paper. It was published by the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded organization that produces some quality work as well as a fair amount of schlock that does not meet the standards of your typical university economics paper. This paper is an example of the latter.

The Affordable Care Act spends a bunch of money to cover people who are too poor or sick to afford their own health care. To pay for that, it raises some taxes and cuts a bunch of spending from Medicare. The new revenue and the spending cuts outweigh the cost of the new spending, which is why the Congressional Budget Office projected it to reduce the deficit. Projections always have a margin for error attached, but the CBO’s two year update actually bumped up the savings projections a bit.

You may wonder what methods Blahous used to obtain a more accurate measure of the bill’s cost. The answer is that he relies on a simple conceptual trick. Medicare Part A has a trust fund. By law, the trust fund can’t spend more than it takes in. So Blahous assumes that, when the trust fund reaches its expiration, it would automatically cut benefits.

The assumption is important because it forms the baseline against which he measures Obama’s health-care law. He’s assuming that Medicare’s deficits will automatically go away. Therefore, the roughly $500 billion in Medicare savings that Obama used to help cover the uninsured is money that Blahous assumes the government wouldn’t have spent anyway. Without the health-care law, in other words, we would have had Medicare cuts but no new spending on the uninsured. Now we have the Medicare cuts and new spending on the uninsured. Therefore, the new spending in the law counts toward increasing the deficit, but the spending cuts don’t count toward reducing it.

That is a completely bizarre assumption. It’s not an assumption that any scoring agency ever applies in other situations. We assume that, in the absence of action, Congress will keep paying Medicare benefits. That’s why we have all these projections of future deficits. If Blahous’s assumptions are right, then we don’t really have an entitlement problem at all. Medicare can’t exceed its trust fund, so problem solved! You know how Paul Ryan has been stalking the halls of Congress with disaster-movie music in the backdrop, warning that we’re about to become Greece? He should relax! (Also, Blahous’s methodology would show that Ryan’s budget looks way worse, too.)

Anyway, that’s the trick. Assume the Medicare savings don’t count because Medicare would have reduced its payments anyway, and boom — Obamacare now increases the deficit.

There actually is a bit more in the paper, but it’s even less persuasive. Blahous suggests that Congress might roll back some of the cost savings in the law. And yes, of course that’s a risk — Republicans are trying to repeal the entire law. If Congress repeals some of the cost savings, then they won’t save money.

That’s not a way of saying Obamacare

Indeed, the whole argument is so bizarrely weak you have to wonder, “What is this doing on the front page of the Washington Post?” Here is what I think is going on. The author of the Post story, Lori Montgomery, is the author of a recent debt-negotiation narrative that seems to have been spoon-fed to her by John Boehner. Montgomery inserts a few cautionary notes into the story, but basically frames it the way Blahous would like.

Blahous is the Republican trustee for Medicare, so that title offers the hook for a paper he writes that, by adopting some mighty odd hypothetical scenarios, says that Obamacare will boost the deficit. Blahous’s government position gives the claim enough juice that it can be pitched as a “study” by a government official, as opposed to just another Republican-authored polemic, which would never receive such prominent or relatively credulous coverage. The next step is for conservatives to adopt Blahous’s figure as the “true” figure — but of course never to apply his strange assumptions to the GOP budget or to any other proposal — and browbeat the media into citing that alongside the CBO figure, for “balance.”

***********************************************
If this work is as poor as it appears to be, I would hope that the President might find someone better qualified to fill that role than this guy.  It is worth noting that 'W' hasn't endorsed anyone, but then even his parents seem to recognize that their son is widely considered a huge disgrace and a liability, in a recent interview with /Romney where the absence of 'W' having endorsed anyone was larger than any other /Republican elephant in the room.

Republicans; they really should fund better math education, as well as better science; they utterly suck at both, which makes for bad policy.  It's crap that only someone completely blinded by ideology could swallow............which pretty much leaves a few wandering listless few remaining tea partiers, the occasional wild-eyed fanatic right wing evangelical out of touch with reality, and the other right wing hard-core extremist fringies.

And of course the payroll of politicos paid by ALEC, directly and indirectly to be their corporate stooges.  Between the defections almost daily of entities running from the bright limelight on the corruption, and the failure of the right to even pretend they have actually drafted legislation, it's just not the force to be reckoned with that it was when shrouded in secrecy hiding the big money expenditures.  Now it's just big and rotten and increasingly an embarrassment, a virtual albatross for politicians and members alike.

Why whatever do I mean?

Things like this:

Oops: Florida Republican Forgets To Remove ALEC Mission Statement From Boilerplate Anti-Tax Bill

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Feb 2, 2012 at 2:07 pm

Progressives have long tried to expose the influence the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) wields in state house across the country, but one Florida lawmaker is making it too easy.

Funded almost entirely by large corporations, ALEC produces “model legislation” favorable to industry that state lawmakers can introduce as their own bills. Usually, the legislators tweak the language of the bills to make them state-specific or to obfuscate their origins. Usually, but apparently not always.

In November, Florida state Rep. Rachel Burgin (R) introduced a resolution (PDF here) that would officially call on the federal government to reduce corporate taxes, but she apparently forgot to remove ALEC’s mission statement from the top of the bill, which she seems to have copied word-for-word from ALEC’s model bill:



As the government transparency group Common Cause reports, “Burgin quickly withdrew the bill hoping that no one had noticed and then re-introduced it 24-hours later, with a new bill number (HM 717), but now without the problematic paragraph.” Apparently no one noticed until this week.
While it’s no secret by now that conservative lawmakers in state capitals everywhere have used ALEC’s legislation to tear down environmental and labor regulations, curb voting rights, and coordinate a business-friendly agenda nationwide, it’s rare to see it on display so clearly.
I'm betting that when it comes to the battle of the PAC ads later in the election cycle, ooopsie daisies like this one are going to get much more attention.
I'm also betting that the Tea Partiers, many of whom were organized and transported on Koch brothers money, in their mega-astro-turfing of the Tea Party will NOT be so surprised to find out how easily their participation has been bought.  I think they will be mad as hell, this time at the Koch Brothers as well as the sane and moderate conservatives in their own party for a change.
It is more than fair and reasonable to expect that when we elect people to public office to serve as legislators they will 1. serve us, not out of state corporations and special interests; 2. that legislation won't be drafted by non-legislators IN SECRET; and 3. the legislation itself is largely crap, resulting in endless legislation and poor outcomes, and is often MORE intrusive than liberal big government.
The light is finally dawning.............or about to.
The wrong people are getting all full of the tar from the proverbial tar baby.

Poor Koch Brothers; they still have pots of money, but it seems they're running out of pots of tar. And those pots of money, the ones they spend in aid of dirty tricks, are just not buying elections the way they used to do.  People are getting wise to election tampering and robocalls misdirecting voters to the wrong polling place or on the wrong date, or any of their other playbook of bad politics.
One people know them for what they are, they just don't work at all well.
Meanwhile, that Occupy movement seems to be gathering steam just as ALEC and the corporate puppeteers are losing theirs.  In the immortal words of Scooby Doo, "Ruh ROH!"
Time to start drawing the rats leaving the sinking ALEC ship:

Update: Intuit is the latest corporation to quit ALEC

Intuit, the company which owns Turbo-Tax which many people are hurriedly using as April 15th approaches, as well as Quicken and QuickBook.

They have indicated they will not renew their membership in ALEC after it expired in 2011.

The three previous multinational corporations to leave ALEC, or to discontinue their membership through non-renewal, are Pepsi Co, Coca Cola, and Kraft.

Color of Change.org and Center for Media and Democracy have drawn attention to ALEC and the controversial legislation that they promote through secret meetings with right wing legislators where they draft special interest legislation designed to provide favors and unfair advantage to the ALEC corporations.

Color of Change has vowed to continue to petition the other corporate members of ALEC to withdraw their support of the right wing agenda and special interest legislation, or risk facing widespread boycotts and other protests.  The Center for Media and Democracy has promised to continue to shine a bright light on the legislative activities and members, including both legislative and corporate members of ALEC, so as to make them more accountable to voters and consumers.

While it is unlikely that the more extreme controlling interests of WalMart or Koch Industries, or the controlling entities of the NRA which have hijacked the organization to support far right causes as well as gun manufacturers, will acknowledge the position of a significant part of the voting and consumer public, that is unlikely to be the case of the other corporate members or the politicians who do their bidding in exchange for financial support - what might be called political friends with financial benefits.

No more hiding in the darkness to do their dirty deals; now the corruption is facing the disinfectant of sunlight.  While ALEC might survive, it will do so smaller and with far less influence if this trend continues successfully.

We can only hope and pray and keep up the good work, and keep up the pressure to end this corrupt entity's damaging effect on government at the local, state and federal levels.  That is especially true of elections and the 2012 cycle.

Who will be the next to go?

KRAFT kicks loose from ALEC

Following Pepsi last January, and Coke yesterday, Kraft has joined the so-far single file parade leaving ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the special interest group that writes legislation in secret, benefiting the corporate and wealthy individual members at the expense of tax payers.  That legislation is then handed to the Republican and Tea Party members of the legislature for passage, because of the corrupt links between the two groups.
Now that the brighter light is shining on ALEC, they are no longer able to operate beneath the radar of public notice.  Without all of their secrecy, they are less able to function.  Meanwhile it is not in the interest of corporate brands to be linked to such corrupt self-interest and the waging of culture war on such a large part of the American public by such a small part.
It is a little soon to call this the kind of rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship exodus similar to the departure of nearly all of Rush Limbaugh's advertisers, but we can hope and work to make that so, followed by a similar parade of ALEC legislators leaving our state houses and senates across the country.

 First one leaves,

then another,

then another.

Making a sharp U-turn in policy and funding.

Making a break to run for the exits.

Who, who, who will be the next to go?  

From the LA Times:

Coca-Cola, Kraft leave conservative ALEC after boycott launched

Within hours of advocacy group Color of Change launching a boycott against Coca-Cola for its participation on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Board, the soft drink giant issued a statement saying that it had “elected to discontinue its membership.”

But the company blamed ALEC’s support of “discriminatory food and beverage taxes” instead of “issues that have no direct bearing on our business.”

“We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our company and industry,”Coca-Cola said.
Kraft followed late Thursday, saying in a statement that it has “made the decision not to renew” its ALEC membership, which is expiring. The company was opaque in its reasoning, citing “limited resources” and saying that its involvement with ALEC “has been strictly limited to discussions about economic growth and development, transportation and tax policy.”
Still, the withdrawals pleased ALEC detractors, which includes the Center for Media and Democracy. The liberal-leaning nonprofit said it had launched a protest campaign in tandem with Color of Change opposing what it said were ALEC’s efforts to deny climate change, undermine public schools and encourage laws that would require voters to present various forms of identification before voting.
Critics of the policies, which have already been implemented in several states, say that they are more likely to shut out minorities, the poor, the elderly and even college students.
Draft legislation from ALEC has also helped fan the debate over “stand your ground” laws, which have played a central role in the February shooting of unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.
Color of Change, an African American advocacy group co-founded by James Rucker and Van Jones, issued a statement saying that the group would direct its sights at other companies associated with ALEC.
Other members of ALEC’s Enterprise Board include executives from Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods, Pfizer, AT&T, UPS and ExxonMobil.

They're Really Cartoons!

After the Romney etch-a-sketch gaffe, I had thought of the candidates as toys for the voter with a child-like mind.  Here is an excellent selection of Mark Fiore animations that demonstrate that if the candidates are toys for the child like, then the issues lend themselves to viewing as cartoons.  Enjoy!

Niki Haley, GOP Apologist & Romney Surogate is Tone Deaf to the Majority, Especially Women

She's backpedalling, but not nearly fast enough.
The right is too intransigent to learn from their mistakes, to ideologically extreme to adjust or meet the rest of the world on common ground to form a consensus.
It is hurting them badly, and their war on women will continue to hurt them.  It is the recognition of the harm they've done to their party with this course of action, their culture war, that has prompted them to trot out a token woman on women's issues, the way they trot out their token minority members on issues relating to race and ethnicity.  In Haley's case, she's turning off the very people she's been sent out like a good little soldier to recruit and persuade.
However they try to spin it, the GOP is a party overwhelmingly of white people trying to preserve their dominance in the status quo, and overwhelmingly acting on behalf of corporations, the wealthiest 1% of individuals, and the corporate special interests that keep those few individuals disproportionately wealthy while pay for the average employee is stagnant or declines, or their jobs disappear entirely.  At the same time, they do their best to reduce or eliminate the control of the company owners, the individual shareholders, who have less and less control over their boards of directors and their executive officers, and their decisions. 
The GOP is the party that promotes and protects the outsourcing of jobs by the private sector, this is a party that embraces racism and exploitation.  The GOP is NOT the party of job creation. 
The GOP is the party that sells out the American citizen through the corruption of big money.The GOP is the party of polarization and division rather than consensus. The GOP is the party of obfuscation and secrecy rather than transparency.
Here is the telegenic Niki Haley trying to do damage control on the View for the GOP and for Romney, but mostly doing more damage in the process, not less.  Good job, Joy Behar!



And while we're on the topic - it should be ILLEGAL to fly this flag of treason and insurrection over any state buildings, in any form, in any southern state. It should generate as much opposition as if it were a Nazi flag or the flag of any other notorious fascist or authoritarian government. It is an insult to every person who is loyal to the government of the Untied States, and in particular an insult to every descendant of slaves.  Every day this flag appears anywhere that is public property, anytime it appears in conjunction with the authority or property of the state of South Carolina, it is an offense, and it is promoting continuing racism.

Joe Long is the curator of education at the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in Columbia.

"A flag is a symbol and one of the peculiar things about a symbol is that there's the message that someone is trying to convey and there's the message that somebody else picks up. It's not always the same message," Long said.

Long said that the battle flag was used because the Confederate army was having a hard time recognizing the Confederacy's official National flag. Today the battle flag remains the most recognized symbol of the Confederacy.

"When they put the flag up in 1961 the official message then was that it was for the centennial the 100-year anniversary of the war, Randolph said. "However even though they gave that message a lot of people nation wide took it as a thumb in the eye of the federal government involving the civil rights movement."

Dr. Daniel Littlefield is a history professor and researcher for African American studies. Littlefield said it is important to know that the confederate flag also represents a time of resistance to integration.

.


I have no problem with recognizing this period of our NATIONAL history, but to do so in a way which conveys support for the confederacy, which acted illegally and which came into existence in large part to continue slavery out of fear it might end even sooner than it would otherwise, NO, that is wrong.  The Confederacy does not deserve that respect or honor.  It is the flag of a defeated enemy of the United States.

FactCheck.org Busts the Tea Party Attacking Republicans

It is an election year, as in war, too often the first casualty is truth - and fact.

In this case however, it is not bullets but bullshit that flies, and if is emanating from those who are extremists, those who tend to be ignorant or low-information voters.  In the case of the Tea Party, they tend to be funded by big money behind them in astro-turf entities, rather than genuinely grass-roots or populist organizations, and they tend to appeal to the simplistic thinking, low information voters.

FreedomWorks is Dick Army's front group for the Koch Brothers; it is a lobbying group for wealthy interests that seduces angry people by lying to them, organizing them, busing them around, and persuading them that they do not need to be informed or seek complex solutions for complex problems.  They appeal to a filiopietistic form of patriotism that is not particularly fact driven, one that simply rewrites and edits out any part of history that is inconvenient or that they don't like.

From SourceWatch, regarding Freedom Works,
under the heading of Funding (emphasis added is mine - DG):

In an article in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, author Jane Mayer links the billionaire brothers David Koch and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries to tea party movement funding. Mayer writes,

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.[1]

Reports indicate that the Tea Party Movement benefits from millions of dollars from conservative foundations that are derived from wealthy U.S. families and their business interests. Is appears that money to organize and implement the Movement flows primarily through two conservative groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

In an April 9, 2009 article on ThinkProgress.org, Lee Fang reports that the principal organizers of Tea Party events are Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, two "lobbyist-run think tanks" that are "well funded" and that provide the logistics and organizing for the Tea Party movement from coast to coast. Media Matters reported that David Koch of Koch Industries was a co-founder of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), the predecessor of FreedomWorks. David Koch was chairman of the board of directors of CSE.[2] CSE received substantial funding from David Koch of Koch Industries, which is the largest privately-held energy company in the country, and the conservative Koch Family Foundations, which make substantial annual donations to conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, etc. Media Matters reported that the Koch family has given more than $12 million to CSE (predecessor of FreedomWorks) between 1985 and 2002.[3][4]

REAL patriotism is where you know the facts about both the good and the bad in the past, where you think critically so as to discern the difference, and where you bother to learn the facts of the present.  Real patriotism requires us to be informed, and to think past the stupidly simplistic, and to be reality based.

An example of the Tea Party in action, as reported in the Wall Street Journal - hardly a bastion of liberalism, and less so since being taken over by the notoriously dishonest and immoral conservative Rupert Murdoch of the UK media scandals notoriety - reported on the Tennessee Tea Party attempting to take out teaching slavery from American history, because it was embarrassing. 

Don't worry if that makes your kid ignorant.  Don't worry if it is a lie.  It will make you properly believe that the founding fathers were not complex people who made mistakes.  It is tea party ideology pure, and that matters to the extremists much more than facts; that is how you can tell they are extremists.  You can tell because this sort of thing makes sense to them, is acceptable to them, is desirable to them.  Don't worry if it makes your child less competitive; all that matters is that they are taught to believe that the United States is the greatest nation in the world, that it never makes mistakes, that it is never wrong -- not even for having slavery --and that if it IS wrong, ever, the solution is to simply LIE about it.  Make stuff up that you like better, because liking it matters more to you if you are a tea partier or other right wing extremist, than the truth does. 

The Wall Street Journal wrote - (note, bold and large type are my emphasis - DG): 

Tennessee Tea Party Wants Schools to Be Nicer to Founding Fathers

The late comedian George Carlin used to say America was built on a double standard: “This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.”
We wonder how his joke would have sat with members of Tennessee’s tea party, which just presented state legislators with five priorities for action, including amending state laws governing school curriculums to change textbook selection so that “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported.
Hal Rounds, an attorney and a spokesman for the group, said the goal is to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another,” according to the Commercial Appeal.
“Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government,” according to materials the activists distributed.
Critics say the activists’ search for truth is really an attempt at lies.
Information about the founders owning slaves and displacing Native Americans “is well documented and acknowledged by professional historians and should not be censored,” according to Addicting Info, a website dedicated to discrediting what it sees as right-wing propaganda. “Hiding knowledge is tantamount to lying and that’s what the Tea Party wants our teachers to do.”
What the group is asking is not unprecedented. In 2010, the Texas State Board of Education adopted controversial textbook standards that stress the Christian influence of the nation’s founding fathers and give more weight to conservative groups and personalities throughout history.
Those moves have been criticized as a departure from generally accepted historical teachings and a threat to the apolitical nature of academic standards.

The Tea Party doesn't just want to dumb down history, to turn it into propaganda; it wants to dumb down and lie about everything.  Science, Economics, and judging by what I've seen from Republican math, that branch of education won't retain it's integrity very long either.  It's not just Tennessee; our own Michele Bachmann, of Iowa, and occasionally Minnesota, promotes the same lies and stupidity.  She's said things about slavery that were blatantly not true; she has made claims for science relating to global warming that were blatantly false.  Her views on economic topics are tragically ill-informed, and often outright dishonest - stupidly so, because she gets busted doing it, and still does so over and over again.  Why make the same mistakes? Because those errors appeal to her Tea Party base.

MODERATE is not a dirty word.  COMPROMISE is not a dirty word.  TAXES is not a dirty word. GOVERNMENT is not a dirty word.  Because I became tired of the extremists treating politics as their own inmate run asylum, I decided this year it is time for the center to regroup, and to push back against extremists.  It is in that context that I republish the FactCheck.org report on Tea Party activities. 

What makes this different than other lies and exaggerations that are committed routinely during election years is the money behind it.  This year ALL of the candidates running on the right are some version of extremists; this year more than ever before in my memory, there is no real selection from which to choose that represent the rest of the right that are not extremists. 

But most of all what makes this year different is the money.  It is the same big money and special interest groups that are behind Dick Armey and his astro-turf Tea Partiers that are running the media blitz in the campaigns.  Our elections are being dominated by a few special interests, the same people who lie to us and rip us off by how they BUY our politicians, especially those on the right who they buy wholesale, that is corrupting our political process, and is ruining our nation.  They have taken routine political lies and distortions, and turned them into world class Propaganda, to benefit themselves, to buy and sell us mere citizens who vote.

From Business Insider:

Super-PACs Bought 91 Percent Of The Political Ads That Ran In Alabama and Mississippi This Month

Michael Brendan Dougherty
March 13, 2012

Whoa!
Super-PACs are doing almost all the work of political advertising in this campaign season.
Greg Giroux of Bloomberg reports that these organizations which can take unlimited political donations, have been responsible for nearly every political ad in the two states having Republican primaries today.
So-called Super-PACs supplied 91 percent of the 5,592 campaign ads that aired on broadcast television stations in the two states in the past month, according to data from New York- based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising.
That's a ton!
It's obvious at this point that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who both have trouble doing traditional fundraising, have been relying on the Super-PACs aligned with them.
But Romney is benefiting from the spending almost just as much:
Restore Our Future, a super-PAC backing Romney, aired ads 2,098 times in Alabama through March 11, compared with 279 spots from Romney’s campaign, according to CMAG.
Again- that's nearly a 9-1 ratio. We're really in a new political environment.

With that kind of media boost behind it, manipulation of our political process is easy for the wealthy individuals and corporate entities that are being so successful at controlling it, at diluting and diminishing the role of the individual by controlling the preponderance of what they see and hear about political issues and candidates.
What is so exemplary about fact checking is that it allows people to push back against the propaganda - from all sides - and to try to drown out the lies with facts.  It is only when we operate from facts that we can find solutions, by being reality based.  It is only when we operate from facts, reliable and objective facts, that we can hope to bridge ideology differences, and find common ground.   Facts are for moderates; lies and half-lies are for extremists - and for the crooks who manipulate and use them.  That is because facts, fair, objective, in-context facts don't work for crooks and extremists.  They don't like them.

Look at what the Tea Party, already viewed with worse disapproval than the rest of the Republicans - which is significantly worse than Democrats and Independents - is doing to their own more moderate political figures this election.  They are trying to drive them out, leaving ONLY the extremists on the right.  The 'Big Tent' Party has become more of a straight jacket.

Note the phrase I've emphasized - TOO MODERATE.
From FactCheck.org:

Summary
Tea party-aligned FreedomWorks for America has launched campaigns against several Republicans whom it deems too moderate, including Senate veterans Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. But some of the group’s claims miss the mark.
A TV ad targeting Hatch claims the six-term Utah senator “has racked up half of our nation’s debt.” It’s true that Hatch voted 16 times to raise the debt ceiling a total of $7.5 trillion, but he didn’t support all of the deficit spending that caused the debt. In fact, he has championed a proposed balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and three conservative watchdog groups grade his fiscal performance over his 35 years in the Senate as anywhere from middling to excellent.
The group also claims Hatch “gave away your family’s money for bailouts to Wall Street bankers.” It’s true that Hatch voted for TARP, but the part that went to bail out Wall Street bankers has actually turned a profit for American taxpayers.
A radio ad claims that in 2010 Hatch was “the third-highest earmarker of all 535 people in Congress.” According to the tallies by the most frequently cited earmark group, Taxpayers for Common Sense, however, Hatch ranked in the middle of the earmarking pack from 2008 to 2010, and in 2010 was 28th highest among the nation’s 100 senators.
A TV ad portrays Lugar as “Team Obama’s favorite senator” even though the Indiana Republican has voted against some of Obama’s signature pieces of legislation, including the health care law, and has voted with the Republican Party 90 percent of the time since the start of the current Congress, according to The Washington Post.
A Web video claims that Senate candidate David Dewhurst, who is the lieutenant governor of Texas, “pushed for a tax that would cost 40,000 Texas jobs.” The bill’s impact on jobs was a matter of dispute. The state comptroller projected the legislation — which also sharply reduced property taxes — would have created 60,000 jobs over 10 years.
That same video also says “state spending increased by billions” under Dewhurst. It’s true spending has risen, but so has inflation and the state’s population. The fact is that Texas spends less per person in inflation-adjusted dollars now than it did before Dewhurst took office. 

We have crossed a line, a Rubicon, from ordinary smaller political lies and exaggerations to a far larger, far more calculated, far more manipulative and exploitive kind of lie. Our politics are no longer about the ordinary untruths and nastiness; we are now being treated to large scale deliberate propaganda.  Getting rid of moderates, people who might not rubber stamp the most extreme legislation of special interests, is essential to their success, and to our defeat as individuals and citizens.

Where or where IS CHIP?

Does he live in the district?  Is his heart.......and more importantly, the rest of him.......STILL a full and proper legal resident, not just on paper, for the next Congressional run?

Or should he more properly be running in New Hampshire?  After all, what kind of a family man doesn't live with his family, except for military service?  Sure doesn't sound like family values to me!

Contraception, versus No Insurance

Millions of people in this country do not have ANY health care coverage, and that which is provided publicly to those in poverty has been greatly reduced.  Further, health care costs are closely linked as one of the single greatest causes of bankruptcy in this country.  We have some of the highest costs for health care without the equivalent results.  Health care reform, including providing contraception, addresses not only a serious public health issue, but also the finacial challenge of effectively reducing health care costs to everyone.

The Righties, be it the Let-Them-Die Tea Partiers, or the Maybe-Charity-Will-Pay-for-Care Republicans, who care more about drowning smaller government in the bathtub than providing effective government that helps keep us a competitive nation with developed countries generally, and western Europe particularly, has NO workable suggestions, only options that would make the 1% richer than they are now by stacking the deck in their favor even more.  The right, in picking their battlegrounds, like contraception, continues to demonstrate their failure to provide alternatives, and to provide solutions; and one more thing they demonstrate, greed and callousness. 

NOT fixing our health care system, including insurance, and including all forms of contraception including abortion being available, is destructive to this country.  It is UN-American.  It is regressive and reactionary.

It is no accident that the figure in the suit, the corporation-man image possibly, is all about big money, corporations being people, and objections to contraception.  That person, according to the polls, those ideas, are hugely unpopular, yet the right keeps doubling and tripling down on them.

From the inimitable Ed Stein:

Women's History Month - 2

Margaret Sanger funded the development of the modern birth control pill out of her own pocket.  She went to jail for giving women contraceptive diaphrams, comdoms, and the most important thing of all, factual sexual medical information.

It LIBERATED women.

That was decades ago, more than half a century ago.  Only the reactionaries are trying to take us back to the bad old days for women.  They hate sex, except when they are having it, often extramaritally despite the lip service to 'family values'.  Lying repressed prudish hypocrites.

Doonesbury nails it - thanks MN Central for the heads up:

and while we are in the neighborhood of humor pointing out the tragedy of right wing policies towards women and reproduction, here are a couple of recent ones from another of my favorite cartoonists, Steve Sack of the STrib, who makes pictures worth a thousand of my words:

For the record, I've referred to Ann Coulter as a 'media slut and/or whore', clearly referring in the context to her willingness to flip flop for support (in that specific case switching from anti-gay to pro-gay) and to say outrageous things, like Limbaugh, just to get attention.  Ultimately, she seems to operate ONLY on getting attention from the media, imho, not at all on legitimate substance of her own.  I would point out that differs in two key respects from Limbaugh: 1. it refers to actual conduct, where Limbaugh's comments, particularly against Sandra Fluke do not; and 2. it refers to media conduct, not Ms. Coulter's private and personal sexual conduct, which is her business unless she opts to use it for media fodder.  The term slut in that context relates to doing things publicly for attention (and in some cases, presumably money) that is offensive, and it is appropriately insulting.  Absent the word 'media', which makes this about public behavior involving someone selling their integrity for money and attention, as Ms. Coulter does routinely, that is a term which is neither specific to women, and therefore not sexist, and which refers to a pattern of public behavior sought by Coulter, unlike Ms. Fluke and so many others who have been insulted by Limbaugh and others on the right.  It is not 'nice', but neither is Coulter; it is an attempt to accurately portray her behavior.  It is not however, unlike Limbaugh and others, intended to intimidate or otherwise control or restrict that behavior either.  It is in fact, considerably LESS offensive and inflammatory than routine statements from Ms. Coulter.

You have to doubt the religious convictions of a man who lies so often about other people's speeches.



Well done, Steve.  Nothing like pointing out the hypocrisy of the serial adulterer.  I'm not persuaded that either of these two individuals have really either found religion or monogamy; rather I think it is nothing but an unconvincing pose - an attitude not limited or specific to either side or the center of the political spectrum.



Thank you T

Thank you Steve! Well done, and clever and witty as always. I'm not worried about Satan in my uterus, but I certainly want Santorum and the rest of the republican extremists and religious fanatics out of it.  The Puritans are trying to make a comeback; they are unwelcome.  Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 19th century pegged them for the hypocrites they were in their original incarnation, in the Scarlet Letter.  Now they just consider themselves part of partially or predominantly entire 'red' states.

Big Oil Is Extracting Money from Our Pockets

We have huge wealth inequality in this country.

We have huge wealth inequality in this country because we do not have a level playing field; the 'playing field' is tilted in favour of special interests and big money, both individual and corporate.

We have huge wealth inequality because we do not have effective regulation; most regulation that would make our playing fields of economic competition fair, honest, and equal instead of unequal are opposed by conservatives, by Republicans, who benefit from the largesse of the rich individuals, the corporations, when they sell us out, we the ordinary people. We, who are real living breathing people, not legal fiction, we who are the 99%.

Here is one instance of how that opposition, that obstruction of legislation that would make the playing field more even, more equal, occurs.

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

and here; the appropriate segment is 2 minutes in:

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

and:
 

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

A

Just for the record, contrary to the statements made by Presidential Candidates like the Nut Gingrich, petroleum IS largely composed of ancient algae that has decomposed over time into our modern 'black gold'. And it is modern algae, which DOES show a tremendous potential to be the new green gold. Algae old or new IS what our energy use is largely founded upon; the Nut Gingrich and his right wing buddies are factually inaccurate. Not surprising; most of them are fact aversive and anti-science, preferring to believe Jesus rode on dinosaurs as the world was created in six days, and is a few thousand years old, and other nonsense.