Patriotic American Are Not on The Side of Crazy Conservatives Who Want to Shutdown Government

Patriotic American Are Not on The Side of Crazy Conservatives Who Want to Shutdown Government

As lawmakers attempt to pass a funding bill to keep the government operating past Monday, House Republicans won’t agree to avert a shutdown unless Obamacare is delayed for one year. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has been pushing this anti-Obamacare strategy for weeks, claims this represents a “compromise.”

But the American public doesn’t necessarily agree. Even as the deadline for passing a continuing resolution draws near, the vast majority of Americans still don’t want Congress to delay or defund the health reform law, according to the results from a new tracking poll.

The Morning Consult group finds that just seven percent of voters support delaying or defunding Obamacare. On the other hand, 39 percent of voters want Congress to either let the law take effect or expand the law even further. Another 29 percent think that Congress should work on making improvements to Obamacare, but ultimately leave the law in place. By a two to one margin, the poll’s respondents said “the results from the 2012 presidential election represented a referendum on moving forward with the Affordable Care Act.”

In a memo regarding the new results, the Morning Consult group notes that voters have ultimately been “unmoved by three months of the defund argument.”

Morning Consult’s results track with earlier research that has found that most Americans want to give the health reform law an opportunity to work. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and USA Today found that even when Americans don’t support Obamacare, they still want lawmakers to try to make it work rather than try to undermine it. And Morning Consult’s last tracking poll found that even Republicans don’t favor defunding the health law.

And if the government does end up being forced to shut down because of Republican brinkmanship over Obamacare, the majority of voters say they’ll put “a lot” of the blame on GOP lawmakers in Congress. According to the new poll, nearly eight in 10 independent voters say they’ll blame congressional Republicans for a shutdown.

In an analysis of the new polling results, conservative health policy columnist Avik Roy acknowledges that Americans “don’t view the law in the apocalyptic terms that many conservatives do.” Even though Cruz — who recently conducted a fake filibuster to speak out against Obamacare for over 20 hours — claims that “the American people overwhelmingly reject Obamacare,” Roy notes that doesn’t mean the public actually supports shutting down the government in order to get rid of it.

Only parts of Obamacare or the ACA have been put into effect and millions of Americans are reaping the benefits for their families. Conservatives want to use blackmail and fiscal hostage taking to go against the will of the American people. Conservative do not and never have believed in government by and for the people. It is a freaky political philosophy partly based on mid 20th century fascism and partly on old world rule by monarchs and the elite. It is not an American political party.

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.

Conservative Republican Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) Has Serious Delusions

Conservative Republican Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) Has Serious Delusions 

The Congressman who once encouraged House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to attack Obamacare’s 10 percent tax on tanning bed services as racist against white people sought to compare the GOP’s latest push to defund the health care law to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

“It only takes one with passion — look at Rosa Parks, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King,” Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) told the New York Times on Thursday. “People with passion that speak up, they’ll have people follow them because they believe the same way, and smart leadership listens to that.”

Though King is best remembered for his work on racial integration, he was also strong champion for the labor movement, fighting against economic inequality and for equal access to health care for all. As he said during a speech to the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

The GOP’s push to defund and ultimately repeal the health care law would leave millions of uninsured Americans without access to health care coverage and would disproportionately impact the African American community. Blacks are 8 percent more likely to lack health insurance than whites, and a recent study found that the health care law could cut that differential in half.

Like the rest of the plastic patriots who call themselves tea bagger conservatives, Yoho does not feel that the American people have the right and the freedom to join together to provide health insurance for ourselves. he and other tea baggers do believe that men, women, children, the elderly and disabled do have the right to die and stop being a burden on Congress critters like Yoho who makes $179,000 dollars a year and his health insurance is subsidized by the American people. Yoho is a social-Darwinist, the UnAmerican political philosophy that fueled the fascist movements of the mid 20th century. The ACA or Obamacare is helping millions of American families.

America Hating Radical Rafael Cruz Goes On The Road Using God To Cover His Lies About Obamacare

America Hating Radical Rafael Cruz, father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) Goes On The Road using God To Cover His Lies About Obamacare

In a fiery speech about defunding President Barack Obama’s health care reform law on Thursday, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), told a crowd that “they may take our lives,” but “they cannot take our honor.”

At a town hall in Wilmington, Delaware sponsored by Heritage Action, Rafael Cruz joined anti-Obamacare crusader Jim DeMint, who has launched a nine-city tour to rally Americans against the law.

“We can be complacent no more, we can be silent no more!” the Texas pastor exclaimed. “You know, we have seen our lives under attack. Our quality of life is being eroded more and more and more as our liberties are taken away. As regulations and more taxation, we are seeing our lives being destroyed.”

The Cruz family has long been an anti-American radical family spreading lies to advance their proto-fascist agenda. The fact is that Obamacare or the Affordable care Act will help and is helping millions of Americans with their healthcare costs which have been rising about 14 percent a year for the twenty years. It is a private market solution, that might well not be perfect, but the utterly dishonorable Cruz is spreading the same lies Sarah Pail and other Anti-American zealots have been spreading for years. Taxes? Cruz is not just lying, he is being just plain old evil - wrapping lies in fake patriotism and the Bible is evil. Taxes are at historic lows, the lowest since the 1950s. Cruz senior and junior have no honor, no integrity, no ethics, no sense of American values, yet being a combination of delusional and venal they just keep running their mouths.

Americans Wonder if Virginia Republican Lieutenant Governor Nominee E.W. Jackson is a Nazi Sympathizer

  Americans Wonder if Virginia Republican Lieutenant Governor Nominee E.W. Jackson is a Nazi Sympathizer

In a local radio interview this morning, Virginia Republican lieutenant governor nominee E.W. Jackson said the Democratic Party is “anti-God” and that Christians should leave it.

Jackson has said in the past that he thinks believing in God and voting Democratic are fundamentally incompatible, so WLEE host Jack Gravely asked if he still believes it. Gravely explained that he’s a Christian and tends to vote Democratic, just like his parents and family. Jackson didn’t back down.

“You are saying for us, we’re all wrong, leave that party. And all I’m saying to you is, if you said it before, you still have to believe it, why did you say it?” Gravely asked. “Oh, oh, oh I do believe it,” Jackson responded.

He continued: “I said it because I believe that the Democrat Party has become an anti-God party, I think it’s an anti-life party, I think it’s an anti-family party. And these are all things I think Christians hold to very dearly.”

Many Americans may find these expressions of radical ideology and religion by conservative Republican E. W. Jackson both disturbing and familiar. They 're disturbing because E.W. seems to think he has been appointed the entry guard into Christendom. Where did Jackson get the last word, the holy authority to determine who is a actual Christian. E.W. Jackson, who subscribes to far Right anti-American conservatism also seems to betray his ideological roots.

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

    -Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

E.W. Jackson has simply replaced the Jew in Hitler's speech with Democrat. Countries that have followed the political leadership of freakish zealots like Jackson have done very well. E.W. has all the ideological hallmarks of a proto-fascist.

Goldman,Using The Conservative-Libertarian Model, Made $5 Billion By Manipulating Inventories of Aluminum

 Goldman,Using The Conservative-Libertarian Model, Made $5 Billion By Manipulating Inventories of Aluminum

What sexual favors were exchanged so that the New York Times blunted the impact of an important, detailed investigative story on Goldman profiteering, this time in the aluminum market, by releasing it on a heat-addled summer Saturday?

On a high level, the story sets forth a simple and damning case. Not all that long ago, banks were prohibited from being in operating businesses. But the Federal Reserve and Congress have loosened those rules and big financial players have gone full bore backward integrating from commodities trading into owning major components of the delivery and inventorying systems. This doesn’t just give them a big information advantage by having better access to underlying buying and selling activity. It allows them to manipulate inventories, and thus, prices. And Goldman’s aluminum henanigans increased prices all across the market, not just for the customers who chose to use them for warehousing and delivery.

The article A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold by David Kocieniewski, tells us that the newly-permissive rules allowed Goldman to buy Metro International Trade Services, a concern in Detroit with 27 warehouses that handles a bit over 25% of the aluminum available for delivery. And here’s where the fun and games begin:

    Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

    This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back–and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country…

    Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records.

    Longer waits might be written off as an aggravation, but they also make aluminum more expensive nearly everywhere in the country because of the arcane formula used to determine the cost of the metal on the spot market. The delays are so acute that Coca-Cola and many other manufacturers avoid buying aluminum stored here. Nonetheless, they still pay the higher price.

The Times’s sources estimate the price impact across the market at 6 cents per pound, which adds $12 to the price of a typical car. Goldman piously claims it obey all the rules, but obeying the rules is far from operating in a fair or pro-customer manner.

The last thing conservatives and rightie libertarians want is a competitive market. They want total control and anyone who suggests using some regulation to stop that control is quickly gang piled on as a liberal pinko communists.

Conservatism, The Movement of UnAmerican Neo-Confederates

Top,    Here's Jim DeMint laughing it up with the neoconderate who wrote his book

Neo-Confederate Rand Paul Aide A Daily Caller Contributor, Fox Regular

Jack Hunter, a congressional aide to Sen. Rand Paul with a history of "neo-Confederate" and "pro-secessionist" views, has produced dozens of articles and video commentaries for The Daily Caller and appeared as what one Fox Business host termed a "regular" guest on that network. He also helped then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), currently the president of The Heritage Foundation, write his most recent book.

The conservative Washington Free Beacon reported today that Hunter, a "close" Rand Paul aide who also co-wrote the Kentucky Republican's 2011 book, "spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist ... Hunter was a chairman in the League of the South, which 'advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.'"

Free Beacon also quoted Hunter's South Carolina radio commentary under the pseudonym "The Southern Avenger" in which he expressed adoration for Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, indignation that white Americans are treated to a "racial double standard," and opposition to Spanish-speaking immigrants. Hunter reportedly "told the Free Beacon that he no longer holds many of these views," including his pro-Lincoln assassin views, but "declined to say that he no longer supports secession."

Free Beacon further reported that "[d]uring public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag"

Conservatives Love America So Much They're Making America More Like Chile

Conservatives Love America So Much They're Making America More Like Chile

An 11-year-old Chilean girl who has become pregnant from rape is renewing a contentious debate over abortion in the conservative Catholic country, where the medical procedure is illegal under all circumstances. Doctors have warned that continuing the pregnancy will be dangerous for the 11-year-old’s health, as well as for the health of her fetus. But, under Chile’s total abortion ban, she is forced to continue it anyway.

The young girl is now 14 weeks pregnant. Her mother’s boyfriend has confessed to sexually abusing the child over the past two years, and is now in custody.

Abortion was legal in Chile under some medical circumstances until Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship instated a total ban in 1973. The current conservative administration has remained firmly opposed to loosening the harsh ban. According to the Santiago Times, Chile is now one of just six countries in the world — including Vatican City — with such stringent anti-abortion laws.

But now that the 11-year-old’s case has been made public, Chileans are beginning to push for change. Some opponents have started an online petition to demand legal abortion access in cases when the woman has been raped or when the woman’s health is at risk.

“It’s the first online petition I’ve signed in my life, but I think this case really deserves it. I hope this case serves as precedent to have a serious discussion about abortion,” Eduardo Hernandez, a 30-year-old Chilean web designer, told the Associated Press. “When I heard about this little girl, my first reaction was to support abortion because I think it’s the best option in this case.”

This past year, the Chilean Senate rejected three different bills that would have loosened the total ban. But some of Chile’s presidential candidates have indicated that they support amending the abortion law. Former president Michele Bachelet, who is emerging as a front-runner in the country’s upcoming election, confirmed on Twitter that she would work to decriminalize abortion for rape victims if she is elected.

Yet, apparently modeling themselves on the governing principles of Chilean dictators, governors Rick Perry and Scott Walker, with the backing of their authoritarian comrades in their state legislature, are making the USA a little more like Chile.

Conservative Culture: America's Wage Slaves Are Getting Crushed Making Corporate Plutocrats Rich

America's Wage Slaves Are Getting Crushed Making Corporate Plutocrats Rich

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

In June, the Labor Department reported [3] that the nation had more temp workers than ever before: 2.7 million. Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association [4], the temp industry’s trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency.

The proportion of temp workers in the labor force reached its peak in early 2000 before the 2001 slump and then the Great Recession. But as the economy continues its slow, uneven recovery, temp work is roaring back 10 times faster than private-sector employment as a whole – a pace “exceeding even the dramatic run-up of the early 1990s,” according to [5] the staffing association.

The overwhelming majority of that growth has come in blue-collar work in factories and warehouses, as the temp industry sheds the Kelly Girl image of the past. Last year, more than one in every 20 blue-collar workers was a temp.

Several temp agencies, such as Adecco and Manpower, are now among the largest employers in the United States. One list [6] put Kelly Services as second only to Walmart.

“We’re seeing just more and more industries using business models that attempt to change the employment relationship or obscure the employment relationship,” said Mary Beth Maxwell, a top official in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. “While it’s certainly not a new phenomenon, it’s rapidly escalating. In the last 10 to 15 years, there’s just a big shift to this for a lot more workers – which makes them a lot more vulnerable.”

The temp system insulates the host companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants. In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage.

The rise of the blue-collar permatemp helps explain one of the most troubling aspects of the phlegmatic recovery. Despite a soaring stock market and steady economic growth, many workers are returning to temporary or part-time jobs. This trend is intensifying America’s decades-long rise in income inequality, in which low- and middle-income workers have seen their real wages stagnate or decline [7]. On average, temps earn 25 percent less than permanent workers.

The CEO of Manpower is like a bandit without the risks. He made $5.5 million over 6 years for supplying wage slaves to other plutocrats. He, like the Walmart family take more out of the economy and suppress more economic activity than they create.

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.

Anti-American Fox News Reporter Todd Starnes Defends Racism and Lies For Paula Deen

Anti-American Fox News Reporter Todd Starnes Defends Racism and Lies For Paula Deen

A Fox News correspondent is attacking "the liberal, anti-South media" for unfairly "trying to crucify Paula Deen" over her admission in a court deposition that she's used racial epithets.

Todd Starnes, who also hosts a Fox News Radio segment, wrote on his Facebook page that the "liberal, anti-South media is trying to crucify Paula Deen. They accuse her of using a derogatory word to describe a black person. Paula admitted she used the word -- back in the 1980s - when a black guy walked into the bank, stuck a gun in her face and ordered her to hand over the cash. The national media failed to mention that part of the story. I'll give credit to the Associated Press for telling the full story."

Starnes also defended Deen via Twitter, writing: "The mainstream media hates Paula Deen [...] I think it's because most of them don't eat meat."

Starnes' defense of Deen doesn't square with reports about Deen's deposition. The Huffington Post reported it "obtained a transcript of the deposition in question" and Deen is quoted as stating she "probably" used the word "in telling my husband" about the incident, and she is "sure" she's used it since then, "but it's been a very long time." She went on to say "my children and my brother object to that word being used in any cruel or mean behavior. As well as I do."

Deen also discussed planning a "really southern plantation wedding" and was asked if she used the n-word then:

    Lawyer: Is there any possibility, in your mind, that you slipped and used the word "n--r"?


    Deen: No, because that's not what these men were. They were professional black men doing a fabulous job.

She apologized today in an online video "to everybody for the wrong that I've done ... Inappropriate and hurtful language is totally, totally unacceptable."

In 2011, Starnes tweeted "Blacks riot at Burger King" and linked to a local news story about a cell phone camera capturing a brawl at a Panama City Beach Burger King. The story did not mention or discuss the race of the participants. The tweet was later deleted.

Starnes' Facebook post: see picture above.

I feel a little sorry for Deen, she seems to have some mental and racial issues, and probably needs professional psychological help , instead of sleazy apologists like Starne trying to cover for things she said on the record.. Starnes on the other hand is a malevolent propagandist for the radical anti-American conservatism pushed regularly by Fox News. In the fantasy world of Starnes and Fox America can never really be free until we return to the plantation model of governance.

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.

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'.

The Truth Comes Out, Conservatives and The Tea Party Were Not Targeted By The IRS

The Truth Comes Out, Conservatives and The Tea Party Were Not Targeted By The IRS

Remember the video of the guy in the “pimp costume” who got advice from ACORN employees on how to run his prostitution ring? Turns out the whole story was just a lie, a doctored-video smear job on an important organization. The guy never wore a “pimp costume” and the real, undoctored videos showed that ACORN employees did nothing wrong. But a lie travels around the world before the corporate media bothers to check the facts. The “news” media blasted the story everywhere, and Congress was so outraged they forced ACORN to close its doors. And here we are again.

The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS “targeted conservative groups.” Some in the media say there was “IRS harassment of conservative groups.” Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were “audited.”

This story that is being repeated and treated as “true” is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except t believe it.

Conservative Groups Were Not “Targeted,” “Singled Out” Or Anything Else

You are hearing that conservative groups were “targeted.” What you are not hearing is that progressive groups were also “targeted.” So were groups that are not progressive or conservative.

All that happened here is that groups applying to the IRS for special tax status were checked to see if they were engaged in political activity. They were checked, not targeted. Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Once again: Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Conservative groups were not “singled out,” were not “targeted” and in the end none were denied special tax status — even though many obviously should have been.

From last week’s House hearings on this:

Rep. Peter Roskam, R-IL: “How come only conservative groups got snagged?”

Outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller: “They didn’t sir. Organizations of all walks and all persuasions were pulled in. That’s shown by the fact that only 70 of the 300 organizations were tea party organizations, of the ones that were looked at by TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration].”

Bet you didn’t see that blasted all over your TV news that night.

Click here to watch the video clip of this. It’s worth it. (Video at link)

And from Bloomberg reporting: IRS Sent Same Letter to Democrats That Fed Tea Party Row, (emphasis added, for emphasis)

    One of those groups, Emerge America, saw its tax-exempt status denied, forcing it to disclose its donors and pay some taxes. None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected. Progress Texas … faced the same lines of questioning as the Tea Party groups from the same IRS office that issued letters to the Republican-friendly applicants. A third group, Clean Elections Texas, which supports public funding of campaigns, also received IRS inquiries.

    In a statement late yesterday, the tax agency said it had pooled together the politically active nonpartisan applicants — including a “minority” that were identified because of their names. “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.

Again, for emphasis: “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.”

This is just another non-scandal that conservatives will embrace just like some people still believe myths about mermaids and the earth being flat. Conservatives thrive on their precious lies. That is because they have some some highly dubious values. You have to be able to parse out the truth from lies, the good from the bad to have ral values. Things conservative Republicans cannot seem to do with any consistency.

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.

Conservative Republican Dreams Come True, American Workers Live on the New Wage Slave Plantation

Conservative Republican Dreams Come True, American Workers Live on the New Wage Slave Plantation

Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money!  But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.

Everardo Carrillo says that's just what happened to him and other low-wage employees who worked at a Southern California warehouse run by a Walmart contractor. Carrillo and his fellow workers have launched a multi-class-action lawsuit for massive wage theft (Everardo Carrillo et al. v. Schneider Logistics) in a case that’s finally bringing national attention to an invisible epidemic. (Walmart, despite its claims that it has no responsibility for what its contractors do, has been named a defendant [3].)

What happened to Carrillo happens every day in America. And it could happen to you.

How big is the problem?

Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A conservative estimate of unpaid overtime alone shows that it costs workers at least $19 billion per year.

The laws protecting workers are grossly inadequate [4], and wage thieves go unpunished. For giant companies like Walmart, Citigroup and UPS, getting fined is just the cost of doing business. You could even say that they're incentivized to cheat because punishment is so unlikely, and when it happens, so light. The protections we used to take for granted, like the right to receive at least the minimum wage, the right to workers’ compensation when hurt on the job, and the right to advocate for better working conditions, are nothing more than a quaint memory for many Americans. Activist Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America,calls it a "national crime wave."

Corporate America does not believe in an honest day's pay for an honest day's work. They believe that workers should shut up and produce so that the corny elite can have more money and even more power. Workers who get uppity and demand the freedom and dignity they deserve are branded Marxists. How ironic that conservative claim to love America and freedom, yet are working to make America less free and less humane.

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.

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.

Bush's Library Dedication Remind American Patriots Of 50 Reasons George W. Bush Should Have Been Tried For Sedition

Bush's Library Dedication Remind American Patriots Of 50 Reasons George W. Bush Should Have Been Tried For Sedition 

Let’s look at 50 reasons, some large and some small, why W. inspired so much anger.

1. He stole the presidency in 2000. People may forget that Republicans in Florida purged more than 50,000 African-American voters before Election Day, and then went to the Supreme Court where the GOP-appointed majority stopped a recount that would have awarded the presidency to Vice-President Al Gore if all votes were counted. National news organizations verified [7] that outcome long after Bush had been sworn in.

2. Bush’s lies started in that race. Bush ran for office claiming he was a “uniter, not a divider [8].” Even though he received fewer popular votes than Gore, he quickly claimed he had the mandate from the American public to push his right-wing agenda. 

3. He covered up his past. He was a party boy, the scion of a powerful political family who got away [9] with being a deserter during the Vietnam War. He was reportedly AWOL for over a year from his assigned unit, the Texas Air National Guard, which other military outfits called [10] the "Champagne Division.”

4. He loved the death penalty. As Texas governor from 1995-2000, he signed [11] the most execution orders of any governor in U.S. history—152 people, including the mentally ill and women who were domestic abuse victims. He spared one man’s life, a serial killer.

5. He was a corporate shill from Day 1. Bush locked up the GOP nomination by raising more campaign money from corporate boardrooms than anyone at that time. He lunched with CEOs who would jet into Austin to "educate" him about their political wish lists.

6. He gutted global political progress.He pulled out [12] of the Kyoto Protocol which set requirements for 38 nations to lower greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, saying [13] that abiding by the agreement would “harm our economy and hurt our workers.”

7. He embraced global isolationism. He withdrew [14] from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, over Russia’s protest, taking the U.S. in a direction not seen since World War I.

8. He ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden. He ignored the Aug. 6, 2001 White House intelligence briefing titled [15], “Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.” Meanwhile, his chief anti-terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, and first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, testified [16] in Congress that he was intent on invading Iraq within days of becoming president.

9. Ramped up war on drugs, not terrorists. The Bush administration had twice as many FBI agents assigned to the war on drugs [17] than fighting terrorism before 9/11, and kept thousands in that role after the terror attacks.

10. “My Pet Goat.” He kept reading a picture book to grade-schoolers for seven minutes [18] after his top aides told him that the World Trade Centers had been attacked in 9/11. Then Air Force One flew away from Washington, D.C., vanishing for hours after the attack.

11. Squandered global goodwill after 9/11. Bush thumbed his nose at world sympathy for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, by declaring a global war on terrorism and declaring [19] “you are either with us or against us.”

12. Bush turned to Iraq not Afghanistan. The Bush administration soon started beating war drums for an attack on Iraq, where there was no proven Al Qaeda link, instead of Afghanistan, where the 9/11 bombers had trained and Osama bin Laden was based. His 2002 State of the Union speech declared [20] that Iraq was part of an “Axis of Evil.”

13. Attacked United Nation weapons inspectors. The march to war in Iraq started [20] with White House attacks on the credibility of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, whose claims that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons proved to be true.

14. He flat-out lied about Iraq’s weapons. In a major speech [21] in October 2002, he said that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to send unmanned aircraft to the U.S. with bombs that could range from chemical weapons to nuclear devices. “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” he said.

15. He ignored the U.N. and launched a war. The Bush administration tried to get the U.N. Security Council to authorize an attack on Iraq, which it refused to do. Bush then decided to lead a "preemptive" attack [22] regardless of international consequences. He did not wait [23] for any congressional authorization to launch a war.

16. Abandoned international Criminal Court. Before invading Iraq, Bush told the U.N. that the U.S. was withdrawing [24] from ratifying the International Criminal Court Treaty to protect American troops from persecution and to allow it to pursue preemptive war.

17. Colin Powell’s false evidence at U.N. The highly decorated soldier turned Secretary of State presented false evidence [25] at the U.N. as the American mainstream media began its jingoistic drumbeat to launch a war of choice on Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

18. He launched a war on CIA whistleblowers. When a former ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson, wrote a New York Times op-ed saying there was no nuclear threat from Iraq, the White House retaliated by leaking [26] the name and destroying the career of his wife, Valerie Plame, one of the CIA’s top national security experts.

19. Bush pardoned the Plame affair leaker. Before leaving office, Bush pardoned [26] the vice president’s top staffer, Scooter Libby, for leaking Plame’s name to the press.  

20. Bush launched the second Iraq War. In April 2003, the U.S. military invaded Iraq for the second time in two decades, leading [27] to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and more than a million refugees as a years of sectarian violence took hold on Iraq. Nearly 6,700 U.S. soldiers have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

21. Baghdad looted except for oil ministry. The Pentagon failure to plan for a military occupation and transition to civilian rule was seen as Baghdad was looted while troops guarded [28] the oil ministry, suggesting this war was fought for oil riches, not terrorism. 

22. The war did not make the U.S. safer. In 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate [29] (a consensus report of the heads of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies) asserted [20] that the Iraq war had increased Islamic radicalism and had worsened the terror threat.

23. U.S. troops were given unsafe gear. From inadequate vests [30] from protection against snipers to Humvees [31] that could not protect soldiers from roadside bombs, the military did not sufficiently equip its soldiers in Iraq, leading to an epidemic of brain injuries.

24. Meanwhile, the war propaganda continued. From landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit to declare [32] “mission accomplished” to surprising troops in Baghdad with a Thanksgiving turkey that was a table decoration [33] used as a prop, Bush defended his war of choice by using soldiers as PR props.

25. He never attended soldiers' funerals. For years after the war started, Bush never attended [34] a funeral even though as of June 2005, 144 soldiers (of the 1,700 killed thus far) were laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetary, about two miles from the White House.

26. Meanwhile, war profiteering surged.The list of top Bush administration officials whose former corporate employers made billions in Pentagon contracts starts with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Halliburton, which made [35] $39.5 billion, and included his daughter, Liz Cheney, who ran [36] a $300 million Middle East partnership program.

The other 24 are at the link. Only in the USA can politicians such as Bush and Cheney do so much harm to the nation, up to and including lying citizens to their death and tanking the economy, and get away with it by saying that those who disagree are just being political. That is simply a way of saying there is no moral line that cannot be crossed, because for conservatives morality is just a matter of which way the wind is blowing on any particular day. They have been wrapping their anti-Americanism in the flag for over half a century and getting away with it. Now they're rewriting the seditious and morally bankrupt Bush presidency. If there is a place below the gutter, that is how far conservatism has sunk.

The NRA or National Right to Kill Children Association Proposals That Will Turn Our Schools into Gun-Crazy Nightmares

The NRA or National Right to Kill Children Association Proposals That Will Turn Our Schools into Gun-Crazy Nightmares

The NRA doesn’t just want to put armed teachers, armed guards and volunteer vigilantes in schools to prevent more school shootings. It wants to turn schools into veritable prisons, where security staff patrol and lockdown schools, and indentify and spy on problem students and employees, according to an NRA-sponsored report [3] that included model legislation to allow such measures.

The National Federation of Teachers [4] and well-known civil rights advocates [5] slammed the report [6], issued by former GOP congressman and Department of Homeland Security official Asa Hutchinson [7]. They said militarizing schools with more guns was not the answer to gun violence. Nor was putting more police into schools, particularly in communities of color. That only increases hostilities for students, not safe learning environments.

What follows below are 16 excerpts from the 225-page report [3] showing how the NRA would choose to deal with the potential for gun violence—primarily by locking down schools, making every student and school employee a suspect, and arming a cadre of security officers with legal authority to shoot back.

Notably, the report does mention that anti-bullying programs have an important role to play in lowering hateful acts. It also says that all school employees, contractors or community volunteers carrying guns should have extensive background checks, which pro-gun lawmakers in Congress are saying would be unacceptable in new federal gun controls.
But the bottom line is that the report [3] by Hutchinson’s security-oriented consulting firm for the NRA would militarize schools and turn them into lightweight versions of modern prisons. Nowhere does it suggest the obvious—that taking guns out of circulation will lessen their use. Instead, it seeks to make guns in schools the new normal.

1. Only more guns will stop violence. “It is the belief of the National School Shield Task Force that many schools across the country stand to benefit from the presence of armed security and, in the quest to make our schools safer, should leave no option off the table.”

2. Unarmed officers can’t do the job. “The presence of a security guard or off-duty policeman when there is an active shooter is mostly ineffective unless the security officer is armed. Without a weapon to defend them, even the most heroic individuals are unprepared to defend against violent attackers armed with guns.”

3. The NRA should train armed school staff.“The NRA has the nationally recognized expertise to develop and implement the stringent training courses required by this model program. It is recommended that the professional training programs that are approved by the states for armed school personnel use private sector approved and certified trainers as well as traditional state law enforcement trainers.”

4. This training should be privatized or donated.“Because of the limitations of federal, state and local funding for school safety, there is an important role that can be filled by a private non-profit advocacy and education organization. The National School Shield is in a position with adequate funding and support from the NRA to fulfill this important national mission.”

5. Four options for an armed presence.“A School Resource Officer (SRO) is a uniformed, armed and sworn law enforcement officer, usually drawn from local police or sheriff’s departments... The second possibility is introducing privately contracted security personnel… The third possibility is introducing armed citizen volunteers.... The fourth option involves arming personnel already at the school for whom security is not their primary duty – for example, teachers, principals, or custodial staff.”

6. Assume no school is safe.“Finally, a school must take steps to prevent and mitigate those events that are entirely unpredictable and even unfathomable. Using a phrase from the security field, this area of consideration can be summed up as follows: ‘Just because there is the absence of a threat does not mean there is no risk.’”

7. Track and spy on ‘problem kids.’“Each school should develop a threat assessment team, which will work in coordination with mental health professionals… The team will be responsible for evaluating all threats, including the surrounding circumstances, and conducting an investigation to determine whether the threat is serious. After all appropriate assessments have been made, the team should create a written safety plan by integrating all relevant findings, and should determine whether to refer the student to a school psychologist for a mental health assessment and, if necessary, to the school resource officer for a law-enforcement investigation.

8. Overview: spy on kids, lock campuses, position guards.“This includes developing a knowledge of commonly identified ‘pre-incident indicators’ that historical inquiry of such events suggests may be helpful in identifying and interdicting potential assailants before they engage in violence. Another part is physical, involving the construction, installation, and maintenance of appropriate physical security barriers beginning with the outermost perimeter of school grounds, extending to the exterior of the school building, and continuing through the interior of the school itself. Finally, a third part is comprised of establishing appropriate daily procedures that complement various components of a school’s physical infrastructure or, where that physical infrastructure is lacking, compensate for that potential gap in security.”

9. Identify ‘troubled’ kids and track them.“Schools should have a dedicated Threat Assessment Group or Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT) that meets at a minimum once every two weeks and preferably weekly. These teams should employ a multi-disciplinary approach to not only assess existing threats but also focus on preventing the threat or crisis from occurring.

“The team tracks 'red flags' over time, detecting patterns, trends, and disturbances in individual or group behavior. The team receives reports of disruptive, problematic or concerning behavior or misconduct (from co-workers, community members, friends, colleagues, etc.), conducts an investigation, performs a threat assessment, and determines the best mechanisms for support, intervention, warning/notification and response.”

10. Spy on schoolwork for violent fantasies.“A student intentionally or unintentionally reveals clues to feelings, thoughts, fantasies, attitudes, or intentions that may signal an impending violent act. These clues can take the form of subtle threats, boasts, innuendos, predictions, or ultimatums. They may be spoken or conveyed in stories, diary entries, essays, poems, letters, songs, drawings, doodles, tattoos, or videos.”

11. Monitor social media use and posts.“The rise of social media has expanded the arena in which students express themselves and communicate with one another. For many adolescents, these new platforms do not merely supplement traditional mediums of communication, but are often the primary means through which they communicate. Therefore, it is important that adults with a stake in school security adapt to this changing landscape.”

12. Watch school employees.“History has unfortunately shown that adults are also capable of posing threats to the occupants of a school. To the victims of an attack and those surrounding them, it hardly matters whether a fellow student or an adult committed the act; the more important thing is that a potential offender – regardless of age – is identified and stopped before they commit the act.

“While the conditions and motives that lead an adult to commit a violent act at a school typically may differ from those of a student, it is also believed that an adult, such as an employee, that commits a violent act does not ‘snap’ but rather displays behavioral indicators over time that lead up to the event.”

13. Background checks for employees (but not gun buyers).“It is also recommended that schools perform a pre-employment background check and periodic rechecks on all employees.”

“If a school decides to employ the services of one or multiple forms of security personnel, it is recommended that schools perform a pre-employment background check on all of these individuals, whether armed and unarmed. The following list includes the types of information the school should consult as part of a pre-employment background check within the laws governing access and use for making informed hiring decisions: Former employment data; DMV records; Residential address history verification; Credit check; Criminal records check; Education verification; Civil history; National wants and warrants; Social security verification; Drug testing; Finger print screening."

14. Limited access to buildings.“In high-risk schools, an entry control point or a manned guard building with corresponding levels of screening and a sturdy gate may be ideal; in others, active monitoring at exterior entry points may be deemed unnecessary, impractical, or counterproductive. A third option is to allow free entry and exit during designated arrival and departure times, while enacting more stringent perimeter screening and access control during daytime school hours and after school hours.”

15. Remove unnecessary plants and trees.“School officials should be cognizant that, if misused, misplaced, or neglected, landscaping can conversely be detrimental to school security, providing hiding places for people, weapons, and explosive devices, blocking lighting, inadvertently providing routes of unauthorized access, blocking lines of sight necessary for natural surveillance, or damaging other security devices.”

16. Surveillance cameras in schools and buses. “Surveillance equipment installed on the outdoor grounds of a school or on the exterior of the building itself can serve several purposes. For one, cameras help distinguish between outsiders who do not belong on campus and students and employees who do. This ability can be helpful, especially to administrative or security staff who may gain from extra time in identifying a threatening individual approaching the school and taking appropriate preventive measures.”

The Security State vs. Common Sense

These measures and others in the NRA-sponsored report would require state legislatures to pass new laws granting legal immunity to people carrying guns inside schools. The appendix of the 225-page report suggests legal language for that legislation, which is typical of rightwing lobbying efforts—and undoubtedly would be a boon for privatized criminal justice services.

This is not shocking to the average conservative gun fetishists who worships their gun like a magical god that can solve any problem.