Is Ron Johnson Wisconsin's Most Bizarre Conservative

RON JOHNSON'S BIZARRE POSITION ON CHILD-ABUSE VICTIMS....

It's been fairly obvious for a while that Ron Johnson (R), the strange far-right Senate candidate in Wisconsin this year, is hard to take seriously. On everything from economic policy to climate policy to Social Security, Johnson's positions have varied between wrong and ridiculous.


Yet this one is shocking, even for a GOP Senate candidate.

    [B]efore running for Senate, Johnson did have one prominent act of political participation. In January 2010, Johnson testified before the Wisconsin state legislature in opposition to the bipartisan Wisconsin Child Victims Act. The legislation, if passed, would alter Wisconsin law to eliminate the statute of limitations on civil suits for child abuse and allow a three-year window to bring suit for victims who were victimized before the bill. The legislation also specifies that the entities that can be sued would include not just individuals, but also a "corporation, business trust, limited liability company," and other formal organizations that could be held accountable for the illegal behavior of their employees. As the bill's authors write, "We believe that there should be no deadline on justice for child sexual abuse victims."

    But Johnson did not place protecting victims as his highest priority.

Clearly not. Johnson instead told policymakers, I" think it is extremely important to consider the economic havoc and the other victims [the Wisconsin Child Victims Act] would likely create."

In other words, if victims of child abuse seek justice, it might interfere with the economy. It's preferable, then, to make it harder for victims to go to court. In a dispute pitting victimized children and abusers, Johnson spoke out against a measure looking out for the former.

Jed Lewison added, "The issue here isn't that just that Ron Johnson is opposing victims of predators -- it's that he's doing so to defend the interests of a tiny elite. If he can't even stand up for children -- sexually abused children, in fact -- who in their right mind believes he would stick up for the interests of everyday Wisconsin families?"

Making matters even worse, Joe Sudbay notes that Johnson served on the Green Bay Diocese Finance Council, which was being sued for its role in the sexual abuse of children at the time of his testimony, putting him in an awkward position -- he urged state lawmakers to make it harder for victims to sue while at the same time helping a church at the center of an abuse scandal. (It's unclear if the legislature was aware of the potential conflict of interest at the time of Johnson's testimony.)

I don't know if this is the kind of story that resonates with voters in Wisconsin, but it seems pretty awful.

One has to wonder why Johnson's conflict of interest have not been investigated. He had the power to vote on legislation which affected the board he was serving on. Friends in high places? Who knows. Johnson has let it be know he is not an advocate of rational thinking. he simply believes what he believes and that settles it - GOP WI Sen. candidate Ron Johnson claims ‘sunspot activity’ is the cause of extreme weather trends.

Yesterday, Wisconsin businessman and U.S. Senate candidate for the Republican Party Ron Johnson gave a wide-ranging interview to the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel. Johnson, a global warming skeptic, detailed his views on climate change and explained that he believes that extreme weather occurring across the globe — like record flooding in Pakistan and massive forest fires in Russia — may not be a result of man-made global warming, and that it’s “far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity”:

    A global warming skeptic, Johnson said extreme weather phenomena were better explained by sunspots than an overload of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as many scientists believe. “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change,” Johnson said. “It’s not proven by any stretch of the imagination.” [...]

    “It’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time,” he said. Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “gets sucked down by trees and helps the trees grow,” said Johnson. Average Earth temperatures were relatively warm during the Middle Ages, Johnson said, and “it’s not like there were tons of cars on the road.”

In fact, sunspots have been at a historic lows. As the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson notes, “Severe weather fueled by global warming pollution is having an even more devastating impact around the world. … All of these disasters were predicted by climate scientists as a consequence of greenhouse gas pollution from burning fossil fuels.” Unfortunately, Johnson’s anti-science, anti-environment views aren’t limited to his bizarre theory about sunspots. Last June, he claimed that global warming saved Wisconsin from turning into a glacier, saying he was “glad there’s global warming … We’d be standing on top of a 200-foot thick glacier.” He has also told the press he is open to oil drilling in Wisconsin’s Great Lakes.

Economists agree with Obama proposals pushed by Fox bad for long-term growth

Economists agree with Obama proposals pushed by right-wing Fox bad for long-term growth

Fox has opposed every major effort to stimulate the economy -- despite economists' support. Since Obama took office, Fox personalities have opposed every major package proposed to stimulate the economy, despite support from a consensus of economists and economic analysts. Recent opposition has included Obama's newly proposed infrastructure plan, the extension of unemployment insurance, aid to states, and food stamps, all of which have been shown to stimulate the economy.

Fox's campaign to extend tax cuts for the wealthy would add debt, do little to stimulate growth. Over the past few months, Fox has launched a campaign aimed at extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. However, economists and financial analysts agree that those cuts will cost $700 billion and would be much less effective at stimulating the economy than extending unemployment insurance, food stamps, and providing direct aid to states - all proposals which Fox personalities have repeatedly opposed.

Fox opposed the stimulus and since bill's passage, have repeatedly falsely claimed that it failed. In covering the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly referred to as the stimulus, Fox News consistently advanced false and misleading claims about the economic recovery package. Since the bill's passage, Fox News figures have repeatedly advanced the false claim that the stimulus "failed," despite the fact that independent and private analysts agree that the stimulus boosted GDP and increased employment.

Nothing particllay shocking that Fox is not a news channel but a propaganda channel for right-wing spin. Of course it is in the interests of the anti-American right-wing conservative movement for the economy to fail and stall for as long as possible. It gives them the opportunity to repeal every great social advancement of the 20th Century from publicly supported universities to environmental protection to Medicare.

Democrat Alan Grayson is right and it is Conservatives who should be ashamed - Disavowal Movement Resurgent

Ever since Jesse Helms ran this ad and Daddy Bush ran this one I've haven't given the moral dimension of attack ads much thought at all. They are part of American politics and you can rail against them all you want, but they aren't going anywhere. Fretting about such things is the province of very upright, highly moral liberals who believe that it is better to lose than to run ads which sink to the other side's level. I guess I just don't think ads are more important than keeping corporate sponsored theocrats from being in positions of power, so we will have to agree to disagree.

At this point in the United States it is permissible for Republicans to attack Democrats as treasonous, Godless/Muslim socialists and compare them to Hitler and Stalin but Democrats are only allowed to attack Republicans for their differences in policy. Can we see the asymmetry here? Is it any surprise that they have dominated politics for the past 30 years? Sure, every once in a while there are moments when their act gets old and the nation will look for hope and change rather than fear and loathing, but let's just say that their willingness (and institutional support) will give them the advantage most of the time.

Some old sayings are true. For Republicans it seems they can dish out the vicious attack ads but can't take them. In this case Grayson's ad was simply stating the facts about Daniel Webster - a Republican who thinks wife is just another word for slave.

Kentucky Needs to Know About Rand Paul, the AAPS, and the National Doctors Tea Party

Kentucky Needs to Know About Rand Paul, the AAPS, and the National Doctors Tea Party

The AMA(American Medical Association)  has splintered into subgroups, sometimes according to specialty and other times according to political bent. One of the more prominent (and scary!) splinter groups is the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), of which Rand Paul is a member.

The AAPS just had a tea party on September 18th. Not only did Rand Paul attend, so did our favorite Nevada teabagger, Sharron Angle. And not only Sharron Angle, but Georgia's Paul Broun, also a doctor.

This group holds some pretty interesting views for an organization that's supposed to be comprised of doctors. Here's their manifesto against health care reform with my italicized remarks next to each point:

    * Subject physicians to the greater control of insurance company oversight Yeah, there's some government-run healthcare for ya...
    * Deter innovation by physicians because insurance companies won't allow it - And this is different from today how?
    * Impoverish patients by forcing them to pay for expensive insurance they may not use. Of all the points, this one is the most absurd. Yes, I'm looking at my poor little dead retirement account when I say that.
    * Enrich insurance companies at the expense of patients and physicians Again, this is different from today how, exactly?
    * Eliminate the growing market of self-paying patients Also? Eliminates bankruptcy due to medical debt.
    * Bankrupt government programs and potentially lead to a government takeover Oh, from their concerns to God's ears. Please, let it be so.
    * Cause many physicians to stop practicing, leading to shortages and long waiting lines Petulant physicians? Say it isn't so!

This organization boasts about fighting "HillaryCare" and winning, and they've currently filed suit to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Folks, these are doctors. Did I miss something, or aren't they supposed to care about people dying because they have no access to health care? Is it really just all about the almighty dollar?

Health care reform notwithstanding, a read of their website really suggests their subname is "John Birchers' Working Physician Subgroup." Or something else, darker.

Where I put on my tinfoil hat and marvel

One of their recommended essays on the site is entitled Isaiah's Job and is recommended reading for those with a "touch of the libertarian blues." The author, Albert Jay Nock, delineates between the "masses" and the "Remnant". Here is a description of each:

    As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians. But it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great, the overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

In other words, there are those appointed, and the rest of us. Those appointed are the "Isaiah group", which not only was Isaiah himself, but the remaining few God chose to spare when he destroyed Jerusalem. And this essayist believes with all his heart that he is one of them.

    You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor where they are, nor how many of them there are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight, and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.

And they dare to call progressives elites?

Other pillars of the AAPS platform

Repeal Medicare. Put insurance companies out of business. Let doctors set their own fees, and if patients can't pay, well, that's one less "mass-man" to have to deal with. Freedom, to these people is anarchy. Anarchy is liberty. Liberty is freedom.

Vaccinations? Only if you feel like it. If you don't, well, God will know his own.

When these goals are realized, the Remnant will have established the correct social order.

This is what Rand Paul stands for. This is what Sharron Angle stands for. This is what already-elected Paul Broun stands for.

Strangely, however, their anarchical libertarian stance erodes when it comes to abortion, and then bounces back to some really bizarre views. They adamantly oppose abortion and a woman's right to choose, do not accept HIV as the cause of AIDS, suggested that Barack Obama is a hypnotist who seduced the masses into voting for him in 2008, and more. Here's what they said about Obama as hypnotist:

    The paper goes on to say that Obama’s “mesmerized, cult-like, grade-school-crush-like worship by millions is not because ‘Obama is the greatest leader of a generation’ who simply hasn’t accomplished anything, who magically ‘inspires’ by giving speeches. Obama is committing perhaps the biggest fraud and deception in American history.”

    The AAPS article notes that the Obama campaign logo “might just be the letter ‘O,’ but it also resembles a crystal ball, a favorite of hypnotists.”

Let's just call them what they are: White-coat wingnuts. It scares me more that these guys are licensed to practice medicine than the idea of them being in politics.

Kentucky might want to ask Rand Paul where his loyalties are. Will he uphold his oath of office and keep his pledge to honor the Constitution or will his allegiance be to some fringe group of "the Remnant".

Republicans Know What's Best for America

Boehner: The ‘Pledge’ Is Just To ‘Lay Out The Size Of The Problem,’ Americans Aren’t Ready For Solutions

Since its release last week, House Republicans have been touting their “Pledge To America” as a bold policy vision to solve the nation’s problems, which they would enact if they gain a majority after the November elections. However, revealing the pledge to be nothing more than regurgitated rhetoric that ignores critical issues, even conservative critics have slammed it as “meaningless stuff” that fails on “advocacy of long term sound public policy.”

Today on Fox News Sunday, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) seemed to concede this point. When host Chris Wallace noted that the Pledge does not even address entitlement spending such as Social Security and Medicare, Boehner countered by saying that its purpose is only to “lay out the size of the problem,” rather than “to get to potential solutions.” This, of course, flies in the face of GOP branding of the proposal, but Boehner explained that he doesn’t think the American people can handle his ideas right now, saying, “Once Americans understand how big the problem is, then we can begin to talk about potential solutions”:

The "pledge" - what there is of it - sounds a lot like a replay of the Bush years. Massive tax cuts were supposed to stimulate the economy - instead we had anemic job growth. Those same cuts were supposed to stimulate business investment, but American business kept off-shoring jobs to China. Those tax cuts were supposed to put more money in the average family's pocket, but income went down for the vast majority of Americans as the wealthy became even wealthier. Maybe Boehner is right - America cannot handle solutions right now. Solutions would require that Republicans stop promising that we can all have a free ride and still enjoy basic services like police and fire protection, better schools, clean air and water, highways, support scientific research and care for the elderly and disabled.

Raese Wants To Go Back To ‘Capitalism The Way It Should Be’ — Before Child Labor Laws

Millionaire businessman John Raese is running on a hard-right “pro-business, anti-regulation and anti-tax platform” as the GOP nominee for a Senate seat from West Virginia. Despite having been rejected by the state’s voters three times — including once for the same Senate seat just four years ago — Raese is hoping to capitalize on the right’s current anti-government hysteria.

A self-described “flamboyant businessman,” Raese enjoys the finer things, owning over 15 cars, boats and motorcycles, and a home in Florida where his family lives full-time. But Raese is humble too, acknowledging that he didn’t earn all of that: “I made my money the old-fashioned way. I Inherited it,” he joked in a recent interview. “I think that’s a great thing to do,” he added.

...Of course, while rolling back a century of labor, environmental, and civil rights regulations might make it easier for Raese, it would be absolutely disastrous for every working American. “Capitalism the way it should be,” as Raese dubbed it, included regular use of child labor, widespread repression of organized labor, virtually zero regulations on workplace safety or fairness — including racial and gender discrimination– and unchecked environmental degradation. “At the beginning of the century, workers in the United States faced remarkably high health and safety risks on the job,” a Center for Disease Control history stated.

Florida Gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott is Lying About Alex Sink. Scott is a Crimnal, Lying is What Criminals do.

Florida Gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott is Lying About Alex Sink. Scott is a Crimnal, Lying is What Criminals do.

What are the facts and why are Florida conservatives so desperate - Republican Party of Florida - State pension fund staffers "lost billions. Then Sink gave them bonuses."

To get to the truth and put the GOP ad in perspective, there are four questions to probe here. One is: Did the Florida pension fund lose $24 billion and is it "gone?" A second is whether Sink was "in charge?" Did experts warn her "she was making risky investments?" And, did Sink give "bonuses to staffers" who lost billions?

Let’s start with some background. Sink is Florida’s chief financial officer and is required by law to sit as one of three members of the  Board of Trustees on the State Board of Administration. The board has oversight authority over the state's largest pension fund, known as the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund. The other members of the board are Gov. Charlie Crist and Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Losses

The trust fund is a massive investment account, today worth about $117 billion and holding the retirement assets of about 1 million current and retired state employees, as well as some local police and firefighters. It is one of the largest retirement funds in the nation, even the world. According to the last actuarial report completed in 2009, the fund is 88.5 percent funded -- meaning if every employee retired today, they would get 88.5 percent of their retirement benefits. A funding level of 80 percent is considered healthy.

So when Wall Street melted down, and stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets began their steep decline in 2008, the value of Florida's retirement fund fell, too. Did the retirement fund lose $24 billion? RPOF does the math this way: On June 30, 2007, the fund was at its peak at $138.4 billion and by June 30, 2010, the value had declined to $109.34 billion, a $29 billion drop in value.

The RPOF cites the $4.5 billion paid out to retirees in 2009-10 and concludes the net investment loss is $24.56 billion. Their number is wrong for these reasons: First, the value of the fund was $136.4 billion, not $138.4 billion, in June 2007. And second, the party subtracted the 2009-2010 payments to retirees from that three-year loss, but failed to subtract the payments to retirees in the other two years as well. Those payments were $3.4 billion in 2007-2008 and $3.2 billion in 2008-2009. If they had subtracted all three years, the drop in value since 2007, then, is $15.96 billion. But party spokesman Dan Conston then said that none of the payouts should have subtracted unless new contributions from the state and other agencies were also added, and he didn’t provide those amounts.

In addition to getting the number wrong, the ad also is inaccurate when it suggests that the money is gone. The loss in value represented a snapshot in time and since June 30, 2010, the trust fund had recovered $8 billion. By Sept. 21, 2010, when the ad began airing, the value of the fund was back to $117 billion, making the net change from the June 30, 2007, value just $8.3 billion.

It's become common to refer to drops in value as losses but, as Dennis MacKee, spokesman for the SBA, points out, "These are changes in net asset values, (they) are not losses until you sell. You don't realize a loss in value until you sell the asset."

We agree. The nature of investing is to see values rise and fall, and it is inaccurate to say that $24 billion of the state pension fund is "gone" when that number is wrong and it's not a permanent loss anyway.

In charge

State law requires the SBA to "make purchases, sales, exchanges, investments, and reinvestments for and on behalf of the funds" and "see that moneys invested under the provisions of ss. 215.44-215.53 are at all times handled in the best interests of the state." Does that mean Sink was "in charge" of the pension fund? According to the statute, the three-member board "may retain investment advisers or managers, or both, external to in-house staff, to assist the board in carrying out the power specified," and the board "shall create an audit committee to assist the board in fulfilling its oversight responsibilities."

The SBA policy statement, which the trustees approve, requires that "the Board delegates to the Executive Director the administrative and investment authority, within the statutory limitations and rules, to manage the investment of FRS assets."

MacKee describes it this way: "Trustees generally deal at a policy level while their appointees assist at a more strategic level." Ash Williams is the SBA's executive director, and the job of investing the state's assets is divided between in-house investment managers and external investment managers.

The type of investment often determines whether the asset is managed internally or with an outside firm. For example, 60 percent of all domestic equities, foreign equity and fixed income investments are managed by external managers while most real estate, private equity and strategic investments are managed internally, MacKee said.

So as a trustee, Sink does not actually do the investing. The RPOF ad is carefully worded, and we agree it is accurate to say Sink was "in charge," along with the two other trustees. But we believe  the implication that she had a broader role in investment outcomes is misleading.

Expert warnings

We asked RPOF what they were referring to when the ad said that "experts even warned Sink she was making risky investments." We’ve established it's inaccurate to say that Sink was making the investments, so let's look at whether she and the other trustees were warned. RPOF cited a Jan. 25, 2009, St. Petersburg Times story that cited audits warning the SBA that it was overexposed to risk and cited specifically the investment in a $5.4 billion apartment complex on 80 acres in Manhattan known as Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The investment was indeed a boondoggle, a real estate deal anchored down by both too much debt and too high a price tag. When the bonds on the property were downgraded and the investment eventually collapsed this year, Florida’s SBA was forced to write off its entire $250 million investment, a $266 million net loss.

It's a fair question to ask whether Sink, as a member of the SBA, asked enough questions and demanded enough answers when the agency auditors were raising these warnings. It is not accurate to imply that she alone was making the investments. Could Sink have done more? It's a good question but the ad doesn't ask; it concludes she knew all. MacKee said that with 15,000 individual securities and 36 managed investment funds with different investment objectives, the odds of large fluctuations in value are great depending on the daily shifts in the market. "We've had the value of the pension fund in one day move by more than $1 billion…To think you’d have the opportunity with any governing board to look at individual investments -- it's not done at that level."

Bonuses

The RPOF cites an April 16, 2008, story in the Palm Beach Post about bonuses handed out to 17 SBA employees "from $371 to $2,500 for their work during an unprecedented two-week, $16 billion run of withdrawals." In addition to the retirement account, the SBA manages the Local Government Investment Pool, which was facing a slew of withdrawals after news broke that the pool had lost value because of investments in risky, mortgage-backed securities.

The facts are more complicated. The losses in the Local Government Investment Pool were the result of investments in asset-backed commercial paper starting in 2000, before Sink was elected to office, MacKee said. Unlike the pension fund, which can handle the kind of volatility in those markets, the LGIP is "managed as a liquidity fund, basically a bank account," he said. So when local governments started to see the value of the LGIP drop because of the risky securities, many panicked and started to withdraw money in droves -- $16 billion over two weeks in November 2007.

The bonus checks were in the works for more than a year before they were handed out, MacKee said. The SBA has an internal policy for allocating bonuses, based on a fixed set of performance measures reached by staff who manage the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund, MacKee said. The bonuses were distributed in January 2008 based on the performance of the retirement fund between June 2006 and June 2007, he said. That was the year the fund reached its peak of $136.4 billion. It was also the last time bonuses were paid, MacKee said, and "the checks were cut in 2008 because you need to know what the performance was."

Did Sink approve the bonuses? Not directly. It was included in the 2007-08 SBA budget, MacKee said, and Sink and the other trustees approved the budget. On this point, the RPOF is again misleading. More importantly, the ad inaccurately implies that the bonuses were linked to the investment losses.

Our ruling

Now let's return to the key claim, that state pension fund staffers "lost billions. Then Sink gave them bonuses." This ad accurately highlights Sink's oversight role of the state's pension fund but after that, this ad stretches the facts and misleads the viewer. The $24 billion is not gone. Sink did not personally make the risky investments or give bonuses to staffers, and the staff bonuses preceded the fund's loss in value.

What is not debatable is that Rick Scott is a criminal. Doesn't matter whether he's a Republican or a communists- the facts remain the same. Scott's fraud - or grand theft was in the hundreds of millions - the only difference between Scott and a bank robber is that Scott didn't use a gun and wear a mask. It looks like one of the defining traits of the tea party conservatives like Scott is the absence of shame when they give hard working Americans the shaft. And shame of the Florida Republican Party - you know the people that are going to bring change to Washington - for helping Scott lie and buy his way into office.

Nevada Tea Party Senate Candidate Sharron Angle Claims There is No Such Thing as Autism. Brags About Cashing In On Fox Appearances

Nevada Tea Party Senate Candidate Sharron Angle Claims There is No Such Thing as Autism. Brags About Cashing In On Fox Appearances

Tea Party conservative Republican Sharron Angle already explicitly said that she appears on Fox as a fundraising tool, because they allow her to tell viewers to go to her website and donate to her campaign. But Jon Ralson found a great tape of Angle at a house party over the weekend describing exactly how much buck a candidate can make off a Fox appearance.

    Sharron Angle: It’s going really well. If you’re interested in just the Internet part of that -- and of course I’ve been criticized for saying that I like to be friends with the [press] -- but here’s the deal: when I get a friendly press outlet -- not so much the guy that’s interviewing me -- it’s their audience that I’m trying to reach. So, if I can get on Rush Limbaugh, and I can say, "Harry Reid needs $25 million. I need a million people to send twenty five dollars to SharronAngle.com.” The day I was able to say that [even], he made $236,000 dollars. That’s why it’s so important. Somebody ... I’m going on Bill O’Reilly the 16th. They say, "Bill O’Reilly, you better watch out for that guy, he’s not necessarily a friendly" ... Doesn’t matter, his audience is friendly, and if I can get an opportunity to say that at least once on his show -- when I said it on Sean Hannity’s television show we made $40,000 before we even got out of the studio in New York.

So, again, Fox News is the communications arm of the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party. The fun part is that even when Bill O'Reilly does his "I'm just an independent" thing and actually questions a Republican, all his viewers hear and see is "send this woman money."

   
Because Angle has a nasty habit of saying outright what conservative candidates are supposed to keep on a wink-nudge basis, she keeps telling people that she does Fox and Christian radio in order to raise money without being challenged for her nutty views.

But avoiding tough reporters does not stop Angle from saying idiotic things -- like, say, putting "autism" in scare quotes at a rally last year.

"You're paying for things you don't even need," Angle says -- like, uh, healthcare for kids who are pretending to have something called "autism," in order to steal your insurance money, I guess.

So Fox and assorted right-media are playing sugar daddy for Angle. Angle rakes in cash and at the same time doesn't have to answer any tough questions about her wacky anti-American/anti-family views. The cherry on top is like her right-wing comrade conservative hate monger Michael Savage, she says kids are just faking, there is no such thing as autism.

How many faces does Meg Whitman have. Conservatives always have at least two - Meg Whitman ( Tea Party conservative candidate for California governor)  sees the writing on the Proposition 23 wall - The candidate says she won't vote for the attempt to suspend California's global warming law. But there's a catch

Dear Seniors of Wisconsin and the rest of this great country - Wisconsin Senate tea party conservative candidate Ron Johnson likens Social Security to Bernie Madoff style Ponzi scheme. It not clear why Johnson who is up to his ears in government subsidies hates America and senior citizens. He says it is a matter of principles. Who's principles? Communist dictator Joesph Stalin.

Carly Fiorina Agenda Bought and Paid for By Crazy Right-wing Billionaires

Carly Fiorina Agenda Bought and Paid by By Crazy Right-wing Billionaires

David and Charles Koch are the oil and gas tycoons sponsoring a fundraiser for US Senate candidate Carly Fiorina at the Republican Senatorial headquarters in Washington, DC on Thursday.

The oil bros influence over the development of the Tea Party and GOP politics for decades was exposed recently in The New Yorker. The Koch brothers' story is a frightening tale about how a stealth power grab by right wingers can develop a populist face for a corporate establishment movement.

Is it any wonder that Fiorina, the California US Senate candidate challenging Barbara Boxer, endorsed Proposition 23, the repeal of the state's landmark greenhouse gas emissions caps also financed by a cool million from the Koch brothers.

The Koch addiction is becoming a household brand in dirty politics in America. The family's money is fueling the new threat of a return to Reagan-Bush deregulation at the heart of the Tea Party's agenda.

It's high time those with the Koch Addiction wore the brand on their forehead. This family's got one thing in mind -- turning the reins of government over to those who would turn back the clock on government regulation of polluters by decades.

At least Carly's loyalties are obvious. As a senator - like most of the Republican party - will simply call all the special interests she he hostage too and ask them how she should vote. This is the grand old tradition of conservatism - the ones who are going to bring change to Washington.

Readjust Fiorina's misdirected finger

Dear Carly Fiorina: The blame game: falsely placing guilt on your opponent for an act one does not commit is deceitful if not outright shameful.

Before coming to Glendale and using the New Horizons day care center as an example of wasted federal funds (“Senate candidate slams local project,” Sept. 13), you should have done your homework and researched just what Maria Rochart, the nonprofit’s founder, has accomplished with low-income youth and their families. All of us should praise Rochart for attempting to build a “Children’s Village” child care facility. This is what the community really needs and desires.

Placing blame on Sen. Barbara Boxer for voting on the stimulus bill is deceptive and totally distracts from the real culprits for the failure of our economy. If you really wanted to point the finger at wasteful federal funds, you should have stood on the rooftop of Chase bank, the former Washington Mutual, and blamed Washington for the fraud and taxpayer bailout of our banking and financial system.

If that were not enough, you could have taken a ride to Glendale Forest Lawn Memorial Park and stood on the lawn and pointed out the graves of our patriotic and courageous, innocent youth who have traded their lives for the lies of Washington and the Pentagon, which have wasted trillions of taxpayer’s money on these wars.

Finally, to save yourself, you should encourage the City Council to save the child care center and continue to seek funds to build this much needed facility.

Most economists agree the stimulus ( Recovery Act) may have had it drawbacks but it did stop the country from falling into a catastrophic depression where unemployment would have been upwards of 15 to 16% instead of the current 9.5. Carly is typical of her those who worship Sarah Palin - they would rather the country fail than give credit to moderate Democrats for saving it from the damage left by eight years of Republican rule..

Hey Wisconsin What Does Ron Johnson Stand For?

WI-Sen: Ron Johnson--frequent rider on the government gravy train

When we last left the great state of Wisconsin, the campaign of GOP Senate candidate Ron Johnson was being forced to answer for the revelation that Mr. No Big Government had sought and received a government-backed loan during the early days of his business career.

The campaign gave the dismissive response that "An industrial revenue bond is neither special treatment nor a government payment or subsidy."

Let's see them try to explain how a a government payment is not a government payment:

    A railroad line to Senate candidate Ron Johnson's plastics factory was built with the assistance of a federal grant.

    According to documents from the Oshkosh city clerk's office, an Urban Development Action Grant in the amount of $75,000 was used to build a rail spur to Pacur, a plastics manufacturing company owned by Johnson.

Team Johnson immediately blasted the story, saying that "we have highways, railroads, post offices, water and electrical services among other public services that businesses rely on each day."

This, in short, is an asinine assertion. All these infrastructure components cited by the Johnson campaign exist because their construction is for the public good, which includes businesses but also means the citizenry at-large. This grant was to give a dedicated rail line for one plastics company.

The public did not benefit from its construction, Pacur did. Their conflation of a dedicated rail spur to water and electrical infrastructure is telling. It is pretty evident from their analogy that their view is that government can only be as large as it needs to be to cater to the whims of corporate America.

Everything else is "big government."

Johnson's business was not self-made. It had a lot of assistance from his fellow citizens of Wisconsin - and the rest of America for that matter. Why can't Johnson bring himself to have enough humility to say thanks America. Johnson promises to change Washington. Do we really need another millionaire hypocrite pretending to care about what happens to the middle-class. Johnson subscribes to Bush's economic policies - you know the ones that drove the economic bus off a cliff. That is not change America can believe in.

Ron Johnson may not know much about public policy, care about the middle-class or what the U.S. Constitution descibes as the common good, but he does know about talking out both sides of his two faces - 

Johnson has adopted an all-green design and logo, giving the impression that he is a friend of the environment. But he is fervent supporter of fossil fuels, defending BP against recent criticisms and calling climate change theories "lunacy" and "not proven by any stretch of the imagination.” (Johnson has suggested sunspots have caused recent weather changes, despite sunspots being at historic lows.)

Johnson demands a smaller, less-involved government, saying our current one is "robbing the bank accounts of future generations of Americans." But even while Johnson calls government spending and subsidies a "threat to our freedom" and insists "government doesn't create jobs," he refuses to acknowledge that his company received millions of dollars in industrial revenue bonds. Johnson's campaign maintains the money he received was not a government handout. Yet this exact form of government subsidized loan is what fiscal conservative temple The Cato Institute calls "corporate welfare."

...Johnson could not be more different than Feingold when it comes to creativity and a voice for Wisconsin. Johnson is a voice for money. He admits as much, saying of Wisconsin's loss of manufacturing jobs to NAFTA "there are always winners and losers." For a candidate who complains about a private sector tax base, those "losers" include the 177,000-odd manufacturing jobs Wisconsin has lost in the last decade; that's 177,000 incomes that paid taxes.

...For solutions to entitlement reform, Johnson points to fellow Wisconsinite and incumbent GOP Congressman Paul Ryan. (It's noteworthy that while Johnson castigates opponent Feingold for being a career politician, he reveres Congressman Ryan, whose never held a job outside government since graduating college in 1992. Spectacular doublethink).

Gosh it seem like Johnson is just another Republican that wants to create a dog eat dog America all the while milking the government cash cow for funds that help make him wealthy. That does display some self made attitude if the new definition of self made is to drain funds from tax payers and than complaining about government handouts. Johnson is your typical right-wing extremist welfare baby - handouts are good for him, but he believes it is wrong to give struggling Americans a helping hand.

WI GOP congressman supporting Ron Johnson surprised that Johnson supports Great Lakes oil drilling.

Ron Johnson, a wealthy business executive and leading Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin this year, is beginning to receive scrutiny for his far right views. He has been criticized recently for opposing an anti-sex offenders bill, the Child Victim Act, and for saying that he is “glad there’s global warming.” Last month, when asked if he would support drilling for oil in the Great Lakes, Johnson — who owns more than $100,000 in BP stock — replied, “I think we have to, get the oil where it is.” At a town hall on Wednesday in Howards Grove, Wisconsin, ThinkProgress asked Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) — who was sporting a Ron Johnson for Senate bumper sticker — if he agreed with Johnson’s support for Great Lakes oil drilling. Petri said he personally hasn’t supported Great Lakes drilling, but seemed genuinely baffled by Johnson’s radical views, and refused to comment.

Whether there should be drilling in the Great Lakes is pretty extreme, but let's say we did. Would Johnson be voting for that because it is genuinely better than developing an energy plan that is cleaner and sustainable or because it would put more money in his pocket while he plays golf.  And why oh why is Johnson against the Child Victim Act? Because he was afraid that giving victims their day in court would cost the scumbags who assaulted them too much money. That's right Wisconsin we need somebody in Washington who will look out for the financial interests of sexual predators. Needless to say Johnson is the favorite of the far rights zealots of the Tea Party.

Please Vote Republican. They Have Solutions to All Our Problems

Please Vote Republican. They Have Solutions to All Our Problems

Part of the GOP’s election strategy this year has been to try to claim that it is the Party of fiscal conservatism. As part of that campaign, Republicans regularly repeat the mantra that in order to get the deficit under control, the federal government needs to “cut spending” (despite also calling for $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy that aren’t paid for). They argue that if they were in control of government they would do just that. But all too often, when asked what spending cuts they would enact, Republicans don’t have an answer.

Yesterday on ABC’s Top Line, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) offered an example of the GOP’s obfuscation. Calling for extending all the Bush tax cuts, Gregg said, “The issue right now is the profligate spending of this Congress and this Presidency.” But when Gregg was asked for specific cuts, he couldn’t offer any:

    HOST: Help us square this then. The increase in the deficit by extending the tax cuts, seems to me there’s not enough spending cuts that can be made to make up for the deficit that we’re continuing to build up.

    GREGG: We’re building the deficit because of the spending, that’s where the deficit is coming from…that massive explosion of spending is where the problem is. It’s not on the revenue side, it’s on the spending side. So why put in all this additional spending. Why don’t you just starting cutting spending first because that is where the problem is.

Similarly, CNBC host Larry Kudlow asked GOP U.S. Senate candidate in California Carly Fiornia what she would cut. All she could muster was bringing spending back to 2008 levels. Another CNBC host asked Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) last month what he would cut. “We’ve got spending to cut in the short term what we’ve got is a huge problem in the long term,” said Cantor, who repeatedly couldn’t give an answer on what he would cut when pressed by the host.

And in March, ThinkProgress asked Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) repeatedly what he would cut in order to reduce federal spending and he couldn’t identify any specifics. Watch the video compilation at link:

Other Republicans have tried to answer this question but have come up a bit short. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said in July that he would “would rescind the unspent stimulus funds,” which at the time, meant that he would do away with $55 billion in middle class tax cuts. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MI) suggested eliminating the Affordable Care Act, thinking it would save $1 trillion, but it would actually increase the deficit by $143 billion.

Republicans spent like insane elites from 2000 to 2008. What did they learn? Rename themselves tea baggers and pretend they were out of town when all that deficit spending and tax cuts for the wealthy was going on. What ideas do they have to fix the problems they caused? Lots of whining and finger pointing.

How Conservative Billionaires and Businesses Crashed the Economy and Screwed the Middle-Class

How Conservative Billionaires and Businesses Crashed the Economy and Screwed the Middle-Class

First, the 90 percent of Americans who haven’t seen a raise in 35 years compensated for their stagnant incomes and kept on consuming, buying televisions and going out to dinner. How did they do it? First, by bringing women into the workforce in huge numbers, transforming the “typical” single-breadwinner family into a two-earner household. Between 1955 and 2002, the percentage of married women who had jobs outside the home almost doubled.  Workers’ salaries stayed pretty much the same, but the average family now had two paychecks instead of one.

After that, we started to finance our lifestyles through debt—mounds of it. Consumer debt blossomed; trade deficits (which are ultimately financed by debt) exploded, and the government started to run big budget deficits, year in and year out. In the period after World War II, while wages were still rising along with the overall economy, Americans socked away 7 to 12 percent of the nation’s income in savings annually (the data only go back as far as 1959). But in the 1980s, that began to decline—the savings rate fell from around 10 percent in the 1960s and the 1970s to about 7 percent in the 1980s, and by 2005, it stood at less than 1 percent (it’s rebounded somewhat since the crash—to 3.3 percent at the beginning of 2010).

The second reason Americans seem complacent in the face of this tectonic shift in their economic fortunes is more controversial: the “New Conservative Movement” built a highly influential message machine that’s helped obscure not only the economic history of the last four decades, but the very notion of class itself.
The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us

Let’s return to the early 1970s, when a rattled economic elite became determined to regain control of the U.S. economy. How do you go about achieving that in a democracy?

One way, of course, is to depose the government and replace it with one that’s more to your liking. In the 1930s, a group of businessmen contemplated just that—a military takeover of Washington, D.C., to stop Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dreaded New Deal from being enacted. The plot fell apart when the decorated general the group had tapped to lead the coup turned in the conspirators.

A more subtle approach is to convince a majority of voters that your interests are, in fact, their own. Yet there’s a big problem with this: if you belong to a rarified group, then the notion of aligned interests doesn’t reflect objective reality. And in the early 1970s, the media and academia provided a neutral arbiter of that reality (of sorts).

We’ve all grown accustomed to conservatives’ conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youths into Maoism. In the early 1970s, a group of very wealthy conservatives started to invest in what you might call “intellectual infrastructure” ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

Families with names such as Olin, Coors, Scaife, Bradley, and Koch may not be familiar to most Americans, but their efforts have had a profound impact on our economic discourse. Having amassed huge fortunes in business, these families used their foundations to fund the movement that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and eventually bring about the coronation of George W. Bush in 2000.

In 1973, brewer Joseph Coors kicked in $250,000 for seed money to start the now highly influential Heritage Foundation (with the help of the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and DeVos foundations). In 1977, Charles Koch, an oil billionaire, started the libertarian CATO Institute. Richard Mellon Scaife, a wealthy right-wing philanthropist who would later fund the shady “Arkansas Project” that almost brought down Bill Clinton’s presidency, bought the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 1970. The American Enterprise Institute, which was founded as the American Enterprise Association in the 1930s and remained relatively obscure through the 1960s, was transformed into an ideological powerhouse when it added a research faculty in 1972. The Hoover Institution, founded by Herbert himself in 1928, saw a huge increase in funding in the 1960s and would be transformed during the 1980s into the Washington advocacy organization that it is today.

In 1982, billionaire and right-wing messianic leader Sun Myung Moon started the Washington Times as an antidote to the “liberal” Washington Post. The paper, which promoted competition in the free market over all other human virtues, would be subsidized by the "Moonies” to a tune of $1.7 billion during the next 20 years. In 2000, United Press International, a venerable but declining newswire, was bought up by Moon’s media conglomerate, World News Communications.

With generous financing from that same group of conservative foundations, the Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and Ted Olsen—who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush’s solicitor general. The Federalist Society continues to have a major impact on our legal community.

In 2005, one of the most influential right-wing funders, the John M. Olin Foundation, actually declared its “mission accomplished” and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after “three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right,” the foundation’s services were no longer needed. The Times reported that the loss of Olin wasn’t terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas “a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today’s conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio.” And that’s not even mentioning Rupert Murdoch’s vast, and vastly dishonest, media empire.

The rise of the conservative “noise machine” has been discussed at length in a number of other works, and conservatives dismiss it as a conspiracy theory of sorts. In truth, it’s anything but—it’s simply a matter of people with ample resources engaging in some savvy politics in an age of highly effective mass communication. There’s nothing new about that; what’s changed is that the world of advertising and marketing has become increasingly sophisticated, and the Right has played the instrument of modern public relations like a maestro.

Taken as a whole, it’s difficult to overstate how profound an impact these ideological armies have had on our economic debates. Writing in the Washington Post, Kathleen Hall and Joseph Capella, two scholars with the Annenberg School of Communication, discussed the findings of a study in which they coded and analyzed the content broadcast across conservative media networks. They found a tendency to “enwrap [their audience] in a world in which facts supportive of Democratic claims are discredited and those consistent with conservative ones championed.” The scholars warned, “When one systematically misperceives the positions of those of a supposedly different ideology, one may decide to oppose legislation or vote against a candidate with whom, on some issues of importance, one actually agrees.”

A larger issue is that the corporate Right’s messaging doesn’t remain confined to the conservative media. The end of the Cold War brought about a sense of economic triumphalism, which infected the conventional wisdom that ultimately shapes the news stories we read—U.S.-style capitalism had slain the socialist beast, proving to many that in the words of Tom Paine, “government is best when it governs least.”

A wave of mergers also concentrated our media in the hands of a few highly influential corporations. In 2009, there was a rare (public) example of one such corporation nakedly exerting editorial control over the decisions of one of its news “assets.” During a meeting between the top management of General Electric, which owned NBC-Universal with its various news networks, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, GE executives agreed to force MSNBC’s firebrand host Keith Olbermann to cease fire in his long-standing feud with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, “The most striking aspect of this episode is that GE isn’t even bothering any longer to deny the fact that they exert control over MSNBC’s journalism.”

    Most notably, the deal wasn’t engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O’Reilly’s show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O’Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp.

Five months previously, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had been criticized for touting GE’s stock on his show, "Morning Joe," without disclosing that the company owned the network that employed him. “I never invest in the stock market because I think—I’ve always thought—that it’s just—it’s a crap shoot,” he said. “[But] GE goes down to five, six, or seven, and I’m thinking, ‘My god. I’m gonna invest for the first time, and I’m gonna send my kids to college through this.’“

A week after that, Scarborough invited Nancy Snyderman, a regular medical correspondent for NBC’s networks, onto the show to discuss the health care reform bill then moving through Congress. Snyderman, who was presented to the audience as an impartial medical expert, had lost the ABC News job she’d previously held for 17 years due to a conflict of interest. The Nashville Examiner reported that “she was briefly suspended for being paid to promote J & J’s product Tylenol. She later spent four years with Johnson & Johnson as Vice President of Consumer Education.”

In another ABC segment, Snyderman weighed in on congressional hearings about autism without disclosing that a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary was the target of litigation alleging that one of its vaccines may help cause the condition. It was a “blatant conflict of interest,” in the words of National Autism Association vice president Ann Brasher.

Snyderman is hardly unique. A months-long investigation in 2010 by the Nation’s Sebastian Jones revealed what he called a far-reaching “media-lobbying complex”—dozens of corporate hired guns who appear on network broadcasts without disclosing their ties to the firms they work for. Jones wrote of “the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news,” citing such appearances as former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, who went on MSNBC—which conservatives insist is the liberal antidote to Fox News—to urge the Obama administration to launch an ambitious energy program.

    The first step [toward a green economy], Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.”

    As Ridge counseled the administration to “put that package together,” he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren’t told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Jones found that during just the previous three years, “at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials—people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests”—had appeared on the major news channels. “Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of appearances,” he wrote.

There’s a final piece of this puzzle that’s less insidious than what Jones unearthed but probably has a bigger impact on our discourse: the standard-issue “he-said/she-said” reporting that’s so instinctive to neutral, “unbiased” journalists. Reporters are expected to get “both sides” of every story, even if one of those sides is making factually dishonest arguments. And there are an untold number of consultants, corporate flacks, lobbyists, and right-wing think-tankers who are always good for a quick quote for a reporter working on deadline.

The economic perception that emerges from all of this simply doesn’t depict the economy in which most Americans live and work. Before the crash of 2008, most Americans saw news of a relatively robust economy, with solid growth and rising stock prices. But their own incomes had essentially stagnated for a generation. I’ve long thought that the disconnect may help explain why Americans suffer from depression at higher rates than do the citizens of most other advanced countries—if you think the economy’s solid, everyone else is prospering, and yet you still just can’t get ahead, isn’t it natural to conclude it must be the result of some fundamental flaw in yourself?

Maybe you do have flaws—sure, you do—but it’s important to understand how the economy helps shape one’s fortunes.

Part of a series of report that will be available at the link. All very interesting but people have a tendency not to do anything until it affects them. Astonishingly the Tea Bagger movement is not a populist movement about placing blame on the rich and powerful that caused our current economic problems. It is a movement about blaming the minimum wage working poor and the middle-class.

Elect Republicans. Republicans Have All The Best Ideas For Solving Problems

Republicans Want To Cut Federal Spending But Have No Idea What Programs To Cut

Part of the GOP’s election strategy this year has been to try to claim that it is the Party of fiscal conservatism. As part of that campaign, Republicans regularly repeat the mantra that in order to get the deficit under control, the federal government needs to “cut spending” (despite also calling for $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy that aren’t paid for). They argue that if they were in control of government they would do just that. But all too often, when asked what spending cuts they would enact, Republicans don’t have an answer.

Yesterday on ABC’s Top Line, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) offered an example of the GOP’s obfuscation. Calling for extending all the Bush tax cuts, Gregg said, “The issue right now is the profligate spending of this Congress and this Presidency.” But when Gregg was asked for specific cuts, he couldn’t offer any:

    HOST: Help us square this then. The increase in the deficit by extending the tax cuts, seems to me there’s not enough spending cuts that can be made to make up for the deficit that we’re continuing to build up.

    GREGG: We’re building the deficit because of the spending, that’s where the deficit is coming from…that massive explosion of spending is where the problem is. It’s not on the revenue side, it’s on the spending side. So why put in all this additional spending. Why don’t you just starting cutting spending first because that is where the problem is. (Why can't Gregg answer a simple question. What exact spending programs would he cut? So simple even a conservative like Greeg who voted for all the deficit spending under the Bush administration, could answer.)

Similarly, CNBC host Larry Kudlow asked GOP U.S. Senate candidate in California Carly Fiornia what she would cut. All she could muster was bringing spending back to 2008 levels ( Those levels would include the Bush-Republican TARP bail-out and running up the largest deficit in history). Another CNBC host asked Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) last month what he would cut. “We’ve got spending to cut in the short term what we’ve got is a huge problem in the long term,” said Cantor, who repeatedly couldn’t give an answer on what he would cut when pressed by the host.

And in March, ThinkProgress asked Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) repeatedly what he would cut in order to reduce federal spending and he couldn’t identify any specifics. ( he's not called Double Talking Liar Boozman for nothing)Watch the video compilation at link:

Other Republicans have tried to answer this question but have come up a bit short. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said in July that he would “would rescind the unspent stimulus funds,” which at the time, meant that he would do away with $55 billion in middle class tax cuts. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MI) suggested eliminating the Affordable Care Act, thinking it would save $1 trillion, but it would actually increase the deficit by $143 billion. -( Roy has never been able to do math. Look up his record at VoteSmart - for eight years he voted for every pork belly earmark in sight)

Christine O’Donnell In Oct. 1999: ‘I Dabbled Into Witchcraft’

Christine O'Donnell Thought Joe Biden Tapped Her Phone - O'Donnell is the future of the conservative movement along with her mentor Sarah Palin.

Sharon Angle, Too Wacky and Extreme for America?

Sharron Angle Claims Unemployment Insurance 'Really Doesn't Benefit Anyone'

In an interview this Wednesday, Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle heightened her criticisms of unemployment insurance, insisting that the benefits program to help the jobless ended up benefiting nobody.

Sitting down with conservative radio talk show host Heidi Harris, Angle once again addressed a topic that brought her a bit of political heat -- including a hard-hitting ad from her opponent Harry Reid-- not too long ago.

"People don't want to be unemployed," she explained. "They want to have real, full-time, permanent jobs with a future. That's what they want, and we need to create that climate in Washington, D.C. that encourages businesses to create those full-time, permanent jobs with a future, and all [Rep.] Shelley Berkeley and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid want to do is put a band-aid on this by extending unemployment, which really doesn't benefit anyone. What happens is of course that your skills stagnate. You become demoralized yourself, you know, feeling that I can't ever get a job, and these are not the solutions to the problem. We have real solutions, but they won't look at the real solutions."

This is a fresh twist in Angle's relatively robust campaign against unemployment insurance. Prior to her appearance with Harris, the Tea Party favorite had argued that such benefits made the jobless "spoiled" in their dependency on the government. On other occasions she's stressed that unemployment insurance should be cut so as to compel people to go look for work.

Does Angle and her wacky far right-wing supporters realize the unemployed were people who had a job, which means they paid taxes toward supporting safety net programs like unemployment. Angle and conservatives are arguing people do not have the right to benefits they paid for. Angle and her supporters seem to have nothing but malicious contempt for hard working Americas who have done nothing wrong except get laid off from their jobs.

Angle say we need to get back to the Constitution and the Founder's original intent. There are lots of problems with a 21st century society going back to the way they did things before the telephone was invented, but one thing Angle and her oddball cheerleaders should do is study a little history - Sharron Angle Channels Bleeding Heart of Thomas Jefferson

In a recent interview, Nevada Tea Party candidate for Senate, Sharron Angle, claimed that her far right wing beliefs mirror those of the Founding Fathers. (When asked about Harry Reid’s claim that she is too conservative, Angle replied, “I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative.”) Of course, this is nothing new for Angle – like other Tea Partiers (see my previous post), she seems to have a fetish about comparing herself with the Founding Fathers and misquoting Thomas Jefferson. Back in March she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "They say, 'You're too conservative.' Was Thomas Jefferson too conservative? I'm tired of some people calling me wacky."

Wacky, huh? Well, Sharron, you do raise an interesting question, and I’ll get back to that in a little bit.

First, let’s just go back to last month and get a good handle on Angle’s Jeffersonian credentials. On July 22, Angle signed a pledge to the American Family Business Institute (www.nodeathtax.org – yeah, I think they’re kind of a single issue organization) to completely abolish the inheritance tax. Surely, the gist of all of Jefferson’s writings (or at least the general mystique of his legend in Tea Partiers’ eyes) indicate that he would have supported Angle’s “Death Tax Repeal Pledge,” right? But he did write a little something that might be applicable to this situation:



“If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra-taxation violates it.”

Look at that! He is concerned about “extra-taxation!” That sounds like Tea Party rhetoric to me, so I guess Sharron is right – but wait, what’s that part before it? Whoa! Did he say what I think he said? An individual’s “overgrown wealth” might be “dangerous to the state,” and should be corrected? Perhaps he foresaw the huge role that money plays in our political system today. (Really, this pretty much summarizes standard Tea Party dogma, does it not?)




His prescription is to establish limits on inheritance: “equal inheritance to all in equal degree.” In other words, Jefferson supported the concept of an inheritance tax. And to keep inheritance “equal to all in equal degree,” I’m guessing the result would be some pretty heavy taxation in a lot of cases. Such a law could arguably redistribute wealth on a far grander scale than any government program proposed or already in existence.

If crazies like Angle want to claim the ideological mantle of the Founders shouldn't they first learn what the Founders actually thought. Jefferson's idea of taxing wealthy estates does go beyond anything her opponent Harry Reid has called for, but that seems to be Angle's game. She lies about Thomas Jefferson and Harry Reid to con the public into voting for her and her bizarre UnAmerican agenda.

Republican Meg Whitman Breaks Record for False Campaign Ads Trying to Buy Her Way Into Office

California: Republican Meg Whitman Breaks Record for False Campaign Ads and Trying to Buy Governorship

Hours after putting $15 million more into her bid for California governor, Republican Meg Whitman on Wednesday defended her donation of a record-breaking $119 million of her own money, saying "my job is to spend money to get this message out."

The former eBay CEO, whose donations to her campaign now top New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $110 million contribution to his re-election bid last year, made the comment after an appearance before a crowd of nearly 300 employees at the San Francisco headquarters of Yelp, the social-networking and rating website.

In a departure from her tightly scripted campaign events, Whitman took some tough questions from the mostly under-30 audience, who grilled her on her campaign spending, negative ads and stance on Proposition 8, the state's ban on same-sex marriage, which she supported.

..."Why are you refusing to remove an ad that has been proven to be false and therefore misleading?" McKay asked. "Why would you knowingly and purposely run a campaign that is based on lies?"

Whitman defended the spots as "essentially" true, saying "politics is a tough business. And you have got to tell people why to vote for you."
'Smear tactics'

McKay also asked: "Why have you made smear tactics and an overall negative focus such hallmarks of your campaign? It doesn't seem to me that defaming your opponent will help California in any way."

Whitman has been found to be an egregious liar. A hypocrite who feels democracy is best served with Soviet style propaganda passing for informed debate. Thinks the state and federal government has the right to meddle in people's personal lives. Has displayed the kind of arrogance that average citizens are tired of seeing in public officials. Has displayed a blatant disregard for the concerns of average citizens. Meg thinks scientific conclusions can be dismissed with her opinions - damn the empirical evidence. In other words Meg Whitman is your typical right-wing Republican.


Conservative Freak Show: What the world has learned about Christine O'Donnell





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6 Key Points About the Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Debate Raging in Washington

6 Key Points About the Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Debate Raging in Washington

Washington is engaged in a noisy fight over extending George W. Bush’s “temporary” tax cuts, set to expire at the end of the year.

The battle lines are clearly defined: President Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership are pressing to extend the cuts that put some money into the pockets of the middle class and let those for the top of the heap expire on schedule. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said this week he might go along with that plan, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, joined the rest of the GOP caucus in insisting that the cuts giving huge breaks to the rich be continued indefinitely as well. Some Blue Dogs have said they’d prefer to keep the break for their wealthy patrons in place, and Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, arguably corporate America’s most reliable mouthpiece in the Senate, has signaled that he may join a Republican filibuster to block passage of any bill that allows them to expire.

National polls -- six of them in recent weeks -- show that the American people are firmly on the side of the Democrats in this fight, but as Greg Sargent pointed out in the Washington Post, conservatives are betting that any discussion of taxes will feed into the wholly inaccurate narrative that "Democrats want to raise your taxes." “Republicans,” he wrote, “seem to be gambling that the nuance of the debate will get lost in all the noise, and people will see Dems as liberal tax-hikers even though they want to extend the tax cuts for the middle class.”

It may work. The corporate media is once again doing its typically horrendous job illuminating what’s at stake in the fight, and for whom. And Democrats are doing their typically pathetic job crafting a cohesive winning message. They’ve allowed the tax cuts, passed in 2001 and set to expire this year -- in order to get away with some parliamentary shenanigans in the Senate -- to be branded the “Bush tax cuts,” and the debate to center around whether to extend them or to “raise taxes.” The entire discussion would look very different if the administration had put together a package of cuts that target only the middle class, called them the “Obama tax cuts,” and then forced conservatives to oppose them.

But that didn’t happen, so we have another muddled debate over a significant matter of public policy. To sort out the fact from the fiction, here are some of the key issues underpinning this fall’s big tax fight.

1. The Rich Get Plenty of Relief from Those 'Middle-Class' Tax Cuts

The central point of debate on this issue -- tax cuts for the middle class versus those for the wealthy -- represents a false narrative. The “middle class” tax cuts give everyone a break, across the board, on their first $200,000 of income ($250K for married couples). What’s more, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CPBB), “high-income people actually receive much larger benefits in dollar terms from the so-called ‘middle-class tax cuts’ than middle-class people do.”

    Specifically, recent estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation show that extending just the middle-class tax cuts would provide more than $6,300 in tax cuts to households with incomes above $200,000, on average, compared to $1,132 in tax cuts for households with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000.

People making between $500K and a cool million would get a cut of $6,701 if the “middle-class” cuts are extended; if the cuts for the “wealthy” continue, they’d pocket an extra 10 grand, on average -- a cut of $17,467.

What’s really at stake are the very large cuts for those at the very top. According to CPBB, households with incomes of over $1 million would receive an average tax break of nearly $104,000 if the high-income measures are extended, versus $6,349 if they’re not. So, the issue is pretty simple: do we want to take on $1 trillion more in national debt over the next decade, on which we’d have to pay interest, to lop $98,000 from American millionaires’ tax bills?

There’s no “class war” between the rich and the middle class; the battle is between those who are wealthy today and all American workers who will be saddled with a bunch of additional debt in the future.

2. Budget Busters

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the sum total of the Bush tax cuts, if extended, would represent the single largest contributor to the deficit over the next decade. Conservative deficit hawks -- or deficit chickenhawks as the case may be -- respond to that reality by whistling as they pass the graveyard. Senator David Vitter, R-Louisiana, recently opined, “I don’t think we have to quote unquote ‘pay’ for that because it’s about Americans keeping their own money and our simply keeping the present tax rates in place.” He didn’t offer any proposed spending cuts, and didn’t mention the $2.7 trillion that extending all of the cuts would add to federal deficits over the next 10 years (or the cool trillion it would cost to extend only those cuts targeted at the top 2 percent of U.S. earners).

3. The Wealthy Don’t Invest the Money They Save in 'Job Creation'

One thing almost every conservative believes to be true, and all respectable economists agree is nonsense, is the idea that the wealthy take those tax breaks and funnel them back into the economy, spending lavishly and stimulating businesses to invest and create tons of new, high-paying jobs.

The reason that narrative is false is simple: they spend the same amount of money on their lifestyles either way, and simply take those cuts and add their value to their already healthy estates.

According to a study of high earners’ spending and saving patterns conducted by Moody's, “Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich.”

    The Moody’s research covering couples earning more than $210,000 found that spending by the wealthy is more likely to be influenced by the ups and downs of the stock market than changes in income-tax rates.

    Stock-market performance is the “primary factor that is driving the savings of the top 5 percent of households,” said Mustafa Akcay, economist and co-researcher of the savings data.

Increasing Americans’ saving rate is a worthy goal; borrowing a trillion dollars to do so for the wealthiest would be nothing short of a brain-dead policy.

4. Actually, Extending the Millionaire Cuts Will Stymie Long-Term Growth

Adding significant amounts of national debt threatens to send interest rates upward, which constrains new business investment and job creation. According to an estimate of that relationship conducted by former Bush Council of Economic Advisers chair Glenn Hubbard, Federal Reserve economist Eric Engen, outgoing OMB director Peter Orszag and William Gale, “the overall effect of the Bush tax cuts on economic growth has therefore been negative -- and it will continue to be negative if the cuts are extended.”

The res of the key points are at the link. making the wealthy pay for their share of America's debt is only fair. Americans have always believed those who benefit the most from public roads, national defense, police, firefighters, a publicly educated work force - the wealthy - should pay for all the benefits that help them make tons of money.

Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul is not mentally stable enough to be a U.S. Senator - Rand Paul doesn't understand how budgets, the Senate, math work, The Kentucky candidate promises to filibuster every unbalanced budget -- but that isn't allowed

Should Kentucky voters send Paul to the Senate, he promises not just to vote against, but to actively filibuster every budget bill that's not balanced.

OK! Good on you, Rand. That's true fiscal conservatism. Of course, that means you'll have to single-handedly close a $1.3 trillion budget gap in one year. So ... good luck with that one, I guess. You'll need to get rid of like 10 Departments of Agriculture.

Oh, wait, there's one other very small problem: Senators can't filibuster budgets.

Paul continues to prove my theory that he's just kind of dumb.

Rand doesn't think the Republican plan to destroy Social Security and Medicare in some bizarre bookkeeping trick to balance the budget is radical enough. Don't worry America when your elderly relatives and friends are starving they can always go begging to Paul's back door at the mansion.

Republicans Never Use Racist Imagery To Demagogue Anyone

Highbrow birtherism: Conservatives attack Obama as an "African colonial"

Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich recently made news by suggesting that President Obama is engaged in "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior," but he isn't alone in using the African heritage of Obama's father and grandfather as fuel for ridiculous smears.
Gingrich attacked Obama for "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview

Gingrich: "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" From a September 11 interview with National Review Online:

    Gingrich says that [Dinesh] D'Souza has made a "stunning insight" into Obama's behavior -- the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama."

    "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asks. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."

    "This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president," Gingrich tells us.

    "I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true," Gingrich continues. "In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest.

President Obama has been amazingly pro business for someone who is supposedly anti-American. One wonders if these conservative hacks even knows what colonialism means. Many European nations invaded and simply took over other countries such as India and large parts of Africa. How is it bad than to be anti-colonialism anyway. Are all these conservatives in favor of reviving the invasion of other countries to exploit their people and resources. One would also think conservatives would have some knowledge of America's own history. How could having any kind of foreign ancestry be suspicious all on it's own. Unless you're a Native American your ancestors immigrated here from somewhere else. Even in Thomas Jefferson's day he regretted white colonists cheated on or broken just about every treaty the colonial states had with Indian tribes. Newt Gingrich's history of bigoted remarks

Gingrich: Poor blacks fail to acquire wealth partly because of their "habits." A June 16, 1995, Washington Post article reported that Gingrich, in a discussion with black journalists, stated that the failure of poor black people to acquire wealth was in part due to their "habits."

(Newt has never served in the military) - Gingrich on women in combat: Women would have trouble staying in ditches "because they get infections;" "males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes." A January 19, 1995, New York Times article reported on concerns about women in military combat roles that Gingrich had raised while teaching a history course at Georgia's Reinhardt College. The Times reported that Gingrich told his students that "females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper body strength," and added that men "are basically little piglets; you drop them in a ditch, they roll around in it."

Conservatism will never change. It's adherents have a very primitive world view. They have to constantly rewrite history to justify their beliefs and always resort to deranged conspiracy theories because they know they cannot win a debate on the merits. And they thrive on paranoia - Paranoid Palin Hunts For Media ‘Moles’ At Montana Speech

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is never shy about bashing the “lamestream media,” concocting conspiracy theories about its bias, and pioneering a media strategy that keeps her as far away as possible from tough questions. Palin’s speakers contract stipulates that journalists are only allowed to record the first three minutes of her remarks, and that all other recording devices, including cell phones, be banned. Palin’s paranoia about the press was on full display Sunday at an event in Missoula, MT, during which she worried there were journalist “moles” in the audience:

    During her talk, Palin at times deviated from her awe-filled words of faith to take swipes at the media – at one point proclaiming that “moles” were in the audience texting about her belief in prayer and taking it all out of context, as per usual.

Palin also said, “Be careful. There may be some media that sneaked into the room.” In response, the editor of The Missoulian, which reported Palin’s comments, said her reporter had credentials to cover the speech and “didn’t sneak in or out.” Palin’s comments are “intended to create distrust of the professional journalists…who take their jobs very seriously and work hard to accurately and fairly report the news,”

How is it bias to record and report exactly what Palin says. She hates Katie Couric to this day simply because Couric asked Palin what her reading habits were. People this paranoid should in no way be governing an open and democratic nation.