Morally Corrupt South Carolina Republicans Go Full Wacko With Sinister Push Poll

Morally Corrupt South Carolina Republicans Go Full Wacko With Sinister Push Poll

A mysterious conservative group has been placing highly-misleading phone calls to South Carolina voters, trying to dissuade them from voting for the Democrat in an upcoming congressional special election.

South Carolina has a reputation for dirty tricks, and next week’s special election between former Gov. Mark Sanford (R) and businesswoman Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D) is no exception. One of the most popular tactics is known as “push polling,” whereby a group calls up voters under the guise of conducting a poll, only to ask questions that leave the voter with a highly-misleading impression about a certain candidate.

ThinkProgress spoke with multiple individuals in South Carolina’s first congressional district who have received push polls from an unknown conservative group that only referred to itself as “SSI Polling”.

April Wolford, a middle-aged woman who has long been active in Democratic politics in the state, was one. At 12:55pm on February 25th, Wolford’s cell phone lit up with “Unavailable” on the caller ID screen. A young man without a discernible accent – “he certainly wasn’t from South Carolina,” she noted – said he was conducting a poll and began with general questions about the race. “But they quickly got slanted,” Wolford noted, “and they didn’t ask a single question about Sanford at all!”

As the conversation turned, she asked him where he was calling from. “SSI Polling,” he told her, but wouldn’t elaborate.

The questions they did ask ranged from outlandish smears to thinly-veiled Republican talking points. Here are some of the issues SSI brought up in various iterations of the push poll, according to those ThinkProgress spoke with:

    - “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you she had had an abortion?”

    - “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you a judge held her in contempt of court at her divorce proceedings?

    - “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if she had done jail time?”

    - “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you she was caught running up a charge account bill?”

Fox News does similar "push polls" all the time. Such immoral tactics are part of Conservative culture.

Rabid Anti-America Charles and David Koch Plan To Buy Up Eight Major Newspapers

Rabid Anti-America Conservatives Charles and David Koch Plan To Buy Up Eight Major Newspapers

The millionaire oil moguls Charles and David Koch are pushing ahead with their plans to purchase several news outlets across the United States, according to a detailed report in the New York Times on Sunday.

At a recent seminar in Aspen, one attendee reported that the brothers — infamous for bankrolling conservative candidates and causes — put forth the question of, “How do we make sure our voice is being heard?” Their answer, it seems, will be to purchase the entire Tribune company, which constitutes a huge swath of American print media:

    The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion.

    Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic.

In total, the Tribune company is responsible for eight print publications.

Charles and David Koch’s money has been instrumental in getting anti-climate politicians into office, and in funding anti-climate science studies. The brothers have also funded with the secretive conservative network ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), which has crafted “model legislation” for voter ID laws that limit voting rights, particularly for low-income people of color. The group was also responsible for the so-called “Stand Your Ground” law that temporarily allowed Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, to walk free.

The brothers also tried to influence the latest election by warning some 45,000 employees that there would be “consequences” if they didn’t vote for Republicans.

The Kochs are actually billionaires, not millionaires. The Kochs believe that working class Americans should have no legal rights in their work places. They believe that only the wealthy should determine public policy. They believe that corporations are people and should have the same rights as people, but none of the responsibility. They believe in wage slavery. If you work forty hours a week and do not make enough to pay rent, utilities and groceries, tough luck - in other words they believe in the plantation model for the USA. They believe that the wealthy should have more rights than a nurse or the assistant manger at the tire store. The Kochs believe their freedom is violated if not given free reign to take away the rights of average Americans. Their newspapers will be like Fox News, discriminating proto-facist propaganda. Patriots can write the FCC E-mail: fccinfo@fcc.gov and tell them you do not want radical anti-American zealots like the Kochs owning newspapers.

Guns Don't Kill People, Video Games Kill People

NRA Blames Everything Except Guns: Outdated Video Games and Hurricanes. Everything except guns.

The National Rifle Association, the nation’s largest gun advocates lobby, attributed the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to “school free zones,” arguing that “genuine monsters” are attracted to schools because its administrators and teachers are not armed. “Politicians pass laws for gun free school zones, they issue press releases bragging about them,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said. “And, in doing so, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre declared and urged Congress to “act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.” The lobby will create a “National School Shield Program” that will help schools respond to attacks, led by former Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR).

In a news conference repeatedly interrupted by protesters blaming the NRA for “killing our kids,” LaPierre shoveled out blame far and wide, going after reporters for glorifying killers like Adam Lanza, violent movies, video games, and music videos. He tore into gun safety advocates for exploiting the tragedy for “political gain,” targeted President Obama for underfunding police initiatives in schools, and said that the media demonized “local gun owners” and spread “misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next violence is a new cycle away.” “Add another hurricane, terrorist attack, or some other natural of man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization,” he said.

Only gun owners and gun lobbyists — who have spent years easing gun regulations across the country — were spared any responsibility.

All of this weird and wacky blame games is to fight against, not some reasonable restrictions on guns -like renewing the assault weapons ban ( originally signed into law by Bush 41), but Wayne is arguing against any and every kind of restriction. We have some reasonable limits on speech - like you cannot call in fake emergencies or accuse an innocent person of something that affects their ability to make a living. Conservatives seem incapable of having any rational discussions about almost every issue, especially guns that they worship like hand held gods. 4 dead in Blair Co. shooting; 3 troopers injured.

Postscript: Robert Bork, 1927-2012. Bork was a reprehensible conservative reactionary.

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Radical Republican Group Tells Congressional Conservatives To Hold Hurricane Sandy Relief Package Hostage

Radical Republican Group Tells Congressional Conservatives To Hold Hurricane Sandy Relief Package Hostage

Club For Growth, a conservative advocacy group, is urging Republicans to vote against the $60 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package that the Senate plans to take up this week, according to a statement on its web site.

The group, which scores congressional votes to document lawmakers’ conservative stances, issued a “Key Vote Alert” this afternoon telling Republicans it would hold a vote in favor of the relief package against them. The statement also calls on lawmakers to offset any money spent for disaster relief with spending cuts:

    The Club for Growth urges all Senators to vote “NO” on the Hurricane Sandy relief bill (HR 1) scheduled for consideration in the upper chamber this week. The vote on final passage, and perhaps procedural votes, will be included in the Club’s 2012 Congressional Scorecard.

    When a natural disaster occurs, there is a textbook response by Congress – they cobble together an overpriced bill that isn’t paid for, there’s no accountability or oversight, and it’s filled with pork. This proposal is no different.

    If lawmakers are interested in improving the bill, they should release the funds in installments to make sure the resources are spent wisely. They should also strip out all immaterial line items, and fully offset all expenditures with spending cuts elsewhere. Serious reform would also include a way for the states to take over the responsibility for future disaster relief funding so that accountability is more localized.

Republicans have made a habit of holding disaster relief hostage to spending cuts in the aftermath of recent natural disasters, like the tornadoes that devastated Joplin, Missouri last spring and Hurricane Irene, which pummeled the East Coast last fall. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) also threatened to hold disaster relief hostage to spending cuts after an earthquake struck his home state, and Republicans reneged on their support of a deal to fund disaster relief last year.

Multiple Republicans have already indicated that they would not support the relief package without equal spending cuts from other programs.

This is what made America great? Conservatives stab working Americans in the back to advance some murky agenda and teach us all a lesson about money. We're not spending the money because someone misbehaved, we're spending it because it is good for people, good for the economy and the decent thing to do after a national catastrophe.  

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Fox News Thug Steven Crowder is Lying About Not Provoking a Fight With Patriotic Michigan Union Protester

Fox News Thug Steven Crowder is Lying About Not Provoking a Fight With Patriotic Michigan Union Protester

A video of Fox News contributor Steven Crowder getting punched by a Michigan union protester was selectively edited, and that editing was revealed during Crowder’s appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News.

The original video shows Crowder getting punched by a protester on Tuesday while Crowder was trying to stop an Americans For Prosperity tent from being torn down. The video, which is appraching a million views on YouTube, was picked up by the right as evidence of “union thuggery”:

...Unfortunately for Mr. Crowder, a look at the video broadcast on the Sean Hannity show appears to show quite clearly that he left out an important section of the footage when he put together his edit. A section of the Fox News broadcast preserved by the Web site Mediaite shows that Mr. Hannity’s producers at Fox News started the clip five seconds earlier than Mr. Crowder did. What the extra footage reveals is the man who punched Mr. Crowder being knocked to the ground seconds before and then getting up and taking a swing at the comedian.

How did the patriotic union protester end up on the ground if Crowder did not push or punch him first. It seems that Crowder is lying. At the very least in the sense that he claims to be nothing but a poor innocent victim. More here, Fox News' Conservative Thug Steve Crowder Absurdly Challenges MI Protester To Duel In The Octagon. Crowders' mission from Fox news and the anti-American Koch brothers was to create violence so they would have something to smear unions with.