I can't believe folks vote for these idiots!

Gov. McDonnell: It’s ‘Counterproductive And Detrimental’ To Inform Workers Of Their Workplace Rights

New Greatest Legal Mind Cites Tea Party In Striking Down Health Care

Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, FL is the latest jurist in the land to declare 2010 health care reform package unconstitutional. Sure, nothing will ever compare to the first time, but it still feels pretty good, right? And these judges get better at it as they have more experience on top of this law. This Vinson guy, for example, even cited the Boston Tea Party in his decision. A shout-out to his homies, if you will. Also, while that wimpy Virginia judge may have just stuck the tip into the health care law, Vinson went all out. HOME PLATE: “Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void.” This judge wins at denying people access to health care until a new greatest legal mind ever is born to us on this dear planet. 


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Note to Fox News: George W. Bush Banned Incandescent Light Bulbs

On Fox News’ Fox and Friends today Stuart Varney called Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn a hero for trying to get rid of the “ban on incandescent light bulbs.” There are two problems with this statement. The light bulbs aren’t banned, and the phase out was actually a Republican idea that was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2007.

Here is the video of Varney from Media Matters.

HERE.

Why Women Who Pick and Process Your Food Face Daily Threats of Rape, Harassment and Wage Theft

We all benefit from a hugely exploitative system, in which our dinner is now directly linked to violence against women.


HERE.

CNN Fail: How Astrology Affects Driving

I'm sorry to report that even CNN can dumb down our chirren with a stupid story claiming that astrology affects drivers. It seems somebody did a survey that shows that Virgos are the worst drivers. Talk about assigning significance to a meaningless statistic. Well, OK, mebby you weren't talking about this. If not, good for you! It pains me to mention it. I think I'll go back to watching the snow fall outside the window.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

It is no secret that the American society is dominated by the super rich, held for hostage by the banks, dominated in the Nation's Capital by the tens of thousands of lobbyists and their big bucks, as the Republican party and their corporate Tea Partyists provide cover for giant theft of many billions of wealth for the very rich, with of course the cooperation of the Democrats who supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy (Check out Rachel Maddow's op-ed, which explains why Dwight Eisenhower, who taxed the rich to balance the budget, which be a radical in today's political reality). In this very discouraging environment it is hard to imagine scenarios where normal folks, every day voters, the non-rich, who are not represented by lobbyists, can have much influence.

On top of that, making change even harder, is an enormously effective propaganda system that perpetuates inaccurate and often destructive myths about virtually every element of capitalism and the US and global economy. And top economic officials in the Obama administration and leading mainstream economists often perpetuate these myths, and the corporate media marches along side repeating them like the gospel.

HERE

Dumbing-Down Our Chirren Part Two

During an appearance on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Friday night, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) stated clearly that he does not believe in the process of evolution.

"I believe I came from God, not from a monkey so the answer is no," he said, laughing, when asked if he subscribes to the theory. Later in the segment he added, "I don't believe that a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day."

HERE

The nice Republican Representative obviously does not understand the theory of evolution because he totally misrepresented what the theory states. 

These guys want to keep kiddos dumb because it's easier to control dumb people.

Dumbing-Down Our Chirren

Oklahoma Lawmaker Sally Kern proposes bill that forces teachers to question evolution, climate science

Palin Doubles Down On 'Sputnik' And 'Spudnut'

Once again, the dumber-than-a-stump Sarah Palin lowers the bar for stupidity. The reader comments at the end of the article are enlightening and priceless:

Sarah Palin is standing by her statements opposing President Obama's call for a "Sputnik moment" -- referring to America's rapid development of technology in the 1950s, after the Soviets were the first to put a satellite in orbit -- following ridicule of her statement that the USSR won the space race but "incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union."

In her latest statement, Palin does not seem to address the alleged victory in the space race by the Soviets -- when in fact their early lead was overtaken by the United States landing on the moon. Instead, she elaborates on the "Sputnik" vs. "Spudnut" line that made up the other main component of her statements on Fox News.

Right-Wing Terrorism: Murders Grow on the Far Right

Total body count for these incidents: 19 dead, 26 wounded.

Not much, you might say, when taken in the context of about 30,000 gun-related deaths annually nationwide. As it happens, though, these murders over the past couple of years have some common threads. All involved white gunmen with ties to racist or right-wing groups or who harbored deep suspicions of  “the government.” Many involved the killing of police officers.

Here.

GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter: The Federal Government Can’t Legislate Bike Paths Because They’re Unconstitutional

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, there is a radical strain of conservativism, dubbed “tentherism,” that invokes the Tenth Amendment to claim that a whole host of uncontroversial federal government programs — like Social Security and Medicare — are unconstitutional. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has even adopted this philosophy to claim that child labor laws are not permitted by the Constitution.


Here.

Ayn Rand took government assistance while decrying others who did the same

Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after she got lung cancer.


Here.

Republicans Say Everything the Dems Pass Is Unconstitutional -- Even Policies They've Championed for Decades

That Republicans are relentlessly attacking the constitutionality of what had long been one of their signature ideas for reforming the health-care system -- the individual mandate requiring people to buy insurance or pay a penalty – is a testament to just how far down the rabbit-hole our discourse has gone.

Late last year, when a federal judge ruled against the mandate (two other courts disagreed, and the Supreme Court will end up deciding the question), Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah,rejoiced. "Today is a great day for liberty," he said. "Congress must obey the Constitution rather than make it up as we go along.” It was an odd testament to freedom, given that Hatch himself co-sponsored a health-care reform bill built around an individual mandate in the late 1990s.

Here

Conservatives Try to Privatize College As Tuition Soars

As in most corners of American life, crisis is the new normal in academia. Investment returns to university endowments have plummeted, state aid is being cut, and critical federal stimulus dollars are running out. Tuition is up, enrollment is being capped, positions are being eliminated, and universities are increasingly relying on part-time adjunct faculty that shuttle from campus to campus in an effort to cobble together a paycheck.

Parents, out-of-work and saddled with depleted savings and home values, are less able to afford tuition than ever. As these axes fall, conservatives are pushing to remake universities in the image of private corporations: budgets dependent on the generosity of rich people, professors instructed to prove their market fitness or pack their bags, and cuts to the humanities in favor of more “practical” courses of study.

University of California Berkeley political scientist Wendy Brown argues that, paradoxically, public universities are most at risk of corporate takeover. Private colleges will remain dedicated to providing the elite with a well-rounded, liberal arts education. Higher education as a whole will become more stratified and less inclusive. 

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Disregarding Their Promise To Focus On Jobs, Republicans Aim To Abolish Job Training Programs

House Republicans rode into the majority on campaign promises to “focus on jobs.” “I got to tell you, when I’m home in Muncie, Indiana, people are asking the question, ‘Where are the jobs?’” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), parroting the popular Republican refrain.

However, once in office, the GOP has all but ignored the issues of job creation and the economy. Their very first bill was a symbolic repeal of the Affordable Care Act that is destined to languish in the Senate or fall to Obama’s veto pen, while their second bill had to do with restricting the rights of private health insurers to cover abortions.
Not only are Republicans completely ignoring job creation, but they are also actively trying to undermine important efforts to boost employment. For instance, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who is delivering the Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union tonight, suggested in a list of proposed spending cuts that the government “eliminate federal job training programs.”

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said on MSNBC today that he also has his eye on job training programs, which were on his list of items that he claims he can “whack from this budget and [have] nobody feel it.” Watch it

As Perry Bashed Recovery Act, Texas Relied Most Heavily On Recovery Act Funds To Fill Budget Hole

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who has raised his national profile by repeatedly criticizing the Obama administration’s response to the Great Recession, found out earlier this month that his state’s deficit for the 2012-2013 fiscal years is twice what he had thought. (Texas, unlike the federal government and many states, has a two-year budget cycle.) After months of criticizing the fiscal policies of the Obama administration and touting “the hard work that Texas and states like ours have done to make prudent fiscal decisions,” Perry wound up facing a budget fiasco on par with that in California.

Perry’s previous budget would also have been in significantly worse shape were it not for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e. the stimulus), which the Texas legislature used to balance its budget, even as Perry scored tons of political points grandstanding against a small portion of the funds. And as it turns out, according to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, Texas relied more heavily on stimulus funding to fill its budget hole than any other state:

Turns out Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds to plug nearly 97% of its shortfall for fiscal 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Texas, which crafts a budget every two years, was facing a $6.6 billion shortfall for its 2010-2011 fiscal years. It plugged nearly all of that deficit with $6.4 billion in Recovery Act money, allowing it to leave its $9.1 billion rainy day fund untouched.

The dirt HERE. 

McCain Was For Cutting Medicare Before He Was Against It

NOW:
Yesterday, in a sharp reversal from the tone of last year’s health care reform debate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called on Congress to cut Medicare, a program he sought to protect from any spending reductions in the health law. “Medicare is going to be much more difficult. But we have to go after the sacred cows and we have to go after entitlements,” McCain said on Face the Nation.

THEN:
Throughout the health reform debate, Republicans falsely claimed that the Affordable Care Act’s estimated $500 billion in cuts to Medicare would undermine senior’s benefits andintroduced numerous amendments and motions instructing Congress to remove the cuts. In December of 2009, McCain even urged seniors to rip up their AARP cards to protest the organization’s support for cutting back the program. “I say to my friends, especially those who are under the Medicare Advantage program, the 300,030 in my state who admittedly they are going to cut their Medicare Advantage benefits,” McCain said at the time. “Take your AARP card, cut it in half. And send it back. They’ve betrayed you.”


HERE

Glenn Beck's Rhetoric Inspires More Death Threats

The New York Times recently reported that frequent Glenn Beck target Frances Fox Piven has been receiving death threats. The threats against Piven are the latest in a growing series of threats and incidents of violence linked to Beck's extremist rhetoric.

MORE

Senate Dems Throw In the Towel

Last month, every member of the Senate Democratic caucus signed a letter signalling support for reforms that would end anonymous holds and force the minority to actually mount a continuous debate if it wanted to block a bill, rather than require a supermajority vote even to begin a debate.

What happened next? Let's see. First, Republican critics attacked the reforms for doing away with the supermajority requirement even though (sadly) they did no such thing. Then the few conservatives who actually understood what the reforms would do (which, again, was not -- NOT, Senator Alexander -- prevent the minority from obstructing legislation) admitted they actually made a lot of sense.

And, now, of course, the denouement -- Senate Democrats fold like a cheap suit.

MORE

Priebus' Republican National Committee: A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Koch's Americans for Prosperity?

Following up the following facebook comment, I found an interesting article about today's GOPigs:

GOP's new Tea Party Chairperson Reince Priebus linked to Koch funded voter supression efforts in Wisconsin that went so far as staking out and photographing the homes of likely democratic voters including college students and minorities. Creepy!

The new RNC chair Reince Priebus, implicated in Americans for Prosperity's voter-caging scandal, carried a lot of water for the Koch-led group in Wisconsin. Now he's rewarded.

More HERE.

Colin Powell: Defunding NPR Won't Solve Deficit Problem, Congress Should Look At Cutting Defense

NEW YORK -- Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell disagreed with current proposals to cut the deficit on Sunday, saying that going after small programs one by one -- and not touching military and entitlement spending -- won't be effective in solving the country's long-term budget problems.

Smart guy! Read the rest HERE.

GOP senator says toning down violent rhetoric means 'the shooter wins'

Read the hilarity HERE.

Republicans Continue to Disrespect Americans' Intelligence With Their Weekly Address

I'll just let Steve Benen take it from here after watching this week's hackery from Sen. John Barrasso and the Republican's weekly address.

PART AND PARCEL OF A LARGER AMNESIA CAMPAIGN...:

     In today's official GOP weekly address, Sen. John Barrasso (R) of Wyoming, the vice chair of the Senate Republican Conference, returned to a familiar subject: his party's obsession with eliminating the Affordable Care Act.
     The pitch was, not surprisingly, pretty familiar. "Republicans will fight to repeal this job-destroying law and replace it with patient-centered reforms," Barrasso said. What might patient-centered reforms look like? For one thing, the GOP wants Americans to be able to buy health insurance across state lines. For another, they'll "end junk lawsuits that drive up the cost of everyone's care." Barrasso also vowed to "restore Americans' freedom over their own health care decisions."
     Substantively, Barrasso, who's never demonstrated any depth of understanding in any area of public policy, has no idea what he's talking about. He clearly doesn't understand the across-state-lines argument; the "junk lawsuits" argument has been debunked repeatedly; and the Affordable Care Act gives consumers more power, not less, over their care.
     But it's the "job-destroying law" claim that still rankles.
     We know with certainty that Barasso, like others who repeat the claim, is lying. We also know with certainty that if Republicans succeeded in gutting the law, it would cost, not create, jobs.
     But it's worth pausing to appreciate exactly why Republicans have a Tourette's-like habit of repeating the phrase at every available opportunity. Jay Bookman had a good piece on this recently. [,,,]
     I realize some of this may seem obvious, but it's important and too often goes unsaid. We even have helpful charts to help drive the point home.
     The assumption on the part of Republicans is that Americans are idiots. The public knows there's a jobs crisis, and knows Democrats passed a series of landmark bills. The point is for Republicans to convince voters that the two enjoy a causal relationship -- maybe if Dems hadn't done all this important work, we wouldn't have lost so many jobs.
     This is lazy, cynical, intellectually-dishonest drivel. Even congressional Republicans should be able to understand the reality here.

Go read the rest but as Steve followed up with, only a fool would be willing to believe Barrasso on job losses. Since no one is comparing Barrasso's lies to Goebbels this week, and whether this is just another part of their "big lie" with propagandizing the American public. I'm sure our national media will simply ignore his statement and whether there's any truth to it.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/republicans-continue-disrespect-americans-int

Republicans Co-opting MLK?????

Having nothing to boast about in reality, some months ago Republicans calling themselves “Raging Elephants” put up a billboard in Houston disingenuously stating that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican.   In short, MLK was no Republican.

King made great efforts to remain non-partisan, aligning himself with “causes” not political parties…. but a man who said, “…a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth…” …doesn’t exactly sound like a Republican.

It’s not surprising.  We can reasonably expect the Right Wingers among us to attempt to rewrite King’s legacy to suit their ideological agenda becausethey have nothing in reality to boast about.  Seriously, what are they going to say?  “Vote for us!  We’re the party that shifted the tax burden from the rich to the middle class -creating the widest gap between rich and poor since the Gilded Age by telling the middle class that “brown people” were coming for their money!”
Read the rest of this entry »

America’s Housing Shortfall

“Everyone knows” that massive overbuilding of housing during the boom years is a crucial contributing “structural” factor to current unemployment, but Scott Sumner looks at the actual data and finds little evidence of housing oversupply:

See HERE.

Glenn Beck's Dangerous Obsession With Frances Fox Piven

In addition to his repeated murder fantasies, Glenn Beck harbors apocalyptic fantasies of mass death--suggesting, for instance, that if the direction of the country doesn't change,  "God will wash this nation with blood." (Barack Obama, are you listening?) But the Fox News host harbors many deranged obsessions. He has long obsessed over Frances Fox Piven, the 78-year-old distinguished professor at the City University of New York. Central to Beck's lies about Piven is the charge that a Nation article she co-wrote with Richard Cloward in 1966 somehow holds the blueprint for a violent leftist takeover of the United States. Beck's similar fascination with the supposed threat posed by the Tides Foundation apparently led one of his fans to attempt an armed assault on the organization (FAIR Blog, 7/22/10).
Beck's supposed anti-violence pledge, issued in the wake of the Tucson massacre, contains a bizarre equation of Piven with a violent paramilitary cult under indictment for plotting the wholesale murder of police officers:

I denounce violent threats and calls for the destruction of our system--regardless of their underlying ideology--whether they come from the Hutaree Militia or Frances Fox Piven.

Needless to say, equating Piven's advocacy of grassroots democratic political activism with terrorism-based revolution is hardly an effective way to discourage violence. Unsurprisingly, some Beck followers have taken his demented fulminations a step further, posting death threats against Piven in the comment section of his website, the Blaze. As Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman recounted on her January 14 program:

On December 31, Glenn Beck’s website, the Blaze, published an article titled "Frances Fox Piven Rings in the New Year by Calling for Violent Revolution." In response to that article, several readers posted direct death threats to Piven. A user named JST1425 wrote, quote, "Be very careful what you ask for, honey.... As I mentioned in previous posts...ONE SHOT...ONE KILL! 'We the People' will need to stand up for what is right.... A few well-placed marksmen with high-powered rifles.... Then there would not be any violence," unquote.

User name SUPERWRENCH4 wrote, quote, "Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I'll give My life to take Our freedom back. Taking Her life and any who would enslave My children and grandchildren and call for violence should meet their demise as They wish. George Washington didn't use His freedom of speech to defeat the British, He shot them," unquote.

More HERE. 

Are We Safer? Good Question.

On Tuesday, PBS aired a new episode of Frontline featuring an investigative segment by the Washington Post's Dana Priest, one of the chief reporters behind that paper's superb Top Secret America investigative series. In her segment called "Are We Safer?"Priest interviews ACLU policy counsel Mike German about domestic surveillance and the post-9/11 proliferation of fusion centers across the country.


HERE.

Huckabee Inadvertently Acknowledges Spending Cuts Will Cost Jobs (VIDEO)

Like all Republicans, likely GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is all for abruptly slashing federal spending. But unlike most high-profile conservatives, he seems to be aware that slashing outlays during an economic downturn will cost jobs.

HERE.

Now There's Even a 'Progressive' Plan to Gut Social Security

The folks trying to slash Social Security face enormous political opposition and have no good argument for their case. They're going to have to lie, cheat, steal to do it.


Don't bother getting old. Just die now.

The GOP's 5 Most Absurd Lies About Health-Care Reform, Debunked

Now is the time to brush up on the facts about health-care reform so we can keep the latest crop of Republican lies from taking hold.


Read all about it HERE.

Will the Tea Party Congress's Hypocrisy Spark More Anti-Government Violence?

The Tea Partiers' energy swept some of the dimmest ideologues into power, and now they're set up for a crushing letdown as those legislators confront reality and end up reneging on their murkily defined promise to "take our country back."

The next two years will prove eye-opening to the Tea Partiers for a very simple reason: the government doesn't actually spend our tax dollars on what their leaders have told them it does. Only a tiny fraction of the budget is dedicated to foreign aid or assistance for the "underserving" poor. Not only is a lot of "pork" popular -- local projects of various stripes -- but earmarks make up a tiny fraction of the budget. And after several decades of privatization, there's just not a lot of fat to be cut from discretionary spending programs -- hell, non-security discretion spending only makes up around 15 percent or so of the total.

So there won't be $2.5 trillion in budget cuts forthcoming, and if there were it'd be taken out of Social Security benefits and the like -- and 74 percent of Tea Partiers oppose benefit cuts to reduce the deficit (cuts are for thee, not for me!). All they're going to end up getting are minor cuts that piss off liberals -- National Endowment for the Arts, NPR, that kind of thing. And even those modest cuts probably won't get past the Senate.

Add in the inevitable corruption that seems especially prevalent among people who believe government is the problem, and these Tea Party folks are going to be even more disgruntled than they already are.

More HERE.

Back-Alley Abortions in 2011

Thanks to the anti-choice movement, poor women throughout the U.S. cannot afford safe abortions and are sometimes forced to make extremely dangerous choices.


Read all about it HERE.

How Can the Richest 1 Percent Be Winning This Brutal Class War Against 99% of Us?

How has a tiny fraction of the population arranged for their narrowest economic interests to dominate those of the vast majority?


Read all about it HERE.

Free Speech For Conservatives Only

"I can say whatever I want because I have the right to free speech, but Chris Matthews is being mean to me!"


HERE

Conservatives' ObamaHate is Pathological

Conservatives Accuse Obama Of Lying About Giffords Opening Eyes; Her Doctors Disagree

January 13, 2011 1:12 pm ET by Ben Dimiero

In one of the most cynical displays in recent memory, following the lead of Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, several  conservative websites - including Fox Nation and MRC arm CNS News - suggested that President Obama lied last night when he said that Rep. Giffords had opened her eyes for the first time shortly after his Wednesday night visit to the hospital.

In a recently-completed press conference, Giffords' doctor Peter Rhee explained that what Obama said last night about Giffords opening her eyes was "true."

The rest.

The Class War Launched by America's Wealthiest Is Getting More Savage

It’s the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us. We’re losing.

Media whitewashes ultra-right in Arizona massacre

Loughner’s actions raise questions about what medical treatment is available for the mentally ill―virtually none, even in a case like this where college classmates were fearful that he might turn to violence―and about the widespread availability of weapons like the Glock 19, whose sole purpose is mass, indiscriminate mayhem through the firing of dozens of rounds in a few seconds.
But the most important issue is what led Loughner to target a Democratic congresswoman. Understanding this necessarily requires an examination of the political circumstances that shaped the gunman’s actions.

Here the central role was played by the ultra-right media campaign mounted by Fox News, talk show hosts like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, including one Republican Senate candidate who called for a “Second Amendment solution” to political issues―i.e., the use of firearms.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained yesterday (See “Arizona assassination spree tied to political right”), the political conceptions in Loughner’s Internet postings are expressed in the vocabulary of the ultra-right media and the Tea Party, including his references to gold and silver backing for US currency, the predominance of the English language, and attacks on sections of the US Constitution, like the 14th Amendment, targeted by the ultra-right. He also reportedly remarked that a young woman who had an abortion was a “terrorist for killing the baby.”

Moreover, both Fox News and the New York Times have reported, citing law enforcement sources, that Loughner may have links to a white supremacist publication called American Renaissance. Ongoing investigation may well develop more evidence of connections to the extreme right―a prospect that makes the “deranged individual” explanation even less credible.

MORE:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/ariz-j11.shtml

Afghanistan: What Can We Achieve?

The U.S. war in Afghanistan started off with rousing optimism in the fall of 2001, but by the end of the decade has devolved into a quagmire for U. S. troops and potential disaster for the Afghan people. For all its twists and turns, it has had one striking constant—nearly every decision made by Western policymakers and Afghan leaders in fighting it has been the wrong one.

. . . It is a mind-numbing tale of failure that has brought the United States and NATO to a painful decision point about the war in Afghanistan. They must realize that it is time to move beyond the U.S. military’s dreams of winning in Afghanistan and focus instead on best preparing the country for a partial drawdown of U.S. troops and a shift in mission from population-centric counter- insurgency to counter-terrorism and stabilization.

. . . After more than nine years of war, few good options remain on the table. The Taliban insurgency has gained momentum across the country at the same time that falling support for the war at home will constrain the president’s ability to sustain a long-term military commitment.

“Winning” in Afghanistan is no longer in the cards, if it ever was. Instead, the president and his advisers must choose from a set of worst-case scenarios. Picking the least worse one—which protects U.S. interests while, one hopes, stabilizing Afghanistan—must be the focus of U.S. policy going forward. That begins with laying the groundwork for a political strategy to spur reconciliation between the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents.

MORE:
http://spi.typepad.com/files/cohen-1-1.pdf

Is President Obama Weak in the Eyes of Arab Leaders?

Neoconservatives are likely to be wrong on any number of issues. But there is one critique of theirs that, somewhat to my dismay, has struck me as more compelling than I would have originally hoped. There is an argument to be made that the United States is weaker – and by this, I mean less admired, less respected, and more likely to be perceived as irrelevant – than it was under the Bush administration. It is difficult to establish causality here, since the original cause was President Bush’s failed policies. We are still paying the price for those failures today.

That said, there are some things we do know. According to recent polling, the United States, under Obama, has lower favorability ratings in several Arab countries than it did in the final years of the Bush administration. It was possible, and in some cases fairly easy, to separate Bush from the United States. Arabs seemed to understand that his policies did not necessarily reflect anything true or essential about America’s character. Moreover, those of us who strongly opposed Bush policy told our Arab (or Latin American or European) friends that it was just a matter of time before America regained a sense of prudence.

As I’ve written before, there is little I can now say to my Arab colleagues. We all got what we wished for (even the Muslim Brotherhood was rooting for Obama) – someone who seemed one of the more brilliant, inspiring, and unique American politicians in recent memory. He had a Muslim name, a Muslim family, lived in the Muslim world, and seemed to have an appreciation for the place of grievance in Arab life. What many Arabs have taken away from this is that the problem with U.S. foreign policy is a structural one. Because even with a “good” president, American foreign policy, as they see it, is quite bad. In short, the U.S. is now irredeemable in a way it never would have been under a President McCain.

MORE:
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/

Palin’s Persecution Complex Culminates with “Blood Libel” Accusation

Sarah Palin just made her horrendous week worse with her new video in which she accuses her political critics of "blood libel."

This gaffe -- demonstrating both an ignorance of religious history and language -- tops a disastrous week: her crosshairs map has been Exhibit A in the discussion of the use of gun-related imagery in political rhetoric. But her PR has been woefully inadequate in explaining the map away as "surveyors symbols." Her TLC show will not be renewed by TLC, her chances for a successful run at the presidency have been downgraded, and even Barbara Walters expressed "feeling a bit sorry for her." Palin, however, has remained aloof and cocooned in Wasilla, while hired minions wipe her Facebook page constantly so that negative comments do not show up. So how is Barracuda Barbie a.k.a. Queen Esther shaping her response? The persecution meme.

Palin's typical pattern is that she takes a phrase from somebody (in this case, possibly Glenn Reynolds, writing in the Wall Street Journal), picks it up, and uses it for her own. In today's debacle, referring to criticism of her "crosshairs" map as a "blood libel," Palin shows that even if six people are killed, it's still all about her. The strategic release of this video, before President Obama travels to Arizona today for a memorial service, shows her self-serving political ends. In addition to misuing the term blood libel -- which historically refers to the accusation that Jews murder Christian babies -- her additional reference to dueling shows that she will not retreat from any violence-laden speech.

Blood libel, a term rooted in medieval Christianity, started as a rumor that Jews were killing Christian babies, and using their blood to mix into matzoh. The blood libel, refuted first by Pope Innocent IV through a series of papal bulls, has nonetheless persisted throughout history as a way for Christians at times to scapegoat Jews. Palin, by calling the media's alleged persecution of her a "blood libel" plays into this evil history by inference. But does she understand how this comment of blood libel appears anti-Semitic? Not only is Rep. Giffords Jewish, but accusing the media of "blood libel" could be seen as playing into anti-Semitic memes that Jews control the media.

MORE:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/antheabutler/4028/palin

Loughner's Parents: Did They Know About His Mental Illness?

As President Obama prepares to travel to Tucson and the victims’ families make funeral arrangements, much about Jared Loughner’s motivations remains unclear. Reporters, pundits, and armchair analysts have been busily trotting out theories, drawing on the details about Loughner that have emerged so far: his bizarre behavior, his parroting of paranoid, extremist ideologies. But one key aspect of what shaped him—his home life—remains an enigma. How much did his parents know about his mental condition? How involved were they in his life? And did they try to get him help? Only they can shed light on such matters. But for now, at least, they remain as inscrutable as their son.

Residents of the middle-class neighborhood, located five miles west of where Jared allegedly killed six people and injured 14 others, described the family as anti-social. Jared, who was apparently the couple’s only son, lived with them, and the three took turns walking the family dog, a medium-sized brindled Labrador Retriever mix. That, however, was the extent of their activities beyond their property. "I've lived here 40 years, and I didn't even know their last name," a woman who lives across the street told The Daily Beast.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-11/jared-loughners-parents-randy-and-amy-did-they-know-about-his-mental-illness-/

AZ Law Will Keep Westboro Baptist Church Hatemongers Away From Shooting Victims' Funerals

After Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church posted a YouTube video saying "Thank God for the violent shooter" that took six lives in Arizona on Saturday and vowed to picket the victims' funerals, the Arizona legislature rallied bipartisan support for an emergency measure to keep protesters away from funerals.

MORE: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/434386/az_law_will_keep_westboro_baptist_church_hatemongers_away_from_shooting_victims'_funerals/

Fear Of Tee Partay In AZ Republican Party

A nasty battle between factions of Legislative District 20 Republicans and fears that it could turn violent in the wake of what happened in Tucson on Saturday prompted District Chairman Anthony Miller and several others to resign.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/community/ahwatukee/articles/2011/01/11/20110111gabrielle-giffords-arizona-shooting-resignations.html#ixzz1Aq9CRc5X

Several AZ Republicans Resign Amid Fears of Tea Party Violence

What the Arizona Republic calls a "nasty little battle" has broken out among Republican members of Arizona's Legislative District 20 in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. Several Republicans have resigned, citing fears that local Tea Party supporters will harm them or their families for not being conservative enough.

Now-former Chairman Anthony Miller was among those to resign. A former campaign worker for Sen. John McCain, Miller sent an email to state Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen just hours after Saturday's shooting, saying, "Today my wife of 20 yrs ask (sic) me do I think that my PCs (Precinct Committee members) will shoot at our home? So with this being said I am stepping down from LD20GOP Chairman...I will make a full statement on Monday."

Miller said he faced "constant verbal attacks" from the Tea Party after being elected to his second term last month. Many of those attacks centered around Miller's involvement with McCain's bid last year against Tea Party darling J.D. Hayworth.

MORE: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/434799/after_giffords_shooting,_several_az_republicans_resign_amid_fears_of_tea_party_violence/#paragraph3

PROGRESSIVE AMERICA VS. CONSERVATIVE AMERICA

Revisionaries How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks.

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Up until the 1950s, textbooks painted American history as a steady string of triumphs, but the upheavals of the 1960s shook up old hierarchies, and beginning in the latter part of the decade, textbook publishers scrambled to rewrite their books to make more space for women and minorities. They also began delving more deeply into thorny issues, like slavery and American interventionism. As they did, a new image of America began to take shape that was not only more varied, but also far gloomier than the old one. Author Frances FitzGerald has called this chain of events “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place.”

This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias. When textbook adoptions rolled around, the Gablers would descend on school board meetings with long lists of proposed changes—at one point their aggregate “scroll of shame” was fifty-four feet long. They also began stirring up other social conservatives, and eventually came to wield breathtaking influence. By the 1980s, the board was demanding that publishers make hundreds of the Gablers’ changes each cycle. These ranged from rewriting entire passages to simple fixes, such as pulling the New Deal from a timeline of significant historical events (the Gablers thought it smacked of socialism) and describing the Reagan administration’s 1983 military intervention in Grenada as a “rescue” rather than an “invasion.”

To avoid tangling with the Gablers and other citizen activists, many publishers started self-censoring or allowing the couple to weigh in on textbooks in advance. In 1984, the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way analyzed new biology textbooks presented for adoption in Texas and found that, even before the school board weighed in, three made no mention of evolution. At least two of them were later adopted in other states. This was not unusual: while publishers occasionally produced Texas editions, in most cases changes made to accommodate the state appeared in textbooks around the country—a fact that remains true to this day.

The Texas legislature finally intervened in 1995, after a particularly heated skirmish over health textbooks—among other things, the board demanded that publishers pull illustrations of techniques for breast self-examination and swap a photo of a briefcase-toting woman for one of a mother baking a cake. The adoption process was overhauled so that instead of being able to rewrite books willy-nilly, the school board worked with the Texas Education Agency, the state’s department of education, to develop a set of standards. Any book that conformed and got the facts right had to be accepted, which diluted the influence of citizen activists.

Around this time, social conservatives decided to target seats on the school board itself. In 1994 the Texas Republican Party, which had just been taken over by the religious right, enlisted Robert Offutt, a conservative board member who was instrumental in overhauling the health textbooks, to recruit like-minded candidates to run against the board’s moderate incumbents. At the same time, conservative donors began pouring tens of thousands of dollars into local school board races. Among them were Wal-Mart heir John Walton and James Leininger, a hospital-bed tycoon whose largess has been instrumental in allowing religious conservatives to take charge of the machinery of Texas politics. Conservative groups, like the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum, also jumped into the fray and began mobilizing voters.

Part of the newcomers’ strategy was bringing bare-knuckle politics into what had been low-key local races. In the run-up to the 1994 election, Leininger’s political action committee, Texans for Governmental Integrity, sent out glossy flyers suggesting that one Democratic incumbent—a retired Methodist schoolteacher and grandmother of five—was a pawn of the “radical homosexual lobby” who wanted to push steroids and alcohol on children and advocated in-class demonstrations on “how to masturbate and how to get an abortion!” The histrionics worked, and the group quickly picked off a handful of Democrats. The emboldened bloc then set its sights on Republicans who refused to vote in lockstep. “Either you’d hippity-hop, or they would throw whatever they could at you,” says Cynthia A. Thornton, a conservative Republican and former board member, who refers to the bloc as “the radicals.”

It took more than a decade of fits and starts, but the strategy eventually paid off. After the 2006 election, Republicans claimed ten of fifteen board seats. Seven were held by the ultra-conservatives, and one by a close ally, giving them an effective majority. Among the new cadre were some fiery ideologues; in her self-published book, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond rails against public education, which she dubs “tyrannical” and a “tool of perversion,” and says sending kids to public school is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames.” (More recently, she has accused Barack Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer and suggested he wants America to be attacked so he can declare martial law.) Then in 2007 Governor Rick Perry appointed Don McLeroy, a suburban dentist and longstanding bloc member, as board chairman. This passing of the gavel gave the faction unprecedented power just as the board was gearing up for the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting standards for every subject.

McLeroy has flexed his muscle particularly brazenly in the struggle over social studies standards. When the process began last January, the Texas Education Agency assembled a team to tackle each grade. In the case of eleventh-grade U.S. history, the group was made up of classroom teachers and history professors—that is, until McLeroy added a man named Bill Ames. Ames—a volunteer with the ultra- conservative Eagle Forum and Minuteman militia member who occasionally publishes angry screeds accusing “illegal immigrant aliens” of infesting America with diseases or blasting the “environmentalist agenda to destroy America”—pushed to infuse the standards with his right-wing views and even managed to add a line requiring books to give space to conservative icons, “such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority,” without any liberal counterweight. But for the most part, the teachers on the team refused to go along. So Ames put in a call to McLeroy, who demanded to see draft standards for every grade and then handed them over to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by his benefactor, James Leininger. The group combed through the papers and compiled a list of seemingly damning omissions. Among other things, its analysts claimed that the writing teams had stripped out key historical figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Pat Hardy, a Republican board member who has sat in on some of the writing-team meetings, insists this isn’t true. “No one was trying to remove George Washington!” she says. “That group took very preliminary, unfinished documents and drew all kinds of wrongheaded conclusions.”

Nevertheless, the allegations drummed up public outrage, and in April the board voted to stop the writing teams’ work and bring in a panel of experts to guide the process going forward—“expert,” in this case, meaning any person on whom two board members could agree. In keeping with the makeup of the board, three of the six people appointed were right-wing ideologues, among them Peter Marshall, a Massachusetts-based preacher who has argued that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were God’s punishment for tolerating gays, and David Barton, former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. Both men are self-styled historians with no relevant academic training—Barton’s only credential is a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University—who argue that the wall of separation between church and state is a myth.

When the duo testified before the board in September, Barton, a lanky man with a silver pompadour, brought along several glass display cases stuffed with rare documents that illustrate America’s Christian heritage, among them a battered leather Bible that was printed by the Congress of the Confederation in 1782, a scrap of yellowing paper with a biblical poem scrawled by John Quincy Adams, and a stack of rusty printing plates for McGuffey Readers, popular late-1800s school books with a strong Christian bent. When he took to the podium that afternoon, Barton flashed a PowerPoint slide showing thick metal chains. “I really like the analogy of a chain—that we have all these chains that run through American history,” he explained in his rapid-fire twang. But, he added, in the draft social studies standards, the governmental history chain was riddled with gaps. “We don’t mention 1638, the first written constitution in America … the predecessor to the U.S. Constitution,” he noted as a hot pink “1638” popped up on the screen. By this he meant the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which called for a government based on the “Rule of the Word of God.” Barton proceeded to rattle off roughly a dozen other documents that pointed up the theocratic leaning of early American society, as the years appeared in orange or pink along the length of the chain.

Barton’s goal is to pack textbooks with early American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its inconvenient blemishes—if they get their way, textbooks will paint slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as “ethical capitalism.” They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, a project McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the writing teams, “Read the latest on McCarthy—He was basically vindicated.”

On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the “original war against Islamic Terrorism.” What’s more, the group aims to give history a pro-Republican slant—the most obvious example being their push to swap the term “democratic” for “republican” when describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the “atrocious” treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, “it might be much more appropriate that … demands for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the federal government.” He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans.

Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, “Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.” Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men.

While the writing teams have so far made only modest concessions to the ideologue experts, the board has final say over the documents’ contents, and the ultraconservative bloc has made it clear that it wants its experts’ views to get prominent play—a situation the real experts find deeply unsettling. While in Texas, I paid a visit to James Kracht, a soft-spoken professor with a halo of fine white hair, who is a dean at Texas A&M University’s school of education. Kracht oversaw the writing of Texas’s social studies standards in the 1990s and is among the experts tapped by the board’s moderates this time around. I asked him how he thought the process was going. “I have to be careful what I say,” he replied, looking vaguely sheepish. “But when the door is closed and I’m by myself, I yell and scream and pound on the wall.”

There has already been plenty of screaming and wall pounding in the battles over standards for other subjects. In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer. At the bloc’s urging, the board threw out the teams’ work and hired an outside consultant to craft new standards from scratch, but the faction still wasn’t satisfied; when the new drafts came in, one adherent dismissed them as “unreadable” and “mangled.” In the end, they took matters into their own hands. The night before the final vote in May 2008, two members of the bloc, Gail Lowe and Barbara Cargill, met secretly and cobbled together yet another version. The documents were then slipped under their allies’ hotel-room doors, and the bloc forced through a vote the following morning before the other board members even had a chance to read them. Bradley argued that the whole ordeal was necessary because the writing teams had clung to their own ideas rather than deferring to the board. “I don’t think this will happen again, because they got spanked,” he added.

A similar scenario played out during the battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.

McLeroy and company had also hoped to require science textbooks to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, including evolution. Scientists see the phrase, which was first slipped into Texas curriculum standards in the 1980s, as a back door for bringing creationism into science class. But as soon as news broke that the board was considering reviving it, letters began pouring in from scientists around the country, and science professors began turning out en masse to school board hearings. During public testimony, one biologist arrived at the podium in a Victorian-era gown, complete with a flouncy pink bustle, to remind her audience that in the 1800s religious fundamentalists rejected the germ theory of disease; it has since gained near-universal acceptance. All this fuss made the bloc’s allies skittish, and when the matter finally went to the floor last March, it failed by a single vote.

But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to [these] experts!” He and his allies then turned around and put forward a string of amendments that had much the same effect as the “strengths and weaknesses” language. Among other things, they require students to evaluate various explanations for gaps in the fossil record and weigh whether natural selection alone can account for the complexity of cells. This mirrors the core arguments of the intelligent design movement: that life is too complex to be the result of unguided evolution, and that the fossil evidence for evolution between species is flimsy. The amendments passed by a wide margin, something McLeroy counts as a coup. “Whoo-eey!” he told me. “We won the Grand Slam, and the Super Bowl, and the World Cup! Our science standards are light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!” Scientists are not so enthusiastic. My last night in Texas, I met David Hillis, a MacArthur Award–winning evolutionary biologist who advised the board on the science standards, at a soul-food restaurant in Austin. “Clearly, some board members just wanted something they could point to so they could reject science books that don’t give a nod to creationism,” he said, stabbing his okra with a fork. “If they are able to use those standards to reject science textbooks, they have won and science has lost.”

Even in deeply conservative Texas, the bloc’s breathtaking hubris—coupled with allegations of vote swapping (see “Money and Power on the Texas State Board of Education”)—have spurred a backlash. In May, the Texas state legislature refused to confirm McLeroy as board chair (Governor Perry replaced him with another bloc member), and, for the first time since he took office in 1998, he is facing a primary fight. His challenger, Thomas Ratliff, a lobbyist and legislative consultant whose father was the state’s lieutenant governor, argues that under McLeroy’s leadership the board has become a “liability” to the Republican Party. Two other members of the ultraconservative bloc are also mired in heated primary battles.

But to date few bloc members have been ousted in primaries, and even if moderates manage to peel off a few seats, by that time it will probably be too late. In mid-January, the board will meet to hammer out the last details of the standards for social studies, the only remaining subject, and the final vote will be held in March, around the same time the first primary ballots are counted. This means that no matter what happens at the ballot box, the next generation of textbooks will likely bear the fingerprints of the board’s ultraconservatives—which is just fine with McLeroy. “Remember Superman?” he asked me, as we sat sipping ice water in his dining room. “The never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way? Well, that fight is still going on. There are people out there who want to replace truth with political correctness. Instead of the American way they want multiculturalism. We plan to fight back—and, when it comes to textbooks, we have the power to do it. Sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have.”
~Mariah Blake

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html