MEET THE BAD GUYS

REPUBLICAN FOLLIES

The Republicans are patently unable to accept either the truth or defeat.  Like hung over alcoholics, they stagger back to commit the same dumb acts over and over.  Persistence in a negative activity signifies mental disturbance.  The picture their intransigence paints is really stupid, mean-spirited and ugly.  Why anyone would want them as political party of choice eludes us.  Observe:

GOP Senator Blocks Jobless-Benefits Extension March 26, 2010 by the Associated Press by Andrew Taylor

Washington – As Congress raced to leave Washington for its Easter recess, a Republican senator blocked a stopgap bill to extend jobless benefits, saying its $9 billion cost should not be added to the national debt.

As a result, some people who have been out of work for more than six months will at least temporarily lose benefits. Newly jobless people won’t be eligible to sign up for generous health insurance subsidies.

At the center of the battle is Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who is insisting that the measure be “paid for” so as not to add to the nation’s $12.7 trillion debt.

“What we are doing is stealing future opportunity from our children,” Coburn said Thursday.

The practical effect of the lapse in benefits would be limited if they are awarded retroactively. But labor advocates say it produces bureaucratic nightmares for state labor departments, and that trying to restore the lapsed benefits is easier said than done.  READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/26-5

Hurting defenseless people is unconscionable.  Senator Coburn is obviously no friend of the people, at least the ones who need help.

Meanwhile, the nutsies over at the Tea Party are going dingo.

The Mad Tea Party and the Cloward-Piven Conspiracy Theory March 26, 2010 by The Nation by Richard Kim

Leftists like to say that another world is possible, but I was never quite sure of that until I started reading tea party websites. There, a government of leftists is not only possible, it’s on the cusp of seizing permanent power, having broken American capitalism and replaced it with a socialist state. Down that rabbit hole, Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel are communists, and “The Left”–which encompasses everyone from the Democratic Leadership Council to Maoist sectarians–is a disciplined and near omnipotent army marching in lockstep to a decades-old master plan for domination called the “Cloward-Piven strategy” or, as of January 20, 2009, “Cloward-Piven government.”

What is this plot? According to David Horowitz, who apparently coined the expression, Cloward-Piven is “the strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.” Named after sociologists and antipoverty and voting rights activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who first elucidated it in a May 2, 1966, article for The Nation called “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” the Cloward-Piven strategy, in Horowitz’s words, “seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.” Like a fun-house-mirror version of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine theory, the Cloward-Piven strategy dictates that the left will exploit that crisis to push through unpopular, socialist policies in a totalitarian manner.

Perhaps most critical, the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory pushes the tea party’s kettle closer to a boil. In its obsession with voter fraud and the potential illegitimacy of the 2008 election–and the democratic process itself–the conspiracy suggests a tit-for-tat strategy for victory: if the left is going to cynically manipulate the system to produce tyranny, then so will we. How? To begin, there’s the tried-and-true tactic of suppressing the poor minority vote–which would next place Project Vote in the tea party’s cross hairs. But why stop there? Like every good conspiracy theory, this one too is a call to arms.   © 2010 The Nation.  Richard Kim is a senior editor at The Nation.   READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/26-3

There Will Be Blood Spilled If the Republicans Keep Matching Their Message with Violent Talk Frameshop By Jeffrey Feldman

Rather than recoil at violent language, GOP leadership seems to see it as a chance to turn out votes. The consequences could be deadly.

Words matter–and they matter even more when they are violent words. Apparently, GOP leadership agrees.

Despite the unwillingness of mainstream media to connect the dots, the base and leadership of the GOP are matching their rhetoric to the disturbing rise of violent talk at Tea Party rallies and amongst conservative anti-government groups. The conclusion: rather than recoil at violent language, GOP leadership seems to see it as a chance to turn out votes.

Palin via Twitter told her Republican followers to “reload” and “aim for” Democrats, directing GOP activists to her SarahPac website where they found a map of the country festooned with rifle scope cross-hairs over Congressional districts held by Democrats. Palin’s rifle scope map is the kind of image one might expect to see in an ad for a violent, first-person shooter video game.

RNC, Michael Steele, issued a recent call to Republicans to put Nancy Pelosi on the “firing line” because of the health insurance reform bill.

By using the phrase “firing line,” Steele encourages Republican activists to think of the next election as an execution of the opposition or a violent killing. The language Steele uses is not neutral. “Defeat” is defined as “kill.” “Voting” is linked to “shooting.” Winning the election is couched in an image of bloodletting.

In a similar violent vein, Sarah Palin via Twitter told her Republican followers to “reload” and “aim for” Democrats, directing GOP activists to her SarahPac website where they found a map of the country festooned with rifle scope cross-hairs over Congressional districts held by Democrats.

When Americans threaten to use firearms to enforce their political views, the violent threats carried by that language undermines the system of public debate on which our system depends. Healthy political debate can sustain a great deal of anger and passion, but it cannot sustain repeated threats of violence and calls for violent assault as a form of political engagement.

It is time to for right-wing political violence to stop before passions turn to bloodshed.  READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/news/146178/there_will_be_blood_spilled_if_the_republicans_keep_matching_their_message_with_violent_talk?page=2

The Republicans are bought into the craziness at a very deep level.  They will not get better.  They will explode or fizzle out, but they will not get “well.”  These sick puppies prefer revolution and the overthrow of the United States government to honest political dialog and debate.  We really need to put these crazies into the booby hatch.

Fox News, Health Care, and the Right-Wing Nervous Breakdown Media Matters for America / By Eric Boehlert

How did health care go so terribly wrong for the Tea Party’s true believers? They made the mistake of believing their own hype — and Fox News.

Watching Fox News personalities recently come unglued as the realization set in that (surprise!) Democrats might actually have the votes to pass health care reform — and noting how extraordinarily loopy and dire both the attacks on the White House, and the proclamations for pending, apocalyptic doom were becoming — I was getting nervous that one of Fox News’ more unhinged hosts might finally just snap and pull a Rev. Jim Jones, beseeching viewers to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Honestly, unless you’ve been monitoring the ticking time bomb that is the far-right media in recent days, you probably don’t appreciate how frighteningly possible that cultish scenario has become, as the GOP Noise Machine, led by Fox News, publicly suffers a nervous breakdown. It’s a mental and emotional collapse that’s been advertised in recent days as cablers, radio talkers, and right-wing bloggers have reached for increasingly hysterical, often blood-curdling rhetoric to describe the irreversible atrocity — an incurable, metastasizing malignancy!! — that’s about to seize and destroy the United States in the form of a bill to expand health care coverage.

Yet last week, as its opposition to reform grew increasingly futile, the GOP Noise Machine dedicated lots of time and energy to mocking and attacking cancer-stricken patients, as well as a motherless 11-year-old boy who had the audacity to speak out in favor of health care reform.

Limbaugh’s immortal words to the boy: “Your mom would have still died, because Obamacare doesn’t kick in until 2014.”

To me, the attacks indicated a withering of the right-wing media’s shrinking moral compass, not to mention common sense. (Mocking the seriously ill is a winning political strategy?) It was another tell-tale sign of the unfolding, and unstoppable, nervous breakdown.

Because how else do you describe this kind of erratic, disturbed behavior? And it’s worth repeating: This wasn’t coming from minor, fringe players. It’s been coming from the supposed leading lights of the conservative media; leading lights who, blinded by paranoia, have suffered a collective collapse and can no longer make sense of their surroundings. READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/media/146176/fox_news%2C_health_care%2C_and_the_right-wing_nervous_breakdown?page=3

Alan Greenspan is back to do us more dirt, not content with having supervised the systematic looting of the United States Treasury and creating the conditions for the collapse of the mortgage and banking sector.  He “apologized” for having done it, said he was wrong, sorry about that.  To show his benign good will to the American people, he now proposes to steal their Social Security for his masters, the Corporatist elite.

Alan Greenspan and the New York Times Are Gunning for Your Social Security AlterNet / By Zach Carter

The battle for Social Security is on — and the Times is fighting for the bad guys.

With health care reform finally signed into law, a new policy battle over Social Security is quietly but unquestionably building momentum. Make no mistake — Wall Street is now doing its best to gut Social Security, and as a front-page article in yesterday’s New York Times makes clear, the media is not ready to challenge them on it.

Like every other major institution in the public and private sectors, Social Security has taken a few licks from the current recession. But the problems are simply not very serious — the entitlement program’s trust fund currently stands at a massive $2.5 trillion — that’s trillion with a “t.” If the federal government makes absolutely no changes to Social Security whatsoever, the program is currently projected to remain fiscally fit through 2037. The effects of the recession are included in that projection — prior to the financial crash of 2008, Social Security was projected to remain solvent through 2041.

But pesky facts like that are not the focus of the story from Times reporter Mary Williams Walsh, who instead highlights a fundamentally meaningless statistic to needlessly frighten her readers:

“This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016.”

That’s a perspective shared by Wall Street billionaires like Peter Peterson, who has pledged a massive fortune to spreading the message: Save the bankers and brokers first — everyone else, including seniors, is expendable. Peterson and Greenspan have allies in the newspaper business and on cable television that are ready and willing to place this agenda at the forefront of the public debate. The Washington Post now even publishes Social Security hit pieces posing as news articles that are funded by Peterson, parading under the banner of the Fiscal Times. As we move into the midterm elections, and Republicans raise the specter of budget deficits and national debt that have increased thanks to their own predatory economic policies, we can expect more of this Social Security fear-mongering. But we shouldn’t take the bait. There is no Social Security crisis. READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/economy/146175/alan_greenspan_and_the_new_york_times_are_gunning_for_your_social_security

It is clear who the bad guys are.  The Republicans are a big part of a criminal mob.  The entire cabal is not only treasonous, it exists through lies and innuendo, smear and violence – threatened and real.  It is no better than any other gangster crew extorting victims for more and more, insensible to law or decency.  The Republicans are aligned with the forces of disorder, chaos and fear.  They aim for the destruction of the society, our nation, the environment and, as a by-product, all living creation.  They have no rationale for their deeds save greed and stupidity.  Hypocrites all, they stand for the worst America has to offer and must be resisted at all cost, if we are to maintain our fair and free United States.

FASCIST AMERICA: ARE WE THERE YET? by Sara Robinson

This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.  READ MORE: https://johnlegry.wordpress.com/politics-mostly/republican-insurance-nazis/

Sara Robinson, AlterNet: Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog. 

“We the Corporations”

He worked for one nation indivisible.

 The merger of corporations with the state is Mussolini’s original definition of fascism.  Look it up.

IMPEACH THE SUPREME COURT FIVE!

“We the corporations”

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.

We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

Signed by 66,763 and counting . . .  CONTACT: http://www.movetoamend.org/

Bust Up the Health Insurance Trusts February 25, 2010 by Robert Reich’s Blog by Robert Reich

Years ago I worked at an agency in Washington called the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC predates the New Deal. It was set up in 1914 during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, at a time when many of America’s industries had combined into giant trusts that had enormous market and political power. The FTC was designed to root out such unfair practices. It ought to take on the health insurance trusts. A few weeks back I mentioned that my health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?

Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection might soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/25-3 

US Banks Veto ‘Socialist Pay’ in Secret Talks February 28, 2010 by the Independent/UK by Margareta Pagano

America’s top bankers quashed attempts by their British counterparts to persuade the industry to bring down salaries in response to public outrage after the world’s governments spent billions rescuing the system.

Chief executives from the world’s banks discussed the plans at a secret dinner held at Claridge’s, the London hotel, last October, at which several leading British bankers are said to have suggested that the sector should take greater responsibility for its part in the crash, and do more to reduce the vast bonuses paid to staff.

But the recommendations were met by stiff opposition from the US banks JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, according to one source. “Some of the US bankers were furious about attempts to reduce pay throughout the industry, arguing that any such move smacked of socialism and would be fiercely resisted,” the source said on Friday. “It’s not the way the Americans like to go about their business.”  READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/28

GOP to the Unemployed: Drop Dead (You Bums) March 1, 2010 by Unsilent Generation by James Ridgeway

On Sunday, unemployment benefits officially ended for hundreds of thousands of Americans, thanks to maneuverings by Senate Republicans to prevent a vote that would have extended those benefits. Unless the extension is passed soon, some 1.1 million of the nation’s unemployed will see their unemployment expire in the coming month, and 5 million will lose benefits by June.

The House finally voted to extend benefits on Thursday, after several days of stalling and posturing. But in the Senate, the measure was blocked by Kentucky’s Jim Bunning. Politico reported that late into Thursday night, Bunning held out against repeated Democratic attempts to pass the extension by unanimous consent. In response to entreaties from colleagues across the aisle, other Republican senators rose to defend Bunning’s right to obstruct the vote, and Bunning himself was heard to utter, “Tough shit.” READ MORE:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/01-3

Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama March 1, 2010 by TruthDig.com by Chris Hedges

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives. 

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/01-0

Thomas Paine - Author-Patriot, 1737-1809.