What the hell kind of country are we?

I haven't posted much about the impending execution of Troy Davis in Georgia, though my dear friend Tata has stepped up to the plate both here and elsewhere. Perhaps it makes me a bad liberal that I haven't chosen the death penalty as one of my major causes. It probably does, because sometimes these cases seem like so much background noise in the larger picture of the Siege on America that's taking place when a mean-spirited Republican Party controls the debate and a weak, feckless Democratic Party allows them to do so. But yes, I admit to a certain amout of annoyance when every time progressives take to the streets, the A.N.S.W.E.R folks are out there with their "Free Mumia!" signs. So call me a bad liberal, I can take it.

However, in the aftermath of the spectacle of American citizens cheering a Texas governor and possible future president having executed 234 people during his term so far, and when we KNOW that one of them was innocent, and we also know that said Texas governor loses no sleep over it, we have to start paying attention.

Troy Davis was convicted in 1991 of the 1989 murder of Savannah, Georgia police officer Marc MacPhail on far less physical evidence than a Florida jury just recently used to acquit Casey Anthony. Many witnesses have come forward and said that their testimony was coerced by Savannah police. When a trial is tainted, such as Davis' was (NYT editorial), and as Cameron Todd Willingham's was in Texas, we owe it to OURSELVES, let alone to the person being sent to his death, to re-evaluate and make sure we have the right guy. Unfortunately, the Georgia Board of Parole and Prisons has thought differently.

The reason this matters now is that the America of Republicans is starting to take shape, and it is an ugly one indeed. It is an America in which angry people frightened about their futures applaud a man who boasts about the number of people in his state who have received the death penalty. It is an America in which it is better to see two or ten or a hundred innocent men be put to death by the state than to risk one guilty one receiving clemency. It is an America in which Republicans would rather a million children to go hungry than for one child to receive a meal to which he is not entitled because his mother makes fifty cents more than the cutoff for aid. It is an America in which the elderly should live in poverty rather than people who have more money than they can spend in 100 lifetimes pay one penny more in taxes.

It may be the state of Georgia that's putting Troy Davis to death today, and we can delude ourselves that it can't happen in OUR state, or it can't happen to US. But unless you are a Republican politician, or a multimillionaire who has paid for the government we have today, it CAN happen to you. And so can poverty and lack of a job and lack of access to health care. It is all part of the same toxic cloud currently hanging over our nation.

This is America on Tea Party. Any questions?

You will not read about this in any newspaper in New Jersey

A tent city rises in Ocean County, New Jersey:

More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey's forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.
And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country's £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.

Ravaged by the loss of their jobs and their homes, the residents of Tent City struggle to get by without day-to-day luxuries that we take for granted such as food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Ex-minister Steve Brigham, 50, runs Tent City, which consists of a dirt road running through a two-acre encampment which has flowerpots laid out front of proud tents and homes.
Functioning as near to a normal town as possible, Tent City is governed by democratic rules agreed by all the residents.

They all must agree to no fighting, to clean the camp, to volunteer their time when they have it, and to most importantly keep the noise down after 10pm

Please click through to the full article and look at how Americans who used to be middle-class are living.

I think perhaps these people should take Joan McCarter's suggestion and send their resumes, along with photographs of how they are living, and send them to Eric Cantor, who had this to say yesterday:

Let him find them a job.

You want to say we liberals are full of hate? For guys like Eric Cantor, you bet we are. And that smug little prick deserves every bit of our hatred.

How did it come to this? A Rant.

Despite what the generations that follow the post-World War II baby boom think, most boomers in my circle have always had the fatalistic notion that Social Security would not be there for us. I've posted before about a Tom Toles cartoon from the 1980's called "The Reading of the Will" which is rife with boomer resentment at our parents' generation because of their defined benefit pensions and guaranteed Social Security payments and leisurely retirements. Somehow we always knew. Even when, in the 1980's, what is now called the "Social Security Trust Fund" was set up specifically for the purpose of beefing up the system for baby boomer retirement, we knew. We knew that whatever stores were built up were replaced with IOUs that we knew the government had no intention of paying.

Those of us who did not want children and have been lucky enough to have not been completely jettisoned from the job market are better off than many. We've been taking advantage of 401(k) match and putting away as much as we can afford. Whether we'll be OK remains to be seen, once Medicare is gutted (and it WILL happen, whether Barack Obama is re-elected next year or not, since he's shown himself to be at best a rubber stamp for Republican policies. But friends of mine who are trying to put kids through college and seeing them into adulthood are scared to death -- not just of their own futures, because who can put away money for retirement when a low-end college is $25,000 a year, but of that of their children, many of whom are unable to get a toehold in the job market. What good does it to do graduate with a degree in marketing when the only job you're going to be able to get is to be re-hired as a cart boy at the Stop & Shop?

Work longer, they tell us. People are healthier longer, so it doesn't make sense to retire at 65 the way it once did. That's all well and good, but is it healthy for a society that is hemorrhaging jobs for older people to clog up the workforce? And there's no sign that the job market is ever going to get any better. Anything done on a PC can be done more cheaply overseas. Anything requiring special skills can be done by hiring immigrants on work visas. I have a friend who's a production editor at a publishing company. She's fifty, she has two kids to put through college and who's going to be the one to tell her that her job may very well not even exist in five years?

I've spent all of my adult years in the Age of Corporatism. I graduated high school into the first Arab oil embargo and graduated college with a degree in sociology into the second one. I started out in a retail management training program that was the catch-all for liberal arts majors at the time. But at least I was graduating into a society that hadn't yet been completely taken over by greed. That happened later, after Ronald Reagan took office, and while I myself have done well, our society hasn't. Oh sure, we have gewgaws and toys and electronics and two flat-screen TVs and 200 channels of nothing you'd want to watch on TV. People have pulled their kids out of school for Caribbean vacations paid for on home equity loans and people in Section 8 housing have smart phones. All of this is cited as examples by Republicans of how well off we are. But are we? And what about tomorrow?

I work in an industry that is rapidly consolidating, with tens of thousands having been laid off in just the last two years. The web development I used to do is dead too, replaced by templates and do-it-yourselfers. When I was in high school and college there was always a "hot industry" that was hiring. If engineers weren't in demand, then marketers were. If there was a glut of marketers, the accounting field was begging for people. Now there is no "hot industry". There is no path to upward mobility for the poor, there is no path towards staying in the middle class for those who were born into it. Only those with inherited money are able to prosper.

Social Security was implemented in the depths of the Depression, and Republicans have been trying to get rid of it ever since. Whatever faults the Democrats may have had, what with Ted Kennedy's scandals and Tip O'Neil's tippling and Hubert Humphrey's often preposterous optimism, they could always be relied on to be the protectors of the middle class and the poor. Whether it was Social Security, Medicare, Pell grants, nutrition programs, or education, the Democrats were the party of the little guy.

Something happened along the way. I suppose you could say it started with Jimmy Carter, who was the first conservative Democrat to hold the White House. Carter, a Southern Baptist, paved the way for the relentless Christianism that has pervaded our political discourse in the years since then. Ronald Reagan started his presidency by busting the air traffic controllers' union and accelerated the path towards elimination of the middle class. Reagan recognized the religious fervor in the southern states and the midwest, and he recognized the residual racism in the south, and used it to pit the middle class against the poor while screwing over both. The patrician George H.W. Bush similar knew nothing about the struggles of middle class people as he marveled over a supermarket scanner. Bill Clinton used his charm to win over crowds of middle class and minority voters while implementing NAFTA and eliminating Glass-Steagall and insisting that he was one of them. The advent of the internet led to $100,000 programming jobs and new media and lots of opportunities for the middle class to start to afford the trappings of the wealthy, and Americans embraced them. They leased BMWs for the kind of payments you used to have to buy a Chevrolet. They took adjustable-rate mortgages that allowed them to make lower payments on bigger houses. They bought houses for 3% down. They took equity loans for akylit soaring-ceilinged great rooms and dream kitchens and summer-long cruises with their kids.

Then George W. Bush came along, and the first thing he did was look at the surplus that Bill Clinton and the internet boom had left him and said, "Let's cut taxes." But to paraphrase the man himself, the have-mores were his base, so they got most of the spoils. Then he ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, and a month later almost 3000 people died in a terrorist attack that should have been thwarted had he been doing his job. And what did he tell people? Go shopping. He put us into two wars, one of them completely unnecessary, kept the tax cuts in place, and anyone who dared question him was called un-American and traitorous. A right-wing echo chamber that had been developed during the Clinton years to obsess over his sex life was now firmly in place, and Judith Miller canoodled with Scooter Libby, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq became conventional wisdom, and if you questioned it, you could very well find your house firebombed by an increasingly frightened and angry population.

Fear was a potent weapon during the Bush years, with color-coded terror warnings and a convenient tape by Osama Bin Laden issued every time Bush's approval ratings dropped. People in flyover states sat up nights worrying about Scary Swarthy Men doing things to the local Wal-Mart, and all the while, while Bush's Washington was warning of terrorist plots and Americans were hiding under the bed clutching a roll of plastic sheeting in one hand and one of duct tape in the other, the guys at the top were rifling through the dresser drawers where Americans kept their spending cash and filled their pockets, then crept off and joined the Be Afraid Chorus.

This is really the point at which the Democratic Party became completely undone. Faced with a McCarthyite White House, and saddled with the baggage of Vietnam amti-war protests, Democrats fell silent as they gave George W. Bush blank check after blank check after blank check to cut taxes for his friends and to feed more and more American kids into a Middle East meatgrinder. This is where it became obvious that this was a party completely unable to frame an argument. A half-million ordinary citizens marched in New York City in early 2003 because we knew that the Iraq claims were bullshit, but the Democratic Party could not even be bothered to study the readily-available evidence out there. It was easier to just listen to the Washington pundits and go along.

Then in mid-2002, a virtually unknown governor from Vermont appeared on Meet the Press and miracle of miracles, was showing that he HAD read the evidence, and he KNEW what was going on. Here was a guy I could vote for.

Howard Dean became so much of a threat to the Washington narrative that not only did Democratic presidential rivals pool resources to tag-team him in Iowa, where it was starting to look like he just might be able to take his campaign of truth to the nomination, but the media got in on the pile-on, deliberately turning down the crowd noise at a rally for campaign workers following his defeat in Iowa so that his exhortations to the disappointed crowd sounded like the ravings of a madman. Later on, after Howard Dean was safely out of the way, ABC, the network that perpetrated this journalistic crime, admitted that they had turned down the crowd noise. Horse, barn door, etc.

So John Kerry, the party's anointed one, the guy who couldn't possibly be attacked because he was a war hero, became the nominee....and was promptly attacked as a war traitor. John Kerry made two fatal mistakes. The first was believing that the American people are too smart to believe demonstrable untruths, and the second was believing that he was working with good-faith operators. Yet despite the willingness of the public to believe the claims of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (a group financed by a Bush and Tom DeLay campaign contributor), Kerry still came within Ohio's electoral votes of defeating George W. Bush in 2004. Kerry, displaying now-typical Democratic gutlessness, didn't even wait till all the Ohio votes were counted before taking his $14 million in campaign cash and going home, but it has since been well-demonstrated that Republican-initiated electronic voting shenanigans really DID tilt the scales for Bush.

So fast-forward to 2008. George W. Bush is acknowledged by all but about 20% of the population to be the miserable failure that those of us with gray matter in our crania knew all along. The financial crisis of 2008 has, depending on what you believe, put us within a hair's breadth of global economic collapse. The Democrats' presumed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, who in a room full of netroots activists at Yearly Kos 2007 said that "Lobbyists are Americans too", lost the nomination in the face of the charisma of Barack Obama, his transformative potential, and a desperate hunger in the population for someone as different from George W. Bush as possible.

I had supported John Edwards in the primaries. Of course we had no idea then what was going on in his private life, and we knew that people in his home state regarded him as somewhat of a phony, but at least he was SAYING the right things about how Americans were already suffering in a diminishing job market and a contracting economy. Edwards turned out to be as bad a messenger for "The Two Americas" as Ralph Nader is for "There Is No Difference", but at least on the stump he was the only guy paying any mind to what was happening. I took no end of shit from Obama supporters in those early days of the 2008 Democratic nominating process because I did not believe that he was the progressive dreamboat they did. I remember paraphrasing Walter Mondale's 1984 convention speech to a gay friend who was offended by John Edwards' "struggle" with accepting gay marriage. "You make John Edwards feel icky and you make Barack Obama feel icky. Obama won't tell you. Edwards just did."

And I was right.

But still -- what was an American in search of a president with a brain in his head, vote for a once-proud American Senator whose stock had fallen so far that he had to choose a bubble-headed beauty queen for his running mate, or a guy who could string together coherent sentences and show that he recognized we live in a complex world? McCain was so inept on the campaign trail that Obama hardly had to break a sweat. McCain seemed old, out-of-touch, and cantankerous. And even the priapic sexual fantasies of the pundit corps at the mere mention of Sarah Palin didn't change the fact that this dimwitted, theorcratic End Of Days-er was potentially one cancer survivor away from the nuclear football.

Even if you didn't support Obama all that much, there was a palpable aura of change in the air on January 20, 2009. It was an aura that diminshed quickly, as Obama filled his Cabinet with hacks, Clinton retreads, and corporatists. And now, thirty years after the I Got Mine And Fuck You doctrine took over the Republican Party, and one summer after the shrill ravings of barely 19% of the American people were treated as a massive new movement, here we are, with a Democratic Party capitulating to a gutting of the American social contract, and not even a request to ask billionaires to throw even one more nickel...one penny...into the pot.

I ask you: Who do these people, these Democrats represent? It isn't these people:




So who is it? And just whom do they think is going to keep them in office? Obama's political people think that "They Have No Place Else To Go" will keep the Democratic base in the fold. They think they're appealing to "a wide swath of voters":

Mr. Obama, seeking to appeal to the broad swath of independent voters, has adopted the Republicans’ language and in some cases their policies, while signaling a willingness to break with liberals on some issues.

That has some progressive members of Congress and liberal groups arguing that by not fighting for more stimulus spending, Mr. Obama could be left with an economy still producing so few jobs by Election Day that his re-election could be threatened. Besides turning off independents, Mr. Obama risks alienating Democratic voters already disappointed by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, end the Bush-era tax cuts and enact a government-run health insurance system.

“The activist liberal base will support Obama because they’re terrified of the right wing,” said Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future.

But he said, “I believe that the voting base of the Democratic Party — young people, single women, African-Americans, Latinos — are going to be so discouraged by this economy and so dismayed unless the president starts to champion a jobs program and take on the Republican Congress that the ability of labor to turn out its vote, the ability of activists to mobilize that vote, is going to be dramatically reduced.”

Borosage is dead wrong. Maybe the dead-enders at Daily Kos, and the commenter here who insists that if you don't cheerlead for Obama it means you really want Mitt Romney to be president, will show up no matter what. But this particular voter is being tired of being told by a bunch of at best inept, lazy, spineless Democrats that no matter how many times they capitulate to the most insane Republicans we've ever seen, we have to vote for them because we have no place else to go. This particular voter is tired of being shown pictures of Michele Bachmann and being told, "ooh, SCARY!"

I am 56 years old. I can't say I want to be subject to torture because I'm not a Christian. I can't say I want to see a hastening of global thermonuclear war because some lunatic that a bunch of inbred ignorant hicks decided was a good person thinks it's his or her calling by God to accelerate the End of Days. I can't say I want a world in which my friends' kids are pushed down into poverty because the oligarchs find any semblance of the middle class frightening. I'd like to believe that I have 20 or 30 or, given the longevity of my family, even more good years ahead of me. I'd like to believe that I'll have time to do something other than just work, eat, and sleep before I die. But I'll tell you this much: If the rest of the middle class in country doesn't care that its government -- both parties -- hates them and is out to eliminate them at the beck and call of their oligarchic masters, then what the hell is the point? Let Michele Bachmann become president. Let's have a Supreme Court that always sides with corporations. Let's have creationism be taught in every school in the country. Let's head down this road towards a new dark ages. If Americans don't care enough to do something to stop this relentless decline into ignorance and hate and fear and loathing, why the hell should I, with my best years already behind me, bust my ass?

Politico uses the "T" word

Politico isn't exactly known for using hyperbole where the right wing is concerned, so it's all the more amazing to see this over there:

The tea party's terrorist tactics

As we stumble closer to Aug. 2, it has become clear that many in the tea party are willing to inflict massive harm on the American people to obtain their political objective of a severely shrunken federal government. Their persistence in rejecting compromise, even as the economic effects of the phony crisis they have created mount, has taken their radicalism beyond tough negotiating, beyond even hostage-taking.

As markets fall in anticipation that there may not be a timely resolution; as credit agencies issue dire warnings that the U.S. political system has become so dysfunctional that a credit downgrade may be inevitable, and as America looks weakened in the eyes of the world, the tea party’s hostage-taking has evolved into the intentional infliction of harm on innocent Americans to achieve a political objective – terrorism.

Terrorism is a tough term, but, unfortunately, it describes tea party tactics precisely.

[snip]

Even in the absence of default, credit agencies would almost surely downgrade our credit worthiness, producing increases in interest rates that would slow the economy, increase unemployment and force families into foreclosure and bankruptcy.

As the markets dropped, families would watch their retirement and education savings and their dreams disappear.

Rather than reject the unthinkable, the tea party harnessed this potential harm as its weapon of mass destruction.

[snip]

The challenge for America is to stand firm in the face of terrorism, no matter the source.

So now we have Fareed Zakaria saying that teabag members of Congress will "blow up the country" if they don't get their way, and even Politico is getting nervous.

The press has no one to blame but itself for the inflated importance of a relatively small group of extremists. From the day Rick Santelli ranted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the 24-hour cable news cycle has treated a fringe bunch of lunatics as The Next Big Exciting Thing. Even Chris Matthews had a thrill of orange pekoe going up his leg at the thought of a big noisy even faux-populist effort. In Congress, the Not Quite So Insane caucus thought they could control the lunatic froth-mouthed minions that spout nonsense and are taken seriously by the frightened the the stupid. But the monster has been unleashed, and there may be no stopping it. It is a small monster, to be sure, but it is fierce and it has already caused much trepidation among the townspeople, who are too dispirited and confused now to go after it with pitchforks and torches and tar and feathers.

No TV And No Beer Make Homer Something Something

Fear for the people of Minnesota:

Around 300 bars and restaurants in Minnesota will not be able to buy alcohol until the state reaches a budget agreement and ends its government shutdown. Since closing down all but the most important services on July 1, the state has stopped issuing the $20 buyer cards required by retailers to replenish their alcohol inventories — bad news for Minnesotans already hurting from the cuts to their social services.

Restaurants are already reporting being low on inventories, and Frank Ball, the executive director of the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association, calls the situation “crippling” to the alcohol retail industry.

This is what happens in the aftermath of "voting by tantrum"

Those independent voters who see Mitt Romney as a shiny new object that they can live with just because they're all pouty and angry at Barack Obama might want to look at Florida governor Rick Scott as a cautionary tale. Because in a sea of really shitty, mean-spirited teabagger governors, this greedy bastard takes first prize:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed “a landmark Medicaid overhaul” yesterday that will put “hundreds of thousands of low-income and elderly Floridians into managed-care plans.” The proposal “gives managed care companies more control over the program that’s paid for with federal and state money,” a shift the state GOP claims will “hold down spiraling costs in the $20 billion program.” However, as TP Health editor Igor Volsky pointed out, a five-county pilot program in Florida already revealed that such a plan produces “widespread complaints and little evidence of savings.” Under managed care, states “have to ensure that private payers aren’t looking out for short term profits by denying treatments or reducing reimbursement rates” and — given what occurred during the pilot program — the results “are already less than promising.”

But Scott may have another reason to push a dubious bill into law. As Mother Jones reported, one of the private managed-care companies that stand to gain from the new law is Solantic, “a chain of urgent-care clinics aimed at providing emergency services to walk-in customers. Solantic was founded in 2001 — by none other than Rick Scott:

The Florida governor founded Solantic in 2001, only a few years after he resigned as the CEO of hospital giant Columbia/HCA amid a massive Medicare fraud scandal. In January, according to the Palm Beach Post, he transferred his $62 million stake in Solantic to his wife, Ann Scott, a homemaker involved in various charitable organizations.[...]

“This is a conflict of interest that raises a serious ethical issue,” says Marc Rodwin, a medical ethics professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. “The public should be thinking and worrying about this.”

But they won't. Because after all, Anthony Weiner has a penis, and that's SO much more important.

Losing our democracy

It would be a comforting thought to believe that now that Americans know exactly what the teabaggers they elected to office last year are all about, they'd have the opportunity to vote these lunatics and greedmongers out next year. However, it's not going to be that easy, as out of mind of a media that's been obsessed with Charlie Sheen, Pippa Middleton's bra, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump, these new Republican leaders, in particular the teabagger governors, have been hard at work shoring up the voting system so that it benefits them.

In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott has signed a bill specifically designed to suppress the vote among low-income and elderly voters -- those most likely to vote Democratic:

Gov. Rick Scott on Thursday signed a controversial overhaul of the election laws that Republicans say is needed to prevent voter fraud and Democrats call a cynical act of partisanship to improve GOP chances in Florida next year.

Critics assailed him for endorsing “voter suppression” tactics aimed at making it tougher for President Barack Obama to capture Florida’s prized 29 electoral votes in 2012.

“I want people to vote, but I also want to make sure there’s no fraud involved in elections,” Scott said. “All of us as individuals that vote want to make sure that our elections are fair and honest.”

But some supervisors who run elections in Florida say the state’s voter registration database is highly reliable. A statement from their statewide association warns Scott that the changes could cause chaos and confusion at the polls next year.

The League of Women Voters says it will suspend voter-registration activity because the bill requires such groups’ volunteers to register with the state and face fines of up to $1,000 for not submitting voting forms within 48 hours.

The bill also cuts early voting days from 15 to eight and requires some voters who have moved to cast provisional ballots, a change most likely to affect college students.

The bill wipes out policy in place for four decades in Florida that allowed voters to update their legal addresses when they voted.

Republicans call that an invitation to fraud, so the new law allows only voters who have moved within the same county to update their addresses at the polls.

None of the bill’s most controversial provisions was pushed by Scott’s chief elections expert, Secretary of State Kurt Browning. He broke weeks of silence Thursday about an hour after his boss, Scott, signed the legislation.

“I know bad election law when I see it,” Browning said. “I don’t think this bill is bad for Florida. … It doesn’t negatively impact Florida voters.”

The law takes effect immediately, which means its first test will be in Miami-Dade, the state’s largest county, which is electing a new county mayor and other officials Tuesday. Supervisor of Elections Lester Sola will end early voting Saturday — three days before Election Day, as the new law requires — a decision candidate Marcelo Llorente is fighting in court.

But in five counties it won’t go into effect until the federal government approves. Any change in state election laws that affects those counties — Hillsborough, Collier, Monroe, Hendry and Hardee — requires approval by the Justice Department in a process known as “pre-clearance.”

The legislation generated far more public opposition than any other bill of the 2011 session. Some was engineered by the League of Women Voters, which has thousands of members in Florida.

Scott’s office reported 14,000 calls and e-mails in opposition; nearly 1,300 in favor. A notation by Scott’s staff said:

“Majority oppose. Urging Governor to veto these bills because they change our voting laws, making it more difficult for some voters to cast their vote.”

But Rick Scott doesn't give a rat's ass what the voters want. Now that he's safely ensconced in office, and now that his approval ratings are plummeting as those in Florida who participated in voting-by-tantrum last year realize just what they've done, it's imperative for him to shore up his power by making sure he can't be voted out.

And what's the excuse given for the new law? To prevent "voter fraud." But as the St. Petersburg Times notes, only 31 cases were referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement between 2008 and 2011. Think about it: For ten cases a year, Rick Scott has just disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters. This is not about "voter fraud." This is about cementing power in the hands of a health care fraud.

And it isn't just in Florida. In Wisconsin, teabagger Governor Scott Walker is attempting to similar disenfranchise those who might dare vote him out of office. Last month Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a similar bill.

The Republican Party has become so corrupt that it no longer can claim to represent the people of this country. And having lost the war of ideas, the party is http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnow all about power -- getting it, consolidating it, keeping it. And the most certain way to do that without bloodshed is to make sure that those who would use the electoral process to remove them from office have no way to do so.

But why should the media report how our representative democracy is being taken away from us? Newt Gingrich said something stupid again, there's a high profile rape case in New York, and who knows -- perhaps Lindsey Lohan will act up again.

UPDATE May 22, 2011: Leslie Parsley looks at all of these efforts nationwide.

I wonder how those twisty Teabagger brains are going to manage this one

In recent years we've seen the political climate on the right fully embrace the Idiocy Is Great doctrine of political discourse. As Barack Obama, the thoughtful, measured former Harvard Law Review editor brought his cool, cerebral, measured, thoughtfulness to the White House, it infuriated those whose crania resemble that of the lunkhead in the much-maligned Planet Fitness commercials who repeats over and over again, "I lift things up and put them down." (By the way, this anti-PF rant is pretty hilarious with its complaints about judgmentalism of bodybuilders while it talks judgmentally about those who aren't, but the whole Planet Fitness foofarah is a topic for another day.)

The Militant Idiocy Movement reached its apex with the rise of Sarah Palin, a woman so incurious and so celebratory of willful ignorance that she can't even string together a coherent sentence. But the combination of her schoolmarm-as-dominatrix looks and reassurance of those who are gray matter-challenged that being stupid is infinitely superior to things like, well, ideas, made her the darling of the right -- at least for a while.

The stupidity-as-virtue doctrine still has a stranglehold on the right, and we see it everywhere, from Palin to Louie Gohmert to Virginia Foxx to the Doublemint Twins of stupid, the Kings Peter and Steve, and so on and so on.

Enter Newt Gingrich.

Say what you will about the Lizard King, he's many things but he's not stupid. He's as crooked as the day is long and he's elevated hypocrisy to an art form, but he's not stupid. His little lizard brain is always cooking up something that can be called "ideas" (if you want to call them that), if only because the rest of his party is obsessed with birth certificates and terror babies and Scary Brown People and evil sluts who won't keep their legs closed and must be punished with the curse of motherhood, which is also what they profess to worship above all else. His "ideas" may seem "intellectual" by comparison to, say, John Boehner, but they're mostly about getting him laid or getting more money into his own pockets. But in the Republican Party, that's enough.

And like the dutiful little puppets they are, the Usual Suspects in the punditocracy are already dusting off their Newt Gingrich Is An Intellectual talking points from those halcyon pre-1994 days.

So what will the teabaggers, who thought they'd get to drink beer with George Bush and that they'd get to fuck Sarah Palin, make of a guy who for all that he's greedy and hypocritical, likes to sell himself as an ideas guy? I mean, on the right, is there anything that shows an ability to think out of the box than to excuse his checkered marital history by saying that he was Fucking for Patriotism? Will they embrace the part of him that taps into their Inner Crazy, or will the fact that he can speak coherently make them suspicious of him?

We will soon see.

When they can't win the argument of ideas....

We've already seen what happens when Republicans can't win elections based on ideas. They send paid Congressional thugs to intimidate vote counters. They stiff minority neighborhoods on voting machines, so that thousands of people have to wait up to 10 hours to vote -- if they get in to vote at all. Their election officials buy easily-tampered-with electronic voting machines made by companies whose owners are openly partisan. Their candidates advocate a return to Jim Crow-era literacy tests.

And when they're called on these tactics, they do things like scream "ACORN! ACORN! ACORN!" -- an organization for which a very few people registered a very few fake names, but there is no evidence whatsoever that a single fake registration resulted in even a single actual fraudulent vote. In response to an irrational fear that someone who is here illegally would expose himself to officialdom to cast a vote he's not supposed to, Republicans have, ever since they got away with it in 2000, tried to put up roadblock after roadblock in front of efforts to get people to the polls -- particularly minorities and young people, who tend to vote Democratic.

Now, in Florida, back where it all began, legislation is winding its way through that would make it extremely difficult to hold voter registration drives. Rachel Maddow reported on it last night:

And it isn't just Florida. As more and more people who were duped by the Tea Party start to wake up and realize that the threat to their way of life isn't immigrants, or abortion, or Scary Muslims®, but Ayn Rand disciples like Rep. Paul Ryan and the other Teabag Congressman bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers. And they're making their dissatisfaction known to Reps. Ryan and Duffy and Webster.

With the Republican Party having no clear likely nominee, other than a famewhore circus clown and a guy who can't possibly win a Republican primary because he's not completely batshit crazy, the tables just might be turned in 2012 on the Republican Party, whose legislators have been foolish enough to believe that what happened in 2008 was a national adoption of Objectivism, rather than a simple case of voting-by-tantrum.

But since Republican legislators are ideologues above all else (including the good of the very people they're SUPPOSED to represent, as opposed to the corporations they do), and since the Twin Pillars of Republicanism are Ideology and Power, the thought that they might not win in 2012 is anathema to them. Democrats who lose elections to Republican election official shenanigans are starting to wake up and demand not that they be declared the winner, but that such shenanigans be investigated so that people can have confidence in their votes -- especially when Republican election officials are people like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell and Kathy Nickolaus.

So in statehouses all over the country, especially those with newly-minted Teabagger governors, they're not taking any chances. If minorities and young people -- who showed up in droves in 2008 to put a black man in the White House resulting in a full-out nervous breakdown by racists who are still looking down the socioeconomic ladder while the Koch Brothers and their equals and lackeys are stealing the few bits of spare change still in their back pockets while they're distracted -- might show up at the polls again, then they have to be stopped. And stop them the Republicans will:

Spreading fear of a nonexistent flood of voter fraud, they are demanding that citizens be required to show a government-issued identification before they are allowed to vote. Republicans have been pushing these changes for years, but now more than two-thirds of the states have adopted or are considering such laws. The Advancement Project, an advocacy group of civil rights lawyers, correctly describes the push as “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”

Anyone who has stood on the long lines at a motor vehicle office knows that it isn’t easy to get such documents. For working people, it could mean giving up a day’s wages.

A survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that 11 percent of citizens, 21 million people, do not have a current photo ID. That fraction increases to 15 percent of low-income voting-age citizens, 18 percent of young eligible voters and 25 percent of black eligible voters. Those demographic groups tend to vote Democratic, and Republicans are imposing requirements that they know many will be unable to meet.

Kansas’ new law was drafted by its secretary of state, Kris Kobach, who also wrote Arizona’s anti-immigrant law. Voters will be required to show a photo ID at the polls. Before they can register, Kansans will have to produce a proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate.

Tough luck if you don’t happen to have one in your pocket when you’re at the county fair and you pass the voter registration booth. Or when the League of Women Voters brings its High School Registration Project to your school cafeteria. Or when you show up at your dorm at the University of Kansas without your birth certificate. Sorry, you won’t be voting in Lawrence, and probably not at all.

That’s fine with Gov. Sam Brownback, who said he signed the bill because it’s necessary to “ensure the sanctity of the vote.” Actually, Kansas has had only one prosecution for voter fraud in the last six years. But because of that vast threat to Kansas democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote.

Eight states already had photo ID laws. Now more than 30 other states are joining the bandwagon of disenfranchisement, as Republicans outdo each other to propose bills with new voting barriers. The Wisconsin bill refuses to recognize college photo ID cards, even if they are issued by a state university, thus cutting off many students at the University of Wisconsin and other campuses. The Texas bill, so vital that Gov. Rick Perry declared it emergency legislation, would also reject student IDs, but would allow anyone with a handgun license to vote.

A Florida bill would curtail early voting periods, which have proved popular and brought in new voters, and would limit address changes at the polls. “I’m going to call this bill for what it is, good-old-fashioned voter suppression,” Ben Wilcox of the League of Women Voters told The Florida Times-Union.

Here's the bottom line: When Americans show up at the polls in large numbers, right-wing extremists tend not to win. Republicans know on some level, despite the relentless talking point that the American people WANT endless tax cuts for billionaires under the false promise of "job creation" (and kudos to those getting up at town halls and noting that we've had 12 years of these tax cuts; so where are the jobs?), what we're seeing now is NOT what the American people want. They cannot win on the current Republican agenda. They cannot win the war of ideas. So they only way they will be able to retain power is by making sure that only THEIR people can vote.

Have you noticed that Republicans are no longer waving the flag and talking about patriotism? Perhaps it's because what they are doing right now is so fundamentally un-American.

And this is the teabaggers' choice for the Republican presidential nomination

Remember that video I posted the other day, in which one vapid, slack-jawed mouthbreathing teabagger after another said that they liked Trump for president? Here's the business genius they're supporting:

Trump has built an American empire from Las Vegas to New York with towering hotels and sparkling casinos. Forbes estimates he's worth $2.7 billion. But not all of Trump's business ventures have been constant money-makers. In 1991, 1992, 2004, and again in 2009, Trump branded companies or properties have sought Chapter 11 protection.

"I've used the laws of this country to pare debt. ... We'll have the company. We'll throw it into a chapter. We'll negotiate with the banks. We'll make a fantastic deal. You know, it's like on 'The Apprentice.' It's not personal. It's just business," Trump told ABC's George Stephanopoulos last Thursday.

A business declaring bankruptcy is nothing new in corporate America, where bankruptcy is often sugar-coated as "restructuring debt." But it might seem alarming to everyday Americans who can't get a bank to restructure their home loans. If you want to get Donald Trump hot under the collar, accuse him of declaring bankruptcy.

Read the whole sordid story here. It's as much about how the laws are rigged so that people like Donald Trump never have to accept the consequences of their own folly as it is about Trump's own multiple bankruptcies. So here we have a bunch of idiots, many of whom are probably underwater on their own houses if they haven't lost them already, whose own retirement accounts have lost much of their value, supporting a guy who's been able to game the system over and over again for his own advantage.

And they don't even see any irony in this.

Where do you even START trying to counteract this level of Teh Stoopid?

Via Randi:

=sound of forehead hitting desk=

Maybe it was ALWAYS a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing

It's always seemed odd to me that when hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets in early 2003 against going to war in Iraq, we were dismissed by the press as a "fringe element", out of touch with "mainstream America." But when hundred people started yelling at legislators' town hall meetings and adopted a name that has connotations of patriotism, the press and the media fell immediately in love and decided that the teabaggers were a formidable political force. Their adoration of this bunch of ignorant, out-of-work fools fighting for the rights of corporations to screw them over even more, is one of the great hoodwinks of the modern era. That much of this so-called "grassroots energy was (and still is) fueled by Koch Industries money didn't faze them one bit. Chris Matthews and others branded this bunch of lickspittles as the next wave in America, and without asking questions, allowed the Koch brothers to buy themselves elections nationwide, recruiting armies of the dissatisfied to give them cover.

With the spectacular fall in teabagger support since the 2010 election showed us a taste of what Teabag America is REALLY going to look like, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate whether it was ever what the media turned it into. When even the MILF-du-jour can't pack a house in the heart of anti-Obama America, perhaps it's over already:

Michele Bachmann’s much-anticipated Tax Day rally on Monday was a "dud" that drew a paltry 300 people in Columbia, S.C., according to reports.
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Bachmann met privately with South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley ahead of her speech to the small crowd in the Palmetto state’s capital.

The Minnesota congressman rallied the tea party supporters with a call to block Washington from raising the debt ceiling and an attack on President Barack Obama for being too close to Wall Street.

She told reporters after the rally that while she has yet to make an announcement on a run for president, she is looking forward to the opportunity to take on Obama, The Associated Press reported.

The rally's sparse attendance is attracing nearly as much attention as Bachmann's remarks.

Except thanks to the gullibility of these people, we're now stuck with the likes of Scott Walker and John Kasich, and Michigan and Florida are being Rickrolled by Ricks Snyder and Scott.

Dictatorship in the heartland

It appears that Scott Walker, otherwise known as The Man With No Soul (and you can see it in his cold, dead eyes), is planning to run the state of Wisconsin like a complete and utter totalitarian dictatorship under his control (emphasis mine):

Following the lead of Michigan GOP Governor Rick Snyder, Walker is said to be preparing a plan that would allow him to force local governments to submit to a financial stress test with an eye towards permitting the governor to take over municipalities that fail to meet with Walker’s approval.

According to the reports, should a locality’s financial position come up short, the Walker legislation would empower the governor to insert a financial manager of his choosing into local government with the ability to cancel union contracts, push aside duly elected local government officials and school board members and take control of Wisconsin cities and towns whenever he sees fit to do so.

[snip]

Should these reports prove accurate, Walker’s plan would resemble-if not directly mirror- the legislation signed into law by Gov. Snyder of Michigan which gives Snyder extraordinary powers to take over municipalities when he determines them to be in financial trouble, further permitting him to actually fire locally elected public officials when he deems it desirable.

Gov. Snyder’s extraordinary law became all too real this week when Emergency Financial Manager, Joseph Harris, appointed by the Governor to take charge of Benton Harbor, Michigan, issued an order which took away all powers of the city’s elected officials.

Yes, this has really happened right here in the United States of America.

Walker’s plans give further credence to the notion that the efforts of the GOP governors with Republican majorities in their state legislative bodies are part of a coordinated plan to enforce a right-wing agenda designed to not only destroy state, county and municipal employee unions, but to take control of local governments by replacing elected officials with appointees, both corporate and individual, of the state’s highest executive officer.

Such a law would additionally give Walker unchallenged power to end municipal services of which he disapproves, including safety net assistance to those in need.

According to my sources, the plan is being written by the legal offices of Foley & Lardner, the largest law firm in the state, and is scheduled to be introduced to the legislature in May of this year.

NOW can we say that the right-wing Republican Koch brothers agenda is NOT about any kind of freedom, other than for corporations to run roughshod over our lives and our ability to function as a democracy?

Will we tolerate this?

I'm afraid it's too late to do anything but. The only tool we have is at the ballot box, and Americans proved themselves last year to be too stupid, ignorant, and gullible to be trusted with something as important as the vote. Perhaps there is a small hard core that still believes in the Teabagger agenda, at least until it hits them personally (as it will). But most people who voted-by-tantrum last year had no idea what they were actually voting for. Republican governors overturning local elections by fiat, Republican legislatures passing stupid legislation codifying debunked claims into law about a President into law for the sole purpose of keeping him off the ballot, partisan Republican election officials possibly rigging election results -- these are all evidence that it is already too late to prevent the relentless march towards complete corporate oligarchy.

I hope you enjoyed America. Because you don't have it anymore.

George Allen does it again

You'd think he'd have learned from last time:

NBC 4’s reporter-anchor Craig Melvin is a tall African-American. Which apparently led to this exchange with former Sen. George Allen, according to Melvin’s Twitter account Tuesday night:

“For the 2nd time in 5 months, fmr. gov. and sen candidate George Allen asks me,”what position did you play?” I did not a play a sport.”

Allen has apologized via Twitter, saying ".@craigmelvin sorry if I offended, ask people a lot if they played sports Grew up in football family found sports banter good way to connect"

Especially when you have cognitive dissonance caused by a black guy who didn't play a sport.

And this racist fuckwit moron is ahead of Democratic opponent Tim Kaine for the Senate seat being vacated by Jim Webb by 13%.

Tea Party Congresscritters: Living the I Got Mine and Fuck You dream

Remember how Republican politicians talked about those who had lost their jobs, couldn't find new ones, and had run out of unemployment benefits? Imagine the squawking there would be among the newly-minted Tea Party congressmen and women if they were among the government workers whose paychecks will be stopped if there is a government shutdown tomorrow.

Last November, one of the first things that Maryland Republican Teabagger Andy Harris did after his election was scream that he wanted his government-paid health insurance NOW after campaigning against health care reform that would cover everyone. Imagine what he would say if his paycheck were stopped because of a shutdown due to Republican intransigence -- including his own.

Fortunately for Andy Harris and the other Teabaggers who would destroy the economic recovery, anemic as it is, solely in the interests of their own power, their own government paychecks will continue, as Nicholas Kristof notes today in a column about the Hooverites of the Tea Party:

If we careen over a cliff on Friday and the American government shuts down, hard-working federal workers will stop getting paychecks, but the members of Congress responsible for the shutdown are expected to be paid as usual.

That’s partly because Congressional pay is not subject to the regular appropriations process, and partly because of Constitutional concerns. The Senate passed a bill proposed by Barbara Boxer of California that would suspend Congressional paychecks in any government shutdown, but the Republican-controlled House has blocked it. House Republicans approved a similar pay suspension, but it was embedded in legislation that has zero chance of becoming law.

The upshot is that federal workers who do important work for the public — cleaning up toxic waste, enrolling sick people into lifesaving medical trials, answering medical hot lines, running national parks, processing passport applications — risk being sent home and going unpaid. But members of Congress would continue to receive $174,000 a year. As the humorist Andy Borowitz wrote in a Twitter message:  “That’s like eliminating the fire dept & sending checks to the arsonists.”

So the people who hate government so much that they fought like hell to get government paychecks are perfectly willing to shut down the government -- because THEY will get paid regardless, and that's all that matters, right? Just ask Andy Harris.

What about the poor people who elected you, moron?

From ThinkProgress:

Last week, Rep. Rob Woodall held a tele-town hall meeting with his constituents, allowing them to call in and ask questions. At one point, a constituent called in and challenged Woodall’s belief that all we need is spending cuts to move towards a more balanced budget. The caller pointed out that closing corporate tax loopholes on big companies like Exxon Mobil — which paid zero federal corporate income taxes in 2009 — and Google, which only paid a 4.2 percent rate in taxes, would do a lot to help balance the budget as well.

Woodall replied by saying he’s “not a fan of class warfare” and that the only people who’ve ever employed him are rich people. He then went on to say that corporate taxes are really taxes on the customers of these companies and that we need to get “corporate taxes as low as we can in this country”:

CALLER: I have a quick comment and then a question. I certainly agree with moving towards a balanced budget, and containing costs, and cutting where we can, including the Defense Department, which I think is terribly bloated, but I just don’t think it’s feasible to balance the budget with cuts alone. I think you’ve got to also include income and place a fair tax on the wealthiest two percent and closing corporate loopholes that allow huge corporations like Exxon to pay no taxes. For example, Google earned eleven billion dollars last year overseas and paid 4.2 percent in taxes. So I think a fair tax on the wealthy and those who can chip in a little more has to be part of the bigger picture.

WOODALL: Bill, I absolutely agree with you that we can’t do it on spending cuts alone. [...] Now you talk about raising taxes. Now I’m not a fan of class warfare. Now the only people who’ve given me a job in my life is rich people. I’ve never had a poor man offer me a job. [...] At the end of the day, it’s going to be one of us, individuals, that pays every nickel in corporate taxes. I want use to get corporate taxes as low as we can in this country. Which means businesses don’t want to be here, they don’t want to provide jobs here. [...] We have to attract new businesses to our shores, the way to do that is with the lowest corporate tax rate we can get, to make sure folks want to come here.

This guy has clearly forgotten that he is supposed to now be a "public servant", which means that he is an employee of the people of his district. I'm sure some of those people are poor. Now, is he saying that rich people gave him his current job as a legislator? If so, is he saying that they bought him a Congressional seat and that he is a bought and paid for Congressman?

Inquiring minds want to know.

America: The World's Madwoman in the Attic

Welcome to Teabag America:

When Louis Brandeis called state legislatures “laboratories of democracy,” he couldn’t have imagined the curious formulas the Tea Party chemists would be mixing in 2011, including: a bill just passed by the Utah legislature requiring the state to recognize gold and silver as legal tender; a Montana bill declaring global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”; a plan in Georgia to abolish driver’s licenses because licensing violates the “inalienable right” to drive; legislation in South Dakota that would require every adult to buy a gun; and the Kentucky legislature’s effort to create a “sanctuary state” for coal, safe from environmental laws.

Less well known is what’s going on in Montana. Legislators there have introduced several bills that would nullify federal law, including health-care reform, the Endangered Species Act, gun laws and food-safety laws. Under one legislative proposal, FBI agents couldn’t operate in the state without the permission of county sheriffs. Legislators are also looking into a proposed resolution calling on Congress to end membership in the United Nations.

A “birther” bill, similar to proposals in various other states, would require presidential candidates — they’re talking about you, Obama — to furnish proof of citizenship that is satisfactory to state authorities. Montana has also joined the push in many states to restore the gold standard, and a Montana House committee approved legislation invalidating municipal laws against anti-gay discrimination.

Then there’s House Bill 278, authorizing armed citizens’ militias known as “home guards.” With the home guards mobilized, Montana would no longer have to fear a Canadian invasion. And while Montana repels the barbarians from Alberta, New Hampshire is contemplating a state “defense force” to protect it from the marauding Quebecois.

Some of the proposals are ominous: South Dakota would call it justifiable homicide if a killer is trying to stop harm to an unborn child.

Some are petty: Wyoming, following Oklahoma, wants to ban sharia law, even though that state’s 200-odd Muslims couldn’t pose much of a sharia threat.

Some are mean-spirited: Iowa would allow business owners to refuse goods and services to those in gay marriages.

Some are fairly harmless: Arizona took actions to make the Colt Single Action Army Revolver the official state firearm and to create a Tea Party license plate.

And some are just silly: A Georgia bill would require only “pre-1965” silver and gold coins for payment of state debts.

A nation divided against sanity cannot stand.

And when one of these nutballs finally does it, conservatives will say that their incendiary rhetoric had nothing to do with it

Another dispatch from Teabag America, in this case Athen, Georgia:

At Rep. Paul Broun’s town hall meeting on Tuesday, the Athens congressman asked who had driven the farthest to be there and let the winner ask the first question.

We couldn’t hear the question in the back of the packed Oglethorpe County Commission chamber, but whatever it was, it got a big laugh. According to an outraged commenter on the article, the question was, when is someone going to shoot Obama?

I’ve asked Team Broun whether that was indeed the question and haven’t gotten an answer. The commenter accurately described the questioner and the circumstances, and no one has disputed his account.

Update: Broun’s press secretary, Jessica Morris, confirmed that the question was indeed, who is going to shoot Obama? “Obviously, the question was inappropriate, so Congressman Broun moved on,” she said.

Here was Broun’s response:

The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year. Hopefully, we’ll elect somebody that’s going to be a conservative, limited-government president that will take a smaller, who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.

He then segued into Republicans’ budget proposal.

Got that? It's at a point now where a Republican Congressman doesn't even express outrage at a question about shooting the President of the United States. Three or four signs at a Wisconsin demonstration of fifty thousand equate Scott Walker with the worst despots in history, and the media goes into a frenzy of "Both Sides Do It." But on the right, it's perfectly OK to treat a question like this as simply "inappropriate."

Asking a Congressman when he stopped beating his wife (when he hasn't) is inappropriate. Asking a Congressman who is going to shoot the president is outrageous -- and should be treated as such. Even John McCain, who whored himself in the worst way to these people in 2008, finally drew the line at "I don't trust him...he's an Arab." Today Republicans don't even flinch when someone talks about shooting elected officials of the other party.

They'd make keeping kosher a crime too, except that they like their bagels too much

I wonder what other religions' practices they're going to make a crime in Tennessee:

A proposed Tennessee law would make following the Islamic code known as Shariah law a felony, punishable by 15 years in jail.

State Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, and state Rep. Judd Matheny, R-Tullahoma, introduced the same bill in the Senate and House last week. It calls Shariah law a danger to homeland security and gives the attorney general authority to investigate complaints and decide who's practicing it.

It exempts peaceful practice of Islam but labels any adherence to Shariah law — which includes religious practices such as feet washing and prayers — as treasonous. It claims Shariah adherents want to replace the Constitution with their religious law.

A dozen other states are considering anti-Shariah bills, and there's a federal lawsuit in Oklahoma over one.