The Superiority Of The Super Committee: Women And Minorities Snubbed

Posted by on August 17, 2011 at 11:39 am. NO Comments :

The brand new Congressional Super Committee that is charged with pulling America’s butt out of a fiscal fire is sorely underrepresented by major groups of the American people. In addition to the disturbing associations that members of the committee have with wealthy campaign contributors, they are also notably homogenous in terms of race and gender.

Republicans appointed an entirely white male panel of members. At least the Democrats included one woman, one African-American, and one Hispanic. Still, that ratio is a long way from proportional representation.

When large groups of citizens are excluded from participating in the democratic process, the result is bad policy, uneven playing fields, and a disheartened and/or outraged electorate. Take for example the representation of women in American political life (or rather, lack thereof) that has produced a legislative War on Women:

War on Women

These inequities are generally unaddressed by the media. Unless that changes there will be continued division and a failure to resolve the most pressing issues of our time. We need to include everyone in the effort to right the nation’s course. And we must not be afraid to embrace the fight for progressivism, civil rights, feminism, and liberty and justice for all.

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Rick Perry’s Pay-to-Play Scam

Posted by on August 15, 2011 at 2:29 pm. 16 Comments :

The media is all atwitter today after Texas governor Rick Perry threw his cowboy hat into the ring and announced his campaign for the Republican nomination for president. However, if there were any integrity in the press, Perry’s campaign wouldn’t last a week.

Rick Perry is an ill-informed, incompetent, political extremist, who barely graduated from Texas A&M University (with a D average) and has suggested that Texas should secede from the union. He supports discrimination against gays and lesbians. He doesn’t believe in either evolution or global warming. He admits that he has no solutions for the nation’s problems other than prayer. And just today he reiterated his position that Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”

But the the big problem for Perry is his brazen corruption as governor of Texas. The Dallas Morning News conducted an investigation last year that revealed Perry’s conversion of the state house into a pay-to-play scheme that filled his campaign coffers, and the pockets of his contributors, with cash.

Rick Perry - Pay-to-Play
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Apparently, the way to get Texas taxpayers to finance your business venture is to payoff the governor. Then the state whines about not having funds for education, health care, and other social services. The Wall Street Journal called this scheme “Rick Perry’s Crony Capitalism.” When the conservative Wall Street Journal finds your shady dealings repugnant, you have crossed line that most people didn’t even know existed. This is the sort of scandal that would torpedo a campaign that wasn’t propped up by Tea Party fanatics and Fox News.

As Perry rolls out his campaign he is already asserting that he can bring to Washington the same sort of “success” that he brought to Texas. That should frighten most Americans. Upon closer examination, the alleged miracle of the Texas economy is a myth based on false premises and peculiarities exclusive to Texas. Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times illustrates just how little the nation can learn, or benefit from, Texas’ program of “depressing wages and dismantling regulation.”

“What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is ‘Well, duh.’ The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.”

What’s more, Texas is now facing a projected 2012 budget deficit of 31.5% of its general fund. That makes it the third worst state deficit in the country. Even California is doing better. [Note: Texas trails only Nevada and New Jersey, both of which have Republican governors]

It is also worth noting that a recent poll showed President Obama beating Perry IN TEXAS!

“…the poll shows Perry trailing President Obama in heavily Republican Texas, which last voted Democratic for president in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was the South’s favorite son. Obama leads 47%-45%, even though Obama’s net approval rating is underwater at 42%-55%.”

So the question is: Why is anyone taking seriously the campaign of a governor who has driven his state into ruin; who has one of the the highest percentages of minimum wage jobs; who has one of the lowest rates of health care coverage; and who is demonstrably corrupt? How long will it take for the press to catch on that Perry is an evangelical huckster with no substantive record of achievement? He’s Elmer Gantry with a government job and gets his snake oil straight from the well.


10 Things You Need To Know About Rick Perry

Posted by on August 14, 2011 at 9:37 am. 6 Comments :

Texas governor Rick Perry is officially in the race for president. The question now for America is: Do we want a president who may be even more ignorant than George W. Bush?

Perry graduated from Texas A&M with a 1.9 GPA or D average. He received mostly C’s and D’s in his courses, including a C in U.S. History, a D in Principles of Economics, and even a C in gym. And he is an advocate for the sort of education that would bring everyone else down to his level.

“I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution.”

But that’s just for openers. Here are some things that voters will need to know as Perry’s revival show gears up for a national tour:

Rick Perry

We definitely have the makings of a political/evangelical uprising that could finish off the economic and cultural decline that Bush started. For his campaign announcement speech, Perry was introduced by Erick Erickson, the editor of the uber-conservative RedState, and a CNN contributor, who is notable for calling a Supreme Court Justice a “goat-fucking child molester.” And in his speech Perry reiterated the four principles he intends to pursue if elected:

“We need balanced budgets. We need lower taxes. We need less regulation. And we need civil justice reform.”

Sound familiar? That’s the standard GOP recipe for national disaster that got us where we are today. But perhaps the most frightening part of Perry’s platform is his devotion to a radical religious crusade as the means to resolve the country’s problems:

“Fellow Americans, right now, America is in crisis. We have been besieged by financial debt. Some problems are beyond our power to solve. We will gather to pray for a historic breakthrough for our country. There is hope for America. We will find it on our knees.”

That’s all America needs now. A president who would have us all kneel and pray away our problems. Calamity Perry does not have solutions to the serious dilemmas we face. He only has platitudes and scripture and a firm belief that he has been called by God to save America.

[Addendum] Perry has also been implicated in a slush fund scheme to benefit his campaign contributors. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called it Rick Perry’s Crony Capitalism. That conclusion was based on an in-depth investigation by the Dallas Morning News that uncovered Perry’s Tech Fund Aided Firms With Ties To His Donors. Under Perry, taxpayers may not have access to frivolities like health care, education, or food, but they do get to funnel cash into the pockets of Perry’s political patrons. This scandal alone should sink Perry’s aborning campaign. That is, if the national media has the integrity to give it the attention it deserves.


What We Learned About Michele Bachmann This Week

Posted by on August 14, 2011 at 3:43 am. NO Comments :

The winner of the Ames, Iowa Republican Straw Poll (by a mere 152 votes over Ron Paul), Michele Bachmann revealed much of herself to the electorate this week.

Michele Bachmann

First, in the Fox News debate on Thursday, Bachmann was asked about her recent confession that, despite not wanting to pursue tax law in college, she did so anyway at the behest of her husband because…

“…the Lord said, ‘Be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.'”

When she was asked at the debate whether she would be submissive to her husband were she elected president, she responded by attempting to redefine the term:

“…it means respect. I respect my husband. He’s a wonderful, godly man, and a great father. And he respects me as his wife. That’s how we operate our marriage. We respect each other.”

The problem with that answer is that no dictionary, and nowhere in the Bible, is submission defined as respect. What’s more, the Bible doesn’t say that husbands should be submissive to their wives. So even if submission did mean respect, it is not reciprocal, as Bachmann implies. Ultimately, her answer to the question was that, since submission equals respect, and respect is demonstrated by capitulating to your husband’s demands, Bachmann would indeed be submissive to her husband as president.

The second thing we learned was that, until recently, Bachmann lacked faith in America. In her presentation prior to the straw poll, she told Iowans that…

“As we’ve been all over the state, what we have seen is a restoration of that dream and you have restored in me my faith in America.”

I wonder if all the right-wing, pseudo-patriots who became faint upon hearing that Michelle Obama’s national pride was restored during her husband’s campaign for president in 2008, will be equally as appalled at Bachmann’s confession? Furthermore, what will they make of her disparagement of the whole of the nation other than Iowa?

“I see on television destruction all across the country, but not in Iowa. It doesn’t matter what city I’m in, I see happy, confident, optimistic people.”

So Iowa is the island of euphoria in a nation beset by turmoil and despair. Apparently she sees depressed, reticent, pessimists from Maine to California. It would be interesting to see how she would campaign in the other 49 states if she wins the nomination, which, of course, she won’t, but that’s another story.


Super Committee Owned By The Super Rich

Posted by on August 13, 2011 at 3:02 pm. 3 Comments :

The so-called Super Committee created by congress to dodge responsibility for …um… I mean to craft legislation for deficit reduction, has not been been particularly well received by anyone.

Newt Gingrich: I think this super-committee is about as dumb an idea as Washington has come up with in my lifetime.

Dennis Kucinich: It’s like, “Honey, I shrunk the Congress.” Congress is now reduced to a majority of seven members on a committee … Everything about this deal is wrong.

They are both right. It’s a dumb idea that puts way too much power in the hands of too small a group. It seems virtually designed to fail. The alleged incentive for the participants to reach an agreement is the threat of draconian cuts to social services and defense. But since the purpose of the committee is to make draconian, unpopular cuts anyway, why wouldn’t the members prefer to decline compromise and let the process take the blame?

What isn’t getting much attention, however, is that the members of the committee have vested interests in the affairs of the programs they are overseeing. In the 2010 election cycle members received combined over $122 million from the very industries and corporations whose budgets they must now slash. Those industries represent the most powerful sectors of the American economy including defense, health care, energy, and banking. The list of the biggest contributors to the committee members tells us a lot about what to expect from their deliberations:

Donor Amount
Club for Growth 993,394
Microsoft Corp 243,625
Elliott Management 233,704
EMILY’s List 202,656
Squire, Sanders & Dempsey 156,350
New York Life Insurance 139,850
General Electric 138,610
Boeing Co 135,910
JPMorgan Chase & Co 133,399
Amgen Inc 131,150
American Financial Group 125,652
DaVita Inc 118,200
Goldman Sachs 114,700
University of Washington 110,164
Comcast Corp 103,465
Blue Cross/Blue Shield 100,100
Citigroup Inc 95,599
Schering-Plough Corp 91,200
Denny Miller Assoc 90,900
[Source: OpenSecrets.org]

The pressure on these committee members to placate their benefactors will be enormous. And these wealthy special interests will certainly unleash their army of lobbyists to keep the federal funds flowing. With all the focus on just a dozen legislators it actually makes it easier to manipulate the outcome because lobbyists don’t have to spread the wealth, and their time, to the other 523 members of congress.

It’s notable that the conservative, anti-tax, Club for Growth so far outpaces the other heavy hitters on the list. Committee member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) is their former president, but John Kyl (R-AZ) also got a generous gift. Many of the donors contributed to multiple members of the committee, i.e. Comcast, GE, and hedge fund company, Elliott Management.

There is one ray of hope and that is for the Super Committee members to demonstrate the famous cowardice of American lawmakers. They could actually deliver a balanced bill that makes targeted cuts and raises revenues from the rich and through the elimination of subsidies and loopholes. By doing so they would throw the ball back to the full congress and make them vote on it. After all, why should the super dozen take all the heat?

In any event, it is imperative that we have an accounting of the financial associations between the committee and their big contributors. In pursuit of that, Common Cause has initiated a campaign to support the Super Committee Sunshine Act (S. 1498), a bill requiring that all campaign and PAC contributions to Super Committee members are disclosed within 48 hours. That’s something all sides of this highly charged process should support.


Mitt Romney: Corporations Are People, My Friend

Posted by on August 12, 2011 at 12:24 am. 5 Comments :

The front-runner for the Republican nomination for president, Mitt Romney, took a courageous stand today in support of the browbeaten, wealthy corporations of America:

That’s right. Corporations are people. They’re born, they live, they dream, they love. And that’s not all…

Soylent Green is people. Corporations are people. And don’t even get me started on Depeche Mode.

It’s about time somebody stood up for the downtrodden multinationals. When will society treat them fairly and allow them to marry and to serve in the armed forces? While they can’t vote, at least they can manipulate elections with their riches because the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. And since corporations have more money than “ordinary” people, they get more speech.

Aint Democracy grand? Way to go, Mitt.

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Falling Skies? A Perspective On The Gyrating Stock Market

Posted by on August 11, 2011 at 11:41 am. 1 Comments :

Ever since the Tea Party Downgrade, the stock market has been a roller coaster of wild swings. Triple-digit ups and downs have become routine. And throughout, the media, and partisan politicians and pundits, have fretted over impending doom and the end of civilization.

So just to help us keep things in perspective…..

Falling Skies

Neil Cavuto, and others on Fox News, have been relentlessly harping on every scrap of negative news they can find. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have been predicting London-style riots. But we should not buy into the Fox News pessimism.

The market is up more than 50%, and over 3,000 points, since Barack Obama was inaugurated as president. Corporations in many sectors of the economy are reporting record profits. Does that mean we shouldn’t be concerned about the recent gyrations. Of course not. We still have a serious deficiency of jobs and a severely unbalanced income gap. But at least we should recognize the reality of the big picture.

There is much to be hopeful about, and if Washington will do the right thing – i.e. invest in growth and job creation, and make the rich pay their fair share – we can prevail over hard times. To do that we must fight back against the obstructionism of the TeaPublicans whose only agenda is to enrich their wealthy, corporate contributors and defeat Democrats in 2012.


Fox Nation vs. MoveOn: Indoctrinating Children

Posted by on August 10, 2011 at 11:49 am. 12 Comments :

Fox Nation - MoveOn

The Fox Nation is very upset about an insidiously cute video from MoveOn.org that features kids advocating a Contract for the American Dream. Check out this horrifying example of child abuse for yourself:

Shocking, isn’t it? The gang at Fox & Friends thinks so too. The posting on Fox Nation displays the Fox & Friends segment, not the whole MoveOn video. And the response from the Fox Nationalists is typically restrained – to Nazi references, allegations of Marxist propaganda, and accusations against Obama who had nothing to do with it. For example:

Fox Nation - MoveOn

Of course, no one on the right would ever consider exploiting children for political purposes.

Fox Nation - Move On

Slandering the MoveOn kids as Nazis is standard operating procedure for the right. You only need to go back a couple of weeks to hear Glenn Beck saying that scores of slaughtered kids in Norway are “like the Hitler youth.” By the way, if you haven’t yet protested Beck’s repulsive comments, here is a list of his radio affiliates. Be sure to let them know that you refuse to listen to their station or patronize their advertisers while Beck is on the air.


Conquering Incoherence: Sarah Palin Swings And Misses

Posted by on August 9, 2011 at 10:49 am. 6 Comments :

Sarah PalinIn her latest Facebook treatise, America’s Quitter Queen, Sarah Palin, spoke out on the subject of the nation’s debt crisis and the recent credit rating downgrade. Titled “Conquering the Storm.” Palin attempts to take credit for predicting precisely what she and her Tea Party comrades deliberately created by refusing to negotiate on a balanced approach to debt reduction.

However, in delivering her ever-so-serious platform for economic renewal, she couldn’t help taking a swipe at the man who demolished her dream of being able to quit the Vice-Presidency of the United States of America, Barack Obama. Reaffirming her hostility to higher education and intellectual achievement, Palin mocked Obama’s grasp of the stumbling economy saying…

One doesn’t need a Harvard Law degree to figure this out!

Oh, doesn’t one? How about a Harvard Economics degree? Palin seems to think that the legal curriculum is the path to financial expertise. Her dig at Obama’s education is kind of like saying that one doesn’t need a degree in architecture to figure out marine biology. Technically, it’s true. There is a Dadaist elegance to her pseudo-logic. No wonder she knows so little about the media. Her degree (which took five colleges to acquire) is in journalism instead of farming. And by the way, Obama, who graduated from Harvard Magna Cum Laude, minored in economics.

But Palin isn’t done yet. She expanded on her criticism by belittling the President’s economic agenda as “magical.”

“By what magical thinking did we figure we could run up perpetual trillion dollar deficits and still somehow avoid the unforgiving mathematics of a downgrade?”

Unfortunately, Palin must have missed the news that S&P’s “unforgiving” math was off by $2 trillion dollars, and it was Obama’s economic team that corrected them. Subsequently, S&P had to rewrite their justification of the downgrade replacing economic concerns with political ones because the debt argument no longer satisfied the criteria for a downgrade. And the new political justification is where S&P indicted Palin and the TeaPublicans for their intransigence and resistance to commonsense tax reforms.

Tea Party Downgrade

Palin ignored this criticism to, once again, play the victim:

“Blaming the Tea Party for our credit downgrade is akin to Nero blaming the Christians for burning Rome.”

That’s an interesting allegory because, according to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, “while the Christians didn’t actually start the fire, they didn’t do much about putting it out either, because they saw it as the sign of the second coming of Christ.” The parallels between this and Palin’s socially conservative congregation are plentiful and disturbingly amusing. It was the Tea Bag Brigades that advocated doing nothing about the debt ceiling and letting the nation go into default.

The remainder of Palin’s Facebooking reads like a broken record of GOP platitudes extolling tax cuts, deregulation, and drilling here, there, and everywhere. She castigates the President for not offering a plan, but her own plan is one that has proven to be a failure. And if she can’t even put together a coherent criticism of her political opponents, how can we trust her to protect America from the terrorist plots of Al Roker?


Rasmussen Poll Asks If The Tea Party Are Terrorists

Posted by on August 8, 2011 at 6:06 pm. 5 Comments :

Tea Party Terrorists

Rassmussen Reports, the official Fox News source for conservatively biased polling, conducted an interesting survey over the weekend that asked:

“Some people have accused the Tea Party of acting like economic terrorists during the budget debates. Are members of the Tea Party economic terrorists?”

I suppose it depends on how you define “economic terrorists.” Would a party that advocates letting the nation default on their debt be considered terrorists? What about a party that asserts that an S&P downgrade would be a good thing (we’ve seen how that worked out)? What about a party that holds a nation hostage in order to force a political agenda down the throats of a populace that opposes the agenda?

Setting aside whether or not we should apply rhetoric like “terrorist” to political adversaries, the result of the poll was that nearly a third (29%) of respondents said that they do regard the Tea Party as terrorists. That’s an astonishing result. Fifty-five percent disagreed and 16% are undecided. That means that nearly half the country believe that the Tea Party are, or might be, terrorists. And remember, this is Rasmussen, the wing-nuttiest of all pollsters.

These results drive home the point I made when I wrote Why Is Anyone Listening To The #@$%*#& Tea Party? It is a discredited constituency that couldn’t fill the back room at an Applebys. Yet for some reason too many in the media and in Washington, including Democrats, take them seriously. That breakdown of mental acuity helped to sap trillions of dollars of wealth from asset markets in the past couple of weeks.

Additionally, the Rassmussen poll shows that…

“…a plurality (43%) of all voters think the Tea Party has made things worse of [sic] the country in the budget debates in Congress. Thirty-two percent (32%) say the Tea Party has made things better for America, and 14% say it’s had no impact. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.”

Again, this is Rasmussen! If a plurality of voters in a Rasmussen poll think that the Tea Party has made things worse, the real number must be a substantial majority. Consequently, any politician who throws in with the Tea Party is representing a phantom movement and contributing to the harm that these phony radicals are causing.

More likely, they are serving their AstroTurf masters at Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-funded frauds. A good percentage of the millions of dollars that it takes to produce the mirage that is the Tea Party is surely flowing into the campaign accounts of Republicans across the nation. But given the results of this poll, and virtually every other one on the subject, these greedy pols will soon regret their decision.