Debt ceiling games, Republicans want to hold the country hostage to make the elite richer and workers even more powerless

 Debt ceiling games, Republicans want to hold the country hostage to make the elite richer and workers even more powerless

The House Republican position is that the debt ceiling — a threat to wreak economic havoc — is a legitimate bargaining chip in budget negotiations.

Party leaders at least understand that the debt ceiling must and will be increased, but hope to use the threat of defaulting on the national debt to extract some relatively modest concessions, if possible.

But some number of House Republicans — it’s unclear how many, but probably around 40 — don’t see it that way. They believe the debt limit — a statutory anomaly that should be abolished — should serve as a sort of tie-breaker in divided government that allows the legislature, or even one branch of it, to turn the presidency into an office of nominal leadership. To turn the president into a figurehead who has no choice but to accede to the legislative wishes of the party he or she defeated in the general election.

Why am I so confident they actually believe this?

Because they took a look at the outrageous list of demands the GOP leadership attached to the party’s debt limit increase proposal and said, “not good enough.”

Late Thursday afternoon, House GOP leaders acknowledged that their debt limit bill, which they haven’t even released yet, lacks the votes to pass. “We still have some challenges,” said Rep. Tom Cole R-Okla, a deputy whip and a John Boehner ally, according to The Hill. “We’ve got an awful lot of support, but clearly at this point we don’t have a final product that’s attracting the number that we need. Hopefully that’ll change, and I think it could.”

The House proposal (at least as originally conceived) is a grab bag of GOP goodies, most of which were bullet points in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign platform. But it lacks the most controversial elements of the GOP agenda — Medicare privatization, Medicaid devolution — and as such doesn’t cut enough spending for some of the most hardline conservatives in the House Republican conference. It also doesn’t include any abortion restrictions.

As such, Boehner and his leadership team can’t whip up 217 Republicans (the current threshold for passage) to back it, and since zero Democrats will support their crazy plan, it’s dead. At least as currently written.

Now I obviously think this whole approach is nuts. But at least in its current form you can construe the plan as a weird starting point from which Republicans will ultimately begin dialing back demands and, in the end, come up empty handed, or at most with minor concessions, in exchange for increasing the debt limit.

But for those 20, 40, 60, however many Republicans, this isn’t how the debt limit should be wielded. The demand should be the totality of the party platform, with no room for negotiation. Or at the very least the party shouldn’t signal willingness to negotiate by leaving major priorities off the table.

When your House majority is 233 members, 20 is enough to threaten your Speakership. As such, instead of telling the hardliners to take a hike, GOP leaders are going to negotiate with them, in the hope of altering the debt limit plan in a way that achieves a Republican-only majority for passage. As loudly as they’re insisting that President Obama should negotiate with him, they don’t have a workable position of their own from which to negotiate. They could quite easily if they were willing to work with Democrats. But John Boehner isn’t ready to lead yet.

Does that mean we’re doomed to default on the debt? I don’t think so. Boehner might not be ready to lead, but he’s also not ready to destroy the economy. The middle way between those two seemingly incompatible “priorities” is to “fight” to the bitter end, but accede to reality at the last possible minute.

That’s what he’s doing right now in the ongoing effort to fund the government, which is set to shut down at the end of Monday. It’s a performance he’ll likely repeat over the next three weeks ahead of the debt limit deadline. Unless he can’t appease the hardliners enough to pass a crazy GOP debt limit bill. In that case, he’ll have to go hat in hand to Democrats for help directly — a recognition that he doesn’t even have the semblance of a governing majority, and that his hardliners are more or less done with him.

Maybe then he’ll accept reality and pick the “leadership” option.

Conservative shadow money from weirdo UnAmerican outfits like the Free Enterprise Institute ( they hate the free market, but love crony corporatism) and the Chamber of Commerce ( the voice of lazy millionaires and companies that have been shipping jobs to Asia for decades)  is pushing for a government shutdown, hoping that it will all be blamed on Democrats.

Six Ways The UnAmerican Conservative Movement is Pushing America To Become The Old Confederacy

 

Six Ways The UnAmerican Conservative Movement is Pushing America To Become The Old Confederacy

1. The latest House budget. There is no single federal budget bill, but a series [14] of bills for combinations of different agencies. In 2013, House Appropriations Committee has been approving budgets that present some of the most draconian cuts seen [15] in a generation. This week saw the panel pass a budget [16] bill cutting the Environmental Protection Agency by 34 percent, including cuts to clean water programs by 60 percent. It gave the White House a quarter of what it sought for renewable energy and energy efficiency, and cut National Park funds by 10 percent and cuts national arts and humanities funding in half.

Earlier Committee budgets cut [17] in half funding for Community Development Block Grants, which is what cities use for housing and anti-poverty efforts. On Thursday, the Committee was expected to release its proposals for health, labor and education. A GOP staffer told [17] the New York Times that education grants to poor students will be cut by 16 percent, and the overall Labor Department will be cut by 13 percent.

This slash-and-burn spree goes beyond the so-called sequester for the current fiscal year ending on September 30, where every federal agency essentially swallowed a 5 percent across-the-boards cut. As Appropriations Committee Democratic Spokesman Dennis explained, the House GOP is continuing the “sequester” but taking the bulk of the funds from programs that they have long opposed: safety nets, environment, poverty, and a spectrum of agencies regulating business. 

The Times said [15] Congress has not faced such a big budget battle since 1995, when the House GOP tried to close the departments of Energy, Education and Commerce—and ended up shutting down the federal government for 28 days.

2. Holding Obamacare hostage. The October 1 implementation date for individuals to start enrolling in Obamacare (the first day of the 2014 federal fiscal year) has become another line in the sand for surly Republicans. Despite passage [18] in 2010, a Supreme Court decision upholding most of it, a presidential election where the healthcare reform was an issue and voters re-elected Obama, top Senate Republicans are now saying that they will not pass any budget bill that includes funding to implement the law. (American families love the benefits they deserve from Obamacare)

The Senate’s top GOP leadership and other senators have signed [17] a letter declaring, “The law cannot be implemented as written.” Whether this is just posturing—as single senators cannot block bills unless they have a majority—remains to be seen. It certainly signals to the House that there will be Senate support to gut funding for the law, which is consistent with the House Republican strategy of eviscerating programs and agencies they oppose.

The GOP’s intransigence needs to be seen against the backdrop of last week’s supposedly bipartisan deal [19] to approve a handful of Obama’s top agency heads. It hardly matters if these agencies have Senate-approved leaders if the GOP’s game plan is to defund and destroy these agencies’ effectiveness.   

3. Stonewalling federal judgeships. This summer’s budget battles only add to the already toxic atmosphere in Washington. Senate’s Republicans have also abused their power by delaying the appointment of federal judges nominated [20] by the White House. The American Bar Association’s president recently wrote an editorial [21] complaining about the large number of federal judge vacancies, calling it a worsening “emergency.”

The public doesn’t fully appreciate how powerful judges are. But senators do, knowing that they serve for life and will decide cases involving business and constitutional issues for a very long time. The Senate’s Republicans keep stonewalling, even though Obama’s appointments tend to be centrists [22]. They are not reflexively libertarian and pro-corporate like the current U.S. Supreme Court majority—or the activist attorneys behind the new rightwing propaganda machine profiled [13] by Mother Jones. This is yet another way in which intransigent Republicans are acting as if Obama did not win re-election.

4. Stopping immigration reform. The GOP, and especially the House majority, knows [23] their power will be diluted if more immigrants become citizens and vote. They also know that many industries rely on low wages for immigrant laborers, including people that [24] pay more in taxes than they receive in government services. But the House GOP will not take up a Senate immigration bill with amnesty and a decade-long path to citizenship. Even Fox News contributor, Republican Juan Williams, has derided [23] House GOP leaders as racist. He should not be surprised, because today’s Republicans are bent on retaining their power by any means, instead of persuading voters in open and fair elections.

5. The attack on voting rights. The game plan here is as old as Reconstruction: block your opponents from voting. After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, Shelby v. Holder, gutting [25] the Voting Rights Act’s toughest provision that blocked racially discriminatory voting laws from taking effect, GOP-led states—North Carolina [26] this week and Texas [27] previously—have put forth bills to re-segregate voting and elections.

What North Carolina Republicans are pushing through their legislature this week is on par [28] with what Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell did before 2004, when his state re-elected President George W. Bush. Rick Hasen, a University of California law professor, wrote [29], “The bill is a nightmare for voting rights advocates: not only does it include a strict voter ID law and provision shortening early voting and eliminating same-day voter registration for early voting, it is a laundry list of ways to make it harder for people to vote.”

The Shelby decision gives the GOP room to plot redistricting scenarios to lock in safe seats in Congress and locally because the Justice Department’s threatened pushback is on untested [12] legal grounds. Texas Republicans quickly said [8] they would revise district lines, instead of waiting for the 2020 Census, as well as toughen state voter ID laws. These discriminatory steps in key states, coupled with the House GOP’s anti-immigrant bias, underscore the party’s defiant obsession with preserving its political power.

6. The attack on election regulators. Part of the attack on voting is an attack on election officials who were genuinely non-partisan, like North Carolina State Board of Election’s longtime director, Gary Bartlett. He was ousted [30] earlier this year after two decades on the job after a new Republican governor reconstituted the state BOE. Bartlett had spent years making [31] North Carolina’s election rules arguably the most progressive in the South. But the North Carolina GOP is also trying to end public financing for judicial elections, another successful anti-corruption program.

Why are conservatives going to all this trouble when they could just move to Iran or China where they already have repressive governments they do not respect basic human rights or democracy.

Morally Corrupt Conservatives On Supreme Court Steal Voting Rights From Millions of Americans

Morally Corrupt Conservatives On Supreme Court Steal Voting Rights From Millions of Americans

Let's be clear about what has just happened. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared that overt racial discrimination in the nation's voting practices is over and no longer needs all of the special federal protections it once did. They did so, without a trace of irony, by striking down as unconstitutionally outdated a key provision of a federal law that this past election cycle alone protected the franchise for tens of millions of minority citizens. And they did so on behalf of an unrepentant county in the Deep South whose officials complained about the curse of federal oversight even as they continued to this very day to enact and implement racially discriminatory voting laws.

In deciding Shelby County v. Holder, in striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the five conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, didn't just rescue one recalcitrant Alabama jurisdiction from the clutches of racial justice and universal enfranchisement. By voiding the legislative formula that determines which jurisdictions must get federal "preclearance" for changes to voting laws, today's ruling enables officials in virtually every Southern county, and in many other jurisdictions as well, to more conveniently impose restrictive new voting rules on minority citizens. And they will. That was the whole point of the lawsuit. Here is the link to the ruling.

In a 5-4 ruling over liberal dissent, the Supreme Court today declared "accomplished" a "mission" that has become more, not less, dire in the four years since the justices last revisited the subject. They have done so by focusing on voter turnout, which surely has changed for the better in the past fifty years, and by ignoring the other ruses now widely employed to suppress minority votes. In so doing, the five federal judges responsible for this result, all appointed by Republican presidents, have made it materially easier for Republican lawmakers to hassle and harry and disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. And they have done so by claiming that the Congress didn't mean what it said when it renewed the act by landslide votes in 2006.

More here, Three Ways The Supreme Court Gutted Voting Rights Today.

Conservative John Derbyshire Hated Blacks, Now He Has Moved To Hating Victims of Sexual Assault

Conservative John Derbyshire Hated Blacks, Now He Has Moved To Hating Victims of Sexual Assault

Former National Review columnist John Derbyshire blamed women and attorneys for the rise in reported sexual assaults within military ranks in a piece for Taki’s Magazine on Monday, saying female service members were gender “outliers” likely to commit erratic behavior.

“They are eccentric and prone to behave eccentrically,” Derbyshire wrote. “As a designated victim group, they are especially susceptible to the associated pathologies, e.g., victim hoaxes for attention, spite, or cash reward.”

But male soldiers, he argued, are responding to their “widespread, innate male urges” to kill people, and putting them in units with women “in sex proportions much different from 50-50, and walled off from the general population” would lead to “sex-related emotions” like jealousy to develop, which would limit their effectiveness. Placing male officers in command of female soldiers also put a “severe strain” on human nature in his opinion, because women are attracted to “higher-status men.”

The column comes in the midst of a disagreement between commanders and lawmakers over how to prosecute sexual assault allegations. A proposal by Sen. Kristen Gillebrand (D-NY) that would have granted prosecutors juridsdiction over such cases was stripped from a defense spending bill on June 12. Earlier this year, a Pentagon report estimated that as many as 26,000 sexual assaults happened within the U.S. military in 2012.

In purporting to advise military leaders on “true facts” to help them counter what he called a “tsunami” of reports of unwanted sexual contact, Derbyshire also argued that terms like “sexual harassment” and “sexual assault” were vulnerable to misinterpretation by crooked lawyers.

“It is not, for example, the case that sexual intercourse comes in precisely two clearly distinguished varieties, consensual and nonconsensual,” he wrote. “There is an entire continuum of consent, ranging from forcible kidnapping/rape, to drunk-and-I-don’t-know-what-I-was-thinking, to licensed connubial bliss.”

Derbyshire was fired from the Review in April 2012 after writing a column for Taki’s urging white parents to tell their children to avoid contact with African-Americans they did not know. In September 2009 he said he “wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep” if women lost the right to vote.

Where does Derbyshire get his psychological science and statistics from? Glenn Beck and Fox News? The conservative movement likes to claim they have values yet always seem to be justifying the worse behavior of people, especially white males. They can't help themselves? That is just the way men are wired? Is the conservative movement composed of sociopath characters who have escaped from Game of Thrones.

Sleazebag Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) Says It Should Be Legal To Fire Someone For Being Republican

Sleazebag Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) Says It Should Be Legal To Fire Someone For Being Republican. OK that is not quite what he said,

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is touted as a top GOP presidential prospect in 2016, thinks it should be legal to fire someone for their sexual orientation.

ThinkProgress spoke with the Florida Senator at the opening luncheon of the annual Faith and Freedom Forum on Thursday and asked him about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill to make discrimination against LGBT individuals illegal across the country.

Though Rubio bristles at the notion of being called a “bigot,” he showed no willingness to help protect LGBT workers from discrimination. “I’m not for any special protections based on orientation,” Rubio told ThinkProgress.

    KEYES: The Senate this summer is going to be taking up the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which makes it illegal to fire someone for being gay. Do you know if you’ll be supporting that?

    RUBIO: I haven’t read the legislation. By and large I think all Americans should be protected but I’m not for any special protections based on orientation.

    KEYES: What about on race or gender?

    RUBIO: Well that’s established law.

    KEYES: But not for sexual orientation?


Workplace discrimination is an all-too-frequent reality for LGBT individuals. Two out of every five openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual employees have reported discrimination at their jobs. Among transgender workers, that figure rises to nine out of ten.

Though other Republicans have applauded Rubio’s so-called “middle ground” on LGBT issues, his record of late tells a far different story. In addition to opposing ENDA and marriage equality, Rubio also said today that he would walk away from his own immigration bill if it includes protections for gay couples.

Currently, 29 states have no laws protecting gay and lesbian workers from discrimination in the workplace, and an additional five states don’t protect workers based on gender identity. And yet nine in ten Americans mistakenly believe that it is illegal to fire someone for being gay.

LGBT workers aren’t asking for “special protections,” as Rubio would have people believe. They’re asking to be treated like everyone else and be allowed to do their job without fear of being harassed or fired for who they are.

Rubio has been studying history's worse regimes and instead of learning moral lessons, he wants the USA to be just like the old Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Both of those totalitarian regimes discriminated against gays and any other group that they thought did not measure up to the "moral" demands of the type of society they wanted. Rubio is another stealth anti-American freak who wraps his distinctly UnAmerican hatred in the flag and the Bible. Patriots should demand that Rubio resign from the senate immediately.

Conservatism Marches On, Closing Schools, But Finding Money To Build More Prisons

Conservatism Marches On, Closing Schools, But Finding Money To Build More Prisons

Philadelphia is so broke the city is closing 23 public schools, never mind that it has the [3] cash to build a $400 million prison.

Construction on the penitentiary said to be "the second-most expensive state project ever" began just days after the Pennsylvania School Reform Commission voted down a plan to close only four of the 27 schools scheduled to die. Facing a $304 million debt, the Commission instead approved a measly $2.4 billion budget that would shut down 23 public schools, wiping out roughly 10% of the city's total.

But it's not like Pennsylvania does not have the money to fill the debt. Rather,  PA's GOP-controlled Houseof  Representatives recently passed a tax break for corporations that will cost the state an estimated $600 million to $800 million annually.

Plus, $400 million is being shoveled into this [3]:

    The penitentiary, which is technically two facilities, will supplement at least two existing jails, the Western Penitentiary at Pittsburgh and Fayette County Jail. Pittsburgh’s Western Penitentiary was built in 2003 with the original intention of replacing Fayette County Jail, but the prison has struggled with lawsuits claiming widespread physical and sexual abuse of prisoners.

    Scheduled to be completed in 2015, the new prison’s cell blocks and classroom will be capable of housing almost 5,000 inmates. Officials said there will be buildings for female inmates, the mentally ill and a death row population.

Conservatives like to whine about crime, but it seems obvious they really like crime. They go about creating public policy that steals from education ( education and literacy have been shown to be very effective ways to reduce crime) and thus creates more criminal behavior.

It Is Time For Patriots To Stop Subsidizing Walmart Billionaires

It Is Time For Patriots To Stop Subsidizing Walmart Billionaires

Due to low wages and few benefits, Walmart workers at a single 300-person Supercenter store rely on anywhere from $904,542 to $1,744,590 in public benefits per year, costing taxpayers, according to a new report from the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The report focused its analysis on Wisconsin, because the state’s data is the most comprehensive and up to date. It looked at how many workers enroll in the state’s Medicaid program and extrapolated how many services they rely on from programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Earned Income Tax Credit, school lunch program, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and Section 8 housing vouchers, among others.

Looking at just those currently enrolled in Medicaid, the report estimates that each employee takes in $3,015 in public benefits a year. But that may be a low estimate, as other workers may enroll in other programs. Assuming a higher number, each employee could use more like $5,815 in benefits a year.

Walmart’s wages are some of the lowest in the industry, despite the fact that it is the country’s largest private employer and one out of every ten retail workers is employed there. Workers make $8.81 per hour on average, according to IBIS World, 28 percent less than those who work for other large retailers.

Its employees also get few benefits through their employment. Only about half of Walmart workers are covered by its health care plans, in part because the costs may be to high. While the company decided to expand health care coverage to part-time workers in 2006, it has since reversed course.

Walmart’s model isn’t the only way in the discount retail space, however. Rival Costco, which competes with Walmart’s Sam’s Club stores, pays employees about 40 percent more. The average Costco worker makes $21.96 an hour. Nearly all of the workers who are eligible for the company’s benefits are enrolled.

Costco has come under analyst pressure to lower wages and boost profit, but the company’s CFO has thus far refused to do so. Its bottom line, however, seems strong: Profits rose by 19 percent to $459 million last quarter.

Meanwhile, Walmart’s sales have been struggling. Its sales suffered during the first quarter of the year and the company has come under criticism for failing to keep shelves stocked thanks to too few employees working at a time. That has led to long lines and customer dissatisfaction, which helped it rank at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index in February.

While Costco has a lower profit margin than Walmart, it gets much more revenue and profit per employee and generates a higher return for investors.

Walmart has embraced the conservative Republican semi-plantation model of business; screw over employees to squeeze every last penny of profit out of powerless workers. They do all of this and stock 50% or more of their products from factories in Asia. Walmart loves America the way a dog beater loves dogs.

The screen capture graphics are from the Twitter feed of this site, Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'.

Claim About Obamacare Reform Rate Shock Is Unfounded

Claim About Obamacare Reform Rate Shock Is Unfounded

The insurance industry and its allies warn that health reform’s limit on how much more insurers can charge older people than younger people for coverage will make individual insurance much more expensive for young adults.  But a new Urban Institute analysis finds that this claim of “rate shock” is “unfounded.”

Starting in 2014, insurers in the individual and small-group insurance markets will be able to charge older people no more than three times what they charge younger people.  This is narrower than the five-to-one differential that is typical today, meaning that (all other things being equal) premiums should rise somewhat for younger people buying coverage in the individual market.

But, as the Urban Institute paper points out, the large majority of young people affected by this will also become eligible for premium subsidies to help buy coverage in the new exchanges that health reform will create, or for Medicaid (if they live in a state that adopts health reform’s Medicaid expansion).  As a result, the age-rating change “would have very little impact on out-of-pocket rates paid by the youngest nongroup purchasers.”

Specifically, the study found:

    92 percent of people ages 21 to 27 projected to buy an individual plan in an exchange in 2017 are expected to have incomes less than 300 percent of the poverty line, so they would be eligible either for Medicaid (if their state expands it) or for substantial subsidies to help pay premiums in the exchange.

    Similarly, 88 percent of 18- to 20-year-olds projected to buy a plan in the exchange are expected to be eligible for premium subsidies or Medicaid.

The study also notes that among the estimated 951,000 young adults ages 21 to 27 who now buy coverage in the individual market and have incomes too high to qualify for premium subsidies or Medicaid, two-thirds are age 26 or younger and in families with access to employer coverage.  That means they could get coverage under health reform’s requirement that insurers allow parents to add children up to age 26 to their job-based plans.

So Fox News, Michelle Malkin and other creepy conservatives are lying or engaging in childish exaggeration. What else is new.

Deranged Republican Erick Erickson Does a Great Impression of a Fundamentalist Iranian Mullah

Deranged Republican Erick Erickson Does a Great Impression of a Fundamentalist Iranian Mullah

Erick Erickson, the conservative blogger and Fox News personality, became the most hated man on Twitter today after responding to a much-discussed Pew survey on female breadwinners by saying that science says that men should dominate women (to be fair to Erickson, Juan Williams and Lou Dobbs expressed equally retrograde sentiments on the very same segment, but have largely escaped the drubbing).

Erickson tried to clear things up with a blog post this afternoon, but only made matters worse by showing how much he doesn’t get it. The missive started off poorly, with some whining about how feminists and “emo lefties have their panties in a wad” (pro-tip: when accused of sexism, don’t reference your opponents’ panties while mounting your defense) and only got worse from there.

First there was a science lesson:

    I also noted that the left, which tells us all the time we’re just another animal in the animal kingdom, is rather anti-science when it comes to this. In many, many animal species, the male and female of the species play complementary roles, with the male dominant in strength and protection and the female dominant in nurture.

There are also species where males castrate themselves before sex to avoid being eating alive by females. Perhaps Erickson would like to experience that — you know, because science?

Erickson goes on to equate all female breadwinners with single mothers, and then to assume that the outrage directed at his comments was about some kind of politically correct effort to destroy families:

    But we should not kid ourselves or scream so loudly in politically correct outrage to drown the truth — kids most likely will do best in households where they have a mom at home nurturing them while dad is out bringing home the bacon.

Here he shows he just doesn’t get it. What upset people about Erickson’s comments had less to do with single mothers and the decline of marriage rates than about gender roles. It was his notion that women should always stay at home and tend to the kids and that men should always be the breadwinners and dominate women — because that’s only natural.

But almost 40 percent of the female breadwinners identified by the survey are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands. Married women “are more likely than before to be the primary provider in the family,” growing from 4 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2011. That’s faster than the rate single mothers have grown. Married women have gained because they’ve had better education and employment opportunities — in other words, more equality.

But Erickson says that breadwinning is not the woman’s role anyway — it’s the “female who tames the male beast.” His worldview, as even better expressed in his blog post than his comments on Fox News, fundamentally rejects the notion of gender equality. How can men and women be equal if one is not supposed to work outside the home and the other is supposed to dominate it?

In short, Erckson, like most of the radical Anti-American, anti-freedom conservative movement has exactly the same attitude towards women as fundamentalist Iranian Mullahs. Women's rights in Iran

Equality does not take precedence over justice... Justice does not mean that all laws must be the same for men and women. One of the mistakes that Westerners make is to forget this.... The difference in the stature, vitality, voice, development, muscular quality and physical strength of men and women shows that men are stronger and more capable in all fields... Men's brains are larger.... Men incline toward reasoning and rationalism while women basically tend to be emotional... These differences affect the delegation of responsibilities, duties and rights.

Now who said that? Wacko anti-America Erick Erickson or wacko anti-America Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iranian Parliament Speaker in 1986.

If Radical Conservative Groups had Not Been Trying To Violate The Law, They Would Not Have Been Investigated by the IRS

If Radical Conservative Groups had Not Been Trying To Violate The Law, They Would Not Have Been Investigated by the IRS

At last week's ways and means committee hearing on the Internal Revenue Service's treatment of tax-exempt organizations, Representative Aaron Schock (an Illinois Republican) helped propel a new firestorm across conservative media: in addition to tea party groups, Schock maintained, anti-abortion organizations were also being subjected to "horrible instances of IRS abuse of power, political and religious bias, and repression of their constitutional rights".

In one of the hearing's most charged moments, Schock interrogated the outgoing acting IRS Commissioner, Steven Miller, about how IRS personnel asked one of the groups to describe its public prayers. Senator Charles Grassley (an Iowa Republican) joined the fray during the Senate's finance committee hearings Tuesday.

For anyone who knows the history of the religious right, the possible revocation of tax-exempt status for claimed religious belief is a potent flashpoint. In his book, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament, religion historian Randall Balmer argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, which Balmar calls the "abortion myth", evangelical voters were not propelled to political activism by the supreme court's 1973 decision in Roe v Wade.

Instead, the issue that mobilized these voters was the IRS's 1975 revocation of the tax-exempt status of the segregationist Bob Jones University. Rightwing religious architect Paul Weyrich told Balmer that it was "the federal government's moves against Christian schools" that actually "enraged the Christian community".

Bob Jones University claimed its ban on interracial dating and admission of students in interracial marriages was rooted in the Bible. It did not end its ban on interracial dating until 2000. The IRS's decision – which went through protracted litigation that ultimately ended when the supreme court let the revocation stand – was in response to new IRS regulations and a 1972 Supreme Court case holding that educational institutions with racially discriminatory policies were not entitled to tax exemption.

Balmar concluded:

    "The Religious Right arose as a political movement for the purpose, effectively, of defending racial discrimination at Bob Jones University and at other segregated schools."

Denying tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory schools – regardless of whether they claim their religion commands it – is not the only issue which the IRS can lawfully examine an applicant's or organization's activities. Under IRS regulations, tax-exempt organizations "may not have purposes or activities that are illegal or violate fundamental public policy". The Bob Jones University case is just one example of the IRS applying this test. Its treatment of anti-abortion groups may be another.

Questioning anti-abortion groups – even the content of their prayers – could very likely have been aimed at determining whether these groups engaged in activities outside abortion clinics that ran afoul of the law. Because of the history of abortion clinic violence by those claiming a religious imperative, the IRS could have been attempting to determine whether the groups' activities were in violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (Face), a 1994 law which prohibits the use of force, the threat of force, or physical obstruction to injure, intimidate or interfere with someone's access to or provision of reproductive health services.

At last week's hearing, Schock entered a 150-page exhibit into the congressional record, a compilation of correspondence about tax-exempt status of three anti-abortion organizations. Two of them, Christian Voices for Life and Coalition for Life of Iowa, claim they were subjected to "unwarranted" questioning during the application process. A third, Small Victories, which already had tax-exempt status, claims to have been "harassed" and exposed to an "intrusive investigation". Christian Voices for Life and Coalition for Life of Iowa eventually obtained their tax-exempt status, and Small Victories' remained intact.

The exhibit was assembled by the groups' attorneys at the Thomas More Society, a rightwing law firm that defended anti-choice activists in National Organization for Women v Scheidler. The National Organization for Women (Now) brought that lawsuit aiming to put an end to clinic violence that had included: "invasions, violent blockades, arson, chemical attacks and bombings of women's health care clinics, assaults on patients, death threats and shootings of health care workers and administrators, including the murder of eight abortion providers."

Although Now's efforts to sue these protestors under federal racketeering laws was ultimately unsuccessful at the supreme court, the Thomas More Society still calls the litigation "a transparent attempt to gag pro-life activism at abortion clinics nationally".

The Face statute was enacted while this litigation was ongoing. It would not be unprecedented, for example, for an anti-choice activist to pray that an abortion provider die. While we still do not know what the IRS's thinking on this matter was, it is not entirely irrelevant or intrusive for the IRS to make such inquiries, including the nature of prayer.

Despite the hype and outrage about the Thomas More Society's clients' treatment by the IRS, the IRS ultimately did not penalize any of these organizations. But a religious right grudge against the IRS runs deep – back to its defense of Bob Jones University. It was just waiting to surface again.

As more and more details emerge it does seem that many of these conservative groups were trying to get a tax exempt status that basically made ALL tax payers subsidize their purely political, and sometimes illegal activities.

Why Are Republicans and the Media Not Discussing Real Scandals

Why are Republicans and the Media Not Discussing Real Scandals

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

Republicans have tried to make scandals where there are none. Certainly the IRS out is Cincinnati - or two employees could have used better judgement, but Obama started firing people as soon as he heard. Benghazi went nowhere because Obama has in truth been better at protecting America than conservatives. The AP scandal is going nowhere because the DOJ did nothing illegal - though many of us may find it disturbing.

Why Does The Conservative Republican Movement Hate Families and Children

Why Does The Conservative Republican Movement Hate Families and Children

From the 2012 Presidential campaign onwards, Republicans have railed against the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “job-killing,” as a threat to freedom, and as a drag on economic growth. The claim has never comported with evidence, but like a zombie it just refuses to die.

The latest effort to kill it comes via a new study from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which found that the benefits EPA regulations bring to the economy far outweigh the costs.

The way this works is pretty straight-forward. Environmental regulations do impose compliance costs on businesses, and can raise prices, which hurt economic growth. But they also create jobs by requiring pollution clean-up and prevention efforts. And perhaps even more importantly, they save the economy billions by avoiding pollution’s deleterious health effects. Particles from smoke stacks, for example, are implicated in respiratory diseases, heart attacks, infections and a host of other ailments, all of which require billions in health care costs per year to treat. Preventing those particles from going into the air means healthier and more productive citizens, who can go spend that money on something other than making themselves well again. Another example is carbon emissions, which will impose costs on the economy in the form of future disruption to food supplies, destruction from extreme weather, and other upheavals if they’re not curbed. Researchers generally put those costs at around $20 to $25 per ton of carbon, but estimates vary widely. Other regulations are actually aimed at reducing red tape, improving communication between agencies, and facilitating the flow of information.

The OMB study looked at a range of regulations across the economy, and found their benefits outweighed their costs across the board. The blue and red bars below represent the range of estimates for what the respective costs and benefits of regulations were. In very few instances was even the very upper limit of cost estimates equal to the very lower limit of benefit estimates.

Source: Office of Management and Budget

But no where was the effect greater than with EPA regulations themselves. Over the last decade, they imposed as much as $45 billion in costs on the economy, but they also drove as much as $640 billion in benefits:

    The OMB found that a decade’s worth of major federal rules had produced annual benefits to the U.S. economy of between $193 billion and $800 billion and impose aggregate costs of $57 billion to $84 billion. “These ranges are reported in 2001 dollars and reflect the uncertain benefits and costs of each rule,” the report noted.

    Rules from the EPA added significantly to both sides of the ledger. “It should be clear that the rules with the highest benefits and the highest costs, by far, come from the Environmental Protection Agency and in particular its Office of Air and Radiation,” the OMB study said. EPA regulations accounted for between 58% and 80% of the benefits the study found as well as 44% to 54% of the costs. Air regulations accounted for nearly 99% of EPA rule benefits, according to the report.

Why are anti-American conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers,  Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, Bob Perry, Foster Friess, William Doré and Peter Thiel against environmental regulation, claiming they are too regulated to make money. Do these conservatives and libertarians think Americans are dumb as dirt. They're making plenty of money. They just want more money and more power that goes with it. They'll never get enough tax breaks or deregulation, they'll always want more, and average Americans will pay for it with the health of their family and friends.

How the National Right To Murder Children Association NRA Shapes Laws That Foster Childhood Deaths

How the National Right To Murder Children Association NRA Shapes Laws That Foster Childhood Deaths

"Unintentional poisoning killed 838 children in the US in 2010; more than 90 percent of them were teenagers, ages 10-19," says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Child Injuries page. "130,000 children visited emergency departments for unintentional poisoning-related injuries in 2011… About 80 percent of these calls were for children under 6, and roughly half of them involved exposures to medications."


But search for similar statistics about gun deaths of children on the CDC website and you will find a big back hole, thanks to NRA lobbying. The NRA has succeeded in getting legislation passed that blocks government health agencies from studying gun violence lest it lead to tighter laws. In fact, you will find more entries for "nail gun" safety on construction sites on the CDC site than for the 5,000 plus children killed by guns every year in the US, which is almost six times that of poisoning deaths. Thank you, NRA.



Gun lobbyists and the legislators whose strings they pull enacted this legislation the same way they have prevented a registry of gun owners or retention of background check information by authorities for more than 24 hours. They tack it on to appropriation bills which receive little debate or discussion because they are viewed as "must pass," mandatory legislation. The riders prohibit the CDC and also the National Institutes of Health from spending funds to "advocate or promote gun control," says the Center for American Progress.

Why? Because gun violence is a law enforcement issue and government research agencies should not be participating in policy debates, bluster NRA lobbyists. Don't confuse us with facts!  The NRA doesn't mind gun violence being a law enforcement issue because it personally pushed through most of the EZ gun laws we are living with like the prohibition of registries, record retention and prohibition of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from requiring dealers to conduct annual inventories.

Thanks to "no inventory laws," a single dealer had 997 guns that were unaccounted for and 93 that were not logged in, during an inspection last year reports, the Center for American Progress. 1,300 illegal Chicago guns were traced to one dealer, Chuck’s Gun Shop since 2008. And Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Washington lost 238 guns in three years–one of which surfaced as a gun used during the 2002 Maryland/Washington D.C./ Virginia sniper murder spree that left 10 dead. What's a little unaccounted for inventory?

The NRA-driven riders against studying gun violence and deaths are not overt bans, but are perceived as a warning to government agencies that their funding will be cut if they tread into gun violence terrain. Since the prohibition against spending funds to "advocate or promote gun control," funding for the CDC to study firearms injury prevention has fallen from over $2 million to around $100,000, says the Center for American Progress report--that's 95 percent.

"Most of these poisoning-related deaths and injuries are predictable and preventable," says the CDC website, announcing its 2012 National Action Plan for Child Injury Prevention (NAP), an initiative developed "with more than 60 stakeholders to spark action across the nation." No such action plan exists for the six times as many children killed by gun violence. "Predictable and preventable" gun violence like the 2-year-old Kentucky girl who was killed by her 5-year-old brother with a rifle he had been given as a gift, this week. And the 4-year-old who shot and killed his 6-year-old his playmate in New Jersey, last month.

The 2nd amendment says is its text the word regulated. yet here we are in a country that quite rightly regulates drivers licenses and medical licenses, yet we have an organization that thinks any sensible regulation of guns is unconstitutional. Only a mindless plastic moron would think like that.

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.

According To Anti-American Fox News You're Death Is Less Important If You're Murdered By A Conservative Republican Terrorist

According To Anti-American Fox News You're Death Is Less Important If You're Murdered By A Conservative Republican Terrorist

On August 5, 2012, just before 10:30 in the morning, Wade Michael Page pulled up outside the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., took out his semi-automatic handgun and started killing worshipers. An Army veteran and an avid bass player in a neo-Nazi rock band, Page killed two Sikhs outside the house of worship and then made his way inside. There, he reloaded and killed four more, including the president [2] of the temple who was shot while trying to tackle Page. Three more were critically wounded in the massacre.

When local police descended, Page opened fire and shot one officer nearly ten times. When the authorities returned fire and shot Page in the stomach, he took his 9mm pistol, pointed it at his own head, and pulled the trigger.

According [3] to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics (he called non-whites "dirt people"), and was interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan. Immersed in the world of white power music, Page's band rehearsed in front of a Nazi flag.

Note that back in August 2012, Fox News didn't care very much about Wade Page and the wild gun shootout he unleashed in an act of domestic terror in the Milwaukee suburb, nor did Fox suggest the event was connected to a larger, more sinister terror trend. In fact, in the days that followed the gun massacre, there were just two passing references to Page during Fox's primetime, one from Bill O'Reilly and one from Greta Van Susteren. No guests were asked to discuss the temple shooting, and after one day the story was completely forgotten.

In one rare occasion when the conversation did turn to Page's motivations, Fox's opinion hosts were quick to criticize the notion that he was a far-right extremist. (He clearly was.) On The Five, after co-host Bob Beckel referred to Page as "right-wing skinhead," he was quickly shouted down by his colleagues. Co-host Andrea Tantaros stressed that the killing was an isolated event that didn't have any larger implications. "How do you stop a lunatic?" she asked. "This is not a political issue."

Fox's guarded response to an extremist's killing spree was striking, considering that in the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attack Fox News has gone all in (again) with its war on Islam as the channel fights its latest bigoted chapter in the War on Terror. It's striking as Fox tries to blame a larger community for the act of two madmen because it's the same Fox News that often can't find time to even comment, let alone report, on what's become regular, and often deadly, right-wing extremist attacks in America.

From neo-Nazi killers like Page, to a string of abortion clinic bombings, as well as bloody assaults on law enforcement from anti-government insurrectionists, acts of right-wing extreme violence continue to terrorize [4] victims in the U.S. ("Fifty-six percent [4] of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists.") But Fox News is not concerned. And Fox News does not try to affix collective blame.

It's clear that Fox is only interested in covering and hyping a single part of the War on Terror; the part that targets Muslims and lets Fox wallow in stereotypes.

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/eric-boehlert
[2] http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/165244086.html
[3] http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/shooter-wade-page-was-army-vet-white-supremacist-856cn28-165123946.html
[4] http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/04/19/467384/chart-right-wing-extremism-terror-threat-oklahoma-city/?mobile=nc
[5] http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-10007.html
[6] http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/terror-from-the-right#.UXqYK4LgM79

There are more examples of Conservative terrorism at the link. It is obvious enough that there are some radicalized Muslims in the world. there are also radicalized violent conservatives, white males, black males, females, Christians, Hindus, Catholics and so on. Yet Fox and conservatives only see Muslims as a grave existential threat. According to the FBI there were 414 homicides in NY in 2012. Almost all of those were what Fox would consider the boring murders of Americans by other Americans.

2013, Congress is More Conservative Than Ever, But They Are The Best Congress Money Can Buy

2013, Congress is More Conservative Than Ever, But They Are The Best Congress Money Can Buy

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

If you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in the sub-arctic range — an icy 15 percent by last count — all you have to do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate pay worship at the altar of corporations, banks and other special interests at the expense of public aspirations and need.

Traditionally, political scientists have taught their students that there are two schools of thought about how a legislator should get the job done. One is to vote yay or nay on a bill by following the will of his or her constituency, doing what they say they want. The other is to represent them as that legislator sees fit, acting in the best interest of the voters — whether they like it or not.

But our current Congress — as cranky and inert as an obnoxious old uncle who refuses to move from his easy chair — never went to either of those schools. Its members rarely have the voter in mind at all, unless, of course, that voter’s a cash-laden heavy hitter with the clout to keep an incumbent on the leash and comfortably in office.

How else to explain a Congress that still adamantly refuses to do anything, despite some 90 percent of the American public being in favor of background checks for gun purchases and a healthy majority favoring other gun control measures? Last week, they ignored the pleas of Newtown families and the siege of violence in Boston and yielded once again to the fanatical rants of Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association. In just the first three months of this year, as it shoved back against the renewed push for controls, the NRA spent a record $800,000 keeping congressional members in line.

And how else to explain why corporate tax breaks have more than doubled in the last 25 years? Or why the Senate and House recently gutted the STOCK Act requiring disclosure of financial transactions by White House staff and members of Congress and their staffs and prohibiting them from insider trading? It was passed into law and signed by President Obama last year – an election year – with great self-congratulation from all involved. But fears allegedly arose that there might be security risks for some in the executive branch if their financial business was known. That concern was examined by the Columbia Journalism Review, which “consulted four cybersecurity experts from leading think tanks and private security consultancies. Each came to the same conclusion: that Congress’s rationale for scrapping the financial disclosure rules was bogus.” Nonetheless, the House and Senate leapt at the opportunity to eviscerate key sections of the STOCK Act when almost no one was watching. And the president signed it.

Then there’s the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, where last week, fire and explosion killed at least 15 — 11 of them first responders — and injured more than 200. The Reuters news service reported that the factory “had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.” Why wasn’t Homeland Security on top of this? For one thing, the company was required to tell the department — and didn’t. For another, budget cuts demanded by Congress mean there aren’t enough personnel available for spot inspections.

Same goes for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – OSHA. The plant hadn’t been inspected in nearly thirty years, and there are so few OSHA inspectors in Texas that it would take 98 years for them to take a look at each workplace in the state once. According to the non-partisan reform group Public Campaign, “Already only able to conduct 40,000 workplace inspections a year in a country with seven million worksites, OSHA will see its budget cut by an additional 8.2 percent this year on account of the sequester.”

Congress quietly acquiesces as the regulations meant for our safety are whittled away.

Twelve members of Congress want to make a bad situation even worse, sponsoring the industry-backed General Duty Clarification Act; its banal title hiding that, as reported by Tim Murphy at Mother Jones magazine, “The bill is designed to sap the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate safety and security at major chemical sites, as prescribed by the Clean Air Act.”

“‘We call that the Koch brothers bill,’ Greenpeace legislative director Rick Hind says, because the bill’s sponsor, GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, represents the conservative megadonors’ home city of Wichita, Kansas. (The sponsor of the sister legislation in the senate, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, represents the Kochs’ home state of Kansas.) The brothers have huge investments in fertilizer production, and Hind thinks they’ll ultimately get what they want, whether or not the bill becomes law.”

No coincidence, perhaps, that the sponsors of the House bill and Senator Roberts, Public Campaign reports, “have collectively taken over $670,000 from the chemical manufacturing industry over their careers.” Since 2011, the industry has spent $85.1 million lobbying.

Congress quietly acquiesces as the regulations meant for our safety are whittled away. The progressive website ThinkProgress notes that even though food related infections — which kill 3,000 and sicken 48 million Americans each year — rose last year, congressional and White House budget cuts may mean up to 600 fewer food inspectors at meat and poultry plants, leaving it up to the industry to police itself. That rot you’re smelling isn’t just some bad hamburger.

It’s true that ninety-two percent of Americans say, yes, reducing the deficit and spending cuts are important, but all on their own the people have figured out cuts that make more sense than anything Congress and its corporate puppeteers want to hear about. Mattea Kramer, research director at the National Priorities Project, says “a strong majority” — 73 percent of us — want a reduced reliance on fossil fuels, and fifty percent want something done about climate change. A carbon tax would help with both, and raise an estimated $125 billion every year. Response from Congress: crickets.

Fifty eight percent of the U.S., according to Gallup, wants “major cuts in military and defense spending,” the average American favoring a reduction of 18 percent. Good luck — the Pentagon and defense contractors already are bellowing about the puny 1.6 percent reduction called for in the new White House budget.

The amazing thing is that one person is responsible for stopping legislation the American people want, Mad Dog Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his henchmen simply threaten to filibuster any legislation that the American people want. That means such legislation would require 60 vote super majority. Since you can't find four conservative Republicans with a backbone or any sense of real patriotism, all bills go to die in the conservative senate.

The Sleazebag Conservative Movement Complains About The Recovery as Corporations Make Record Profits

The Sleazebag Conservative Movement Complains About The Recovery as Corporations Make Record Profits

Too many Americans are unaware of the extreme disparities that have been caused by the unregulated profit incentive of capitalism. Our winner-take-all system is flailing away at once-healthy parts of society, leaving them like withered limbs on a trembling body, even as the relative few who benefit promote the illusion of opportunity and prosperity for all. Concerned citizens armed with facts are not fooled. Instead, the more they learn the angrier they get. And as in revolutions of the past, discontent leads to change.

Hacking Off the Poor Half of Society

Some wealthy and uninformed individuals have referred to the lowest-income 47% of Americans as the "takers," who enjoy government benefits at the expense of the high-earning one percent. But their claim is meaningless. The total amount paid out in 'welfare' (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is less than the investment income of just three men in a single year.

The monthly TANF income for a family of four is less than what the average member of the Forbes Top 20 made in one second at the office.

The 47% don't own stocks. They don't own anything. The so-called 'takers' have ZERO wealth. The value of any assets owned by nearly half of the country is surpassed by their debt.

Slashing the Security of the Elderly

Recipients of 'entitlements' are accused by the uninformed of getting something for nothing. The opposite is true. According to the Urban Institute, the typical two-earner couple making average wages throughout their lifetimes will receive less in Social Security benefits than they paid in. Same for single males. Almost the same for single females.

Getting something for nothing? Yes, the rich are. Tax expenditures, which are deductions and exemptions that primarily benefit the highest-earning individuals, cost about 8% of the GDP, the same percentage that goes to Social Security and Medicare.

If just one of the tax breaks for the rich, the $113,700 cap on Payroll Tax, were eliminated, Social Security would be almost entirely funded for the next 75 years.

Slicing Up Justice

In the last few months American citizens, some of them children, have been arrested for:

    Looking for Indian arrowheads on federal land.
    Throwing peanuts on the school bus.
    Lying about a home address to get the kids into a better school.
    Sitting on a milk crate.

Meanwhile, not a single banker was arrested for these actions:

    HSBC Bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels.
    Goldman Sachs designed and sold mortgage packages that were meant to fail.
    Bank of America and Lehman Brothers hid billions of dollars of bonuses and loans from investors.

Severing the Head from the Global Body

If you could gather together the world's 200 richest individuals, ask each one his or her net worth, get the actual numbers from Forbes, and then add it all up, the total would be more than the total wealth of half the population of the world, 3.5 billion people.

The U.S. is one of the greatest contributors to this shameful disparity. It's no coincidence that we're both the third least taxed developed country and the fourth highest in wealth inequality among all nations. It's also no surprise, with so little revenue going to the general public, that our country is the fourth worst in the overall well-being of its children.

Castrating the Taxman

Corporations have doubled their profits and cut their taxes in half in ten years. The burden of taxes, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the price of a "civilized society," has been shifted to workers. For every dollar of employee payroll tax paid in the 1950s corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.

Globalization has allowed U.S. corporations to stop paying for national defense and infrastructure and all the benefits of the U.S. legal and educational systems. All of the following companies had sizable U.S. revenues, but they claimed losses here while declaring billions of dollars of profits overseas.

    -- Bank of America, with 82% of its revenue in the U.S., declared $7 billion in U.S. losses and $10 billion in foreign profits.
    -- Citigroup, with 42% of its revenue in North America (almost all U.S.), declared a $5 billion U.S. loss and a $28 billion foreign profit.
    -- Pfizer, with 40% of its revenues in the U.S., declared almost $7 billion in U.S. losses to go along with $31 billion in foreign profits.
    -- Abbott Labs, with 42% of its sales in the U.S., declared a $256 million U.S. loss and $12 billion in foreign profits.
    -- Dow Chemical, with 32% of its sales in the U.S., declared a $15 million U.S. loss against foreign profits of over $5 billion.

Conclusions

If there's any way capitalism can work, it has to be regulated. Otherwise greed takes over. Blind greed. The sneering head at the top of the body watches limbs being chopped off, but it doesn't seem to recognize that we're all bleeding to death.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press).

How can this be. Conservatives keep saying that if we would only lower taxes yet again for these wealthy corporations and millionaires, and cut regulations that protect our air and drinking water, corporate America might make enough money to hire people. When is America going to tell conservatives they're fed up with the anti-American policies wrapped in the flag.

Conservative pervert Mark Sanford (R-SC) due in court over allegation he trespassed at ex-wife’s house

Conservative pervert Mark Sanford (R-SC) due in court over allegation he trespassed at ex-wife’s house

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) will be in court two days after his bid to return to public office concludes for allegedly trespassing on his ex-wife’s property.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Mark Sanford is accused of repeatedly going into Jenny Sanford’s home without her permission, which would be a violation of their 2010 divorce agreement.

“Plaintiff has informed defendant on a number of occasions that this behavior is in violation of the court’s order and has demanded that it not occur again,” her lawyer, Deena Smith McRackan, said in the complaint.

Jenny Sanford told Politico via email on Tuesday that while she confirmed the lawsuit to the AP, “it was my understanding that these documents, which deal with a number of private domestic matters, were to have remained sealed along with the divorce documents. I did not choose to make this public, nor did I choose the timing of his trespassing.”

According to the suit, Jenny Sanford allegedly caught the former governor and current congressional candidate on Feb. 3 using his cell phone for a flashlight as he left the house through a rear door. Court records also said McRackan enclosed a February 2011 letter sent to both Mark Sanford and local police warning him not to trespass on the property.

Mark Sanford won a runoff election on April 2 and is now facing a May 7 election against Democratic candidate Elizabeth Colbert Busch for the congressional seat representing the state’s 1st district.

S.C. conservatives will vote for Sanford anyway because it is a member of the radical conservative movement. That is all that matters to these freaks and perverts, that they drink the Republican kool-aid. Once you're a member you can trespass, lie the country into a war or crash the economy, and conservatives will find some bizarre way to blame Democrats.

In Fact, the U.S. Has Been Winning the War on Terror. Terrorism soared when conservatives controlled all three branches of government from 2000 to 2006. Maybe these are not the people to trust with national security.

Making balancing the budget a priority over job creation still does not work: Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.

Sinister Anti-American Conservative Ben Carson Goes On Crazed Rant Against Critics

Sinister Anti-American Conservative Ben Carson Goes On Crazed Rant Against Critics

Dr. Ben Carson has pivoted from apologizing "if anybody was offended" by his anti-gay comments to attacking his critics, some of whom he says are "racist[s]" who are trying to smear him as a bigot in order to silence him.

Carson, who has been lauded by the conservative media and treated to dozens of Fox News appearances over the past few months, lashed out at his critics during an April 1 interview on The Mark Levin Show.

The noted surgeon and Johns Hopkins University neurosurgery professor has been subject to harsh criticism, including from students and staff at Johns Hopkins Medical School, since he compared gays who support marriage equality to pedophiles and practitioners of bestiality during a March 27 interview on Fox News' Hannity.

During that appearance, Carson said, "Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are. They don't get to change the definition. So, it's not something against gays. It's against anybody who wants to come along and change the fundamental definitions of pillars of society. It has significant ramifications."

Carson had previously written in his 2012 book that marriage equality could destroy America like the "fall of the Roman Empire."

After LGBT medical students called for Carson's replacement as the commencement speaker for the class of 2013, he attempted to claim that he hadn't been "equating" gays with pedophiles or those who engage in bestiality, while apologizing "if anybody was offended." He also said he would be willing to step down as commencement speaker.

But on Levin's show, Carson went on the offensive, saying that the criticism he has received proves that he's right that "political correctness is threatening to destroy our nation because it puts a muzzle over honest conversation." He added that "the attacks against me have been so vicious because I represent an existential threat" to his critics, who he says "take my words, misinterpret them, and try to make it seem that I'm a bigot."

After Levin claimed that Carson has been "attacked also, in many respects, because of your race" because "a lot of white liberals" don't like black conservatives, Carson replied, "Well, they're the most racist people there are. Because you know, they put you in a little category, a little box, 'you have to think this way, how could you dare come off the plantation?'"

Carson's accusation echoes Rush Limbaugh, who said that Carson's experience shows that if minorities "dare stray from the Democrat Party plantation," they will "pay the price for that." Fox News' Megyn Kelly has also rallied to Carson's defense. Meanwhile, right-wing media figures like Fox's Eric Bolling and the Daily Caller's Matt Lewis have criticized conservatives for pushing Carson as the savior of the GOP so quickly.

Carson voices the same cultural values as 15th century inquisitors who call anyone who disagrees with them, evil. he has a skill set and good for him. Thank goodness he does not determine public policy. He sees anyone who is a patriotic American ( non-conservatives) the same way tyrants throughout history has seen those who fight for freedom, economic and social justice.