Category Archives: Politics

April 12, 2011 · 11:48 pm

150 Years Later, Tea Partiers Still Aren’t Over The Civil War

Unbelievable….

But not really…

I could have guessed this of the Tea Party and most of the GOP…

More like sad, but true….

From ThinkProgress.org:

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginning, when secessionists fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. According to a new poll from CNN, the Civil War’s legacy remains unresolved. The poll finds that Republicans and Tea Party supporters are more likely to support the Confederacy and confederate leaders than Democrats or Independents.

According to the poll, nearly one in four Americans sympathize with the Confederacy more than with the Union. That number grows to nearly four-in-ten among white Southerners. Among Tea Party members, 26 percent sympathize with the Confederacy more than the Union, and that number grows to 28 percent among Republicans.

via ThinkProgress » 150 Years Later, Tea Partiers Still Aren’t Over The Civil War.

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April 12, 2011 · 11:41 pm

Infrastructure Improvements ‘Key To Recovery,’ Report Says

This is what really scares me about the short sighted group in Washington today…

If we don’t start making infrastructure investments, not only will the economy stall, but we won’t be positioned to move forward and compete with other nations…

Another example of where we are heading toward becoming a Third World Country if we don’t start investing in infrastructure and our future…

Slaughter wrote that modernization efforts like high-speed rail development are vital to economic growth — and helped make the U.S. a leading economy in the first place: “High-quality infrastructure has helped boost U.S. productivity and standards of living, in part by encouraging global companies to create high-paying jobs here. Today, however, America’s infrastructure is deteriorating — both in absolute terms and relative to other countries that are rapidly bolstering their infrastructure.”

The nation’s aging infrastructure was thrown into sharp relief in August 2007 when an interstate bridge jammed with rush hour traffic suddenly collapsed, pitching dozens of cars into the Mississippi River below and killing 13 people.

via Infrastructure Improvements ‘Key To Recovery,’ Report Says.

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April 12, 2011 · 10:40 pm

Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom | The Nation

Another great article from The Nation…

The Conservatives really are PR geniuses.  They also have Street Smarts.

The Democrats have to look to history to frame their arguments in ways that have worked before.  This article has some good advice….

They also have to get over their fear of the GOP yelling “class warfare.”  The Class War is already on and the Middle Class is losing….

We must also change the argument about government. Government need not be a source of constraint, as conservatives claim. Nor is it designed to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market, as many liberals claim—a formulation that depicts citizens as needy and passive and opens liberals to the charge of paternalism and condescension. When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating herself from her rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy.

In forging his realignment, Roosevelt was careful to identify the enemy not as a political party but an economic aristocracy. Throughout the 1936 campaign, he barely mentioned Alf Landon. Instead, he denounced the Liberty League and the businessmen it represented. Realignments in America are like that: Jackson railed against the Bank; the Republicans ran against the slaveocracy; Reagan campaigned against the liberal elite. Part of this is strategic: it’s easier to peel away voters from the opposition if you can show that it is not their party you oppose but the interests it represents, which are not theirs. But part of it is substantive, reflecting a conviction that the task at hand is not simply to defeat a party or win an election but to free men and women from a malignant social form. If we hope to forge a comparable realignment, we must stop talking about the Tea Party or even the Republicans and start talking about the business class that stands behind them.

via Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom | The Nation.

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April 12, 2011 · 10:28 pm

In the Next Round of Budget Talks, Big Cuts for Health Research Are Coming | The Nation

This Congress- and Washington in general- has no foresight….

Their current budget cutting mania is leading us down the path to becoming a Third World Country.

We have fallen behind the rest of the world in so many areas and they seem intent on pushing us back even more…

From The Nation:

But the real damage will come after the proposed cuts take effect. The NIH is comprised of twenty-seven institutes and centers with particular focuses, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Heart Lung and Blood Institute; each will decide how to manage their individual cuts. The NCI will prioritize funding the same level of new grants (they currently fund 14 percent of new grant applications), but will have to cut funding from cancer centers. Others will have to choose between new and existing grants. When ongoing grants aren’t renewed, work may simply stop. “University departments will do their best to support promising research during a dry spell,” explains Riggins, “and there are a few foundations that provide bridge grants, but these resources aren’t abundant either.”

In the long term, funding scarcity will make it hard to attract top research scientists. Many have already left for more stable careers in industry. And US labs will continue to lose people not just to other fields but to other countries as well. Kelly Ruggles, a microbiologist at Columbia, says, “It used to be that people would come here to get trained in the sciences. Now, people are leaving for better opportunities in Singapore or China. There’s just more science than money right now.”

Of course, this is a difficult funding environment, but the proposed NIH cuts are based in part on ignorance. Legislators who understand the NIH tend to give it full-voiced support. When retired Representative John Edward Porter chaired the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the NIH, he held hearings with each of the twenty-seven institutes so members could hear directly from the researchers why they needed money and what they were doing with it. When, during the mid-’90s, the House Budget Committee proposed cuts to the NIH budget, Porter brought a troupe of Nobel laureates, esteemed scientists and business leaders in to meet with then-speaker Gingrich. The result? Instead of cutting the budget, Congress doubled the NIH budget over five years, because they saw that the funding was working. “I certainly learned that the money going to the NIH was money that was being tremendously well spent,” recalls Porter, “making a difference in the lives of human beings all over the planet.”

via In the Next Round of Budget Talks, Big Cuts for Health Research Are Coming | The Nation.

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April 12, 2011 · 9:53 pm

Budget debate was fought entirely on the GOP’s turf

Greg Sargent, at The Washington Post, makes some good points here…

First of all, it’s all about the 2012 Elections, not about what is best for the Country or what the Democrats core beliefs may be…

We know the Republicans have no core beliefs…

Sadly, given what happened in 2010, this approach might be necessary to deal with an uneducated, stressed out, results oriented electorate.  Obama’s strategy may be to try to protect the American electorate from themselves…

This might be smart, but it’s also very scary….

And it sacrifices good policy on the altar of political necessity….

And Americans have no one to blame but themselves…

President Obama’s advisers apparently believe that his best route to reeelection is to acknowledge the need for more fiscal discipline, while picking a fight with the GOP over the need for targeted government investment in our future and painting the GOP’s cut-at-all-costs vision as out of the mainstream. In fairness, his advisers, as Paul Krugman noted recently, may very well be right about this.

But it’s still worth appreciating how far to the right the debate has shifted, in part because of Democratic acquiescence. The idea that government spending should be a job-creation tool in our arsenal was entirely marginalized, to the point that it was simply not part of the discussions; meanwhile, the insane conservative demand for $100 billion in cuts was treated as a kind of outer right-wing boundary of legitimate discourse. The result: Giving Boehner more than he originally asked for in cuts became the stuff of middle ground compromise.

via Budget debate was fought entirely on the GOP’s turf – The Plum Line – The Washington Post.

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April 9, 2011 · 10:08 am

Shocking Truth Behind Donald Trump’s Hair Revealed?

Now that DT is running for President, this is potentially a National Security issue….

I hope they discover and validate the truth behind the world’s greatest comb-over before he’s elected and seals the information forever as a State Secret….

From Vanity Fair:

My baldly-stated thesis: this could be evidence of a rarely-sighted, possibly unprecedented “double comb-over.” It looks as if a length of hair growing from the part on the left side of Trump’s pate has been combed left-to-right over the crown of his head, while a second length of hair, growing from the back of his head, has been combed back-to-front over the first length of hair. Salon-strength hair products likely play a role in the final construction of this lattice-like structure—which could also explain the “ship’s prow” look one sometimes sees in side views of Trump.

Granted, there could be other explanations for the cross-hatching in Trump’s hair, such as a wood-grain tattoo on his scalp. Further study is clearly called for. Now that Trump is running for president, I nominate the Washington press corps to look into it, just as soon as they’re finished writing down everything Michele Bachmann says.

via Shocking Truth Behind Donald Trump’s Hair Revealed? | VF Daily | Vanity Fair.

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April 8, 2011 · 11:41 pm

Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls: Matt Taibbi

Great article in Rolling Stone from Matt Taibbi.

I love is snarky tone and accurate facts…

Here is a brief excerpt and I encourage you to click the link to read the rest of it…..

Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.

The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.

via Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy.

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April 8, 2011 · 4:31 pm

GOP Budget Proposal: Ludicrous and Cruel

Excellent analysis of Paul Ryan’s GOP Budget proposal by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times:

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.

The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.

And that neither should nor will happen. Mr. Ryan and his colleagues can write down whatever numbers they like, but seniors vote. And when they find that their health-care vouchers are grossly inadequate, they’ll demand and get bigger vouchers — wiping out the plan’s supposed savings.

In short, this plan isn’t remotely serious; on the contrary, it’s ludicrous.

And it’s also cruel.

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.

So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.

via Ludicrous and Cruel – NYTimes.com.

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April 8, 2011 · 3:30 pm

Shock poll: 46% of Mississippi Republicans think interracial marriage should be illegal | The Raw Story

I hope some time in my lifetime, Mississippi steps forward to at least join the 20th Century.  They’ve been stuck in the 19th Century for over 200 years now…

A new poll out of Mississippi finds that in a bastion of America’s south, many Republican voters have tightly held onto the old, hateful views of race as a dividing line in society.

A full 46 percent of Mississippi Republicans said they believe interracial marriage should be illegal, according to the left-leaning survey group Public Policy Polling. Only 40 percent said they thought it should remain legal, with the rest unsure.

Republicans who said they were in favor of banning interracial marriages were most frequently supporters of Fox News contributor Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor (R) who quit half-way through her first term. Their least liked candidate was Mitt Romney, the former radio executive and Governor of Massachusetts (R).

via Shock poll: 46% of Mississippi Republicans think interracial marriage should be illegal | The Raw Story.

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April 8, 2011 · 3:27 pm

Brain structure differs in liberals, conservatives: study | The Raw Story

Well, I always knew I never really thought like a Conservative and now I know why…

I’ve always analyzed and dissected complex issues instead of going for the easy solutions….

I question everything.  I always have…

Fear isn’t something I consciously use in my decision but it’s clear the GOP uses it to drive and fire up their Conservative base…

Fascinating article from Raw Story:

 

WASHINGTON — Everyone knows that liberals and conservatives butt heads when it comes to world views, but scientists have now shown that their brains are actually built differently.

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.

“We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala,” the study said.

Other research has shown greater brain activity in those areas, according to which political views a person holds, but this is the first study to show a physical difference in size in the same regions.

“Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” said Ryota Kanai of the University College London, where the research took place.

“Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure.”

The study was based on 90 “healthy young adults” who reported their political views on a scale of one to five from very liberal to very conservative, then agreed to have their brains scanned.

People with a large amygdala are “more sensitive to disgust” and tend to “respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions,” the study said.

Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that “monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts,” it said.

“Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views.”

It remains unclear whether the structural differences cause the divergence in political views, or are the effect of them.

But the central issue in determining political views appears to revolve around fear and how it affects a person.

“Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty,” the study said.

via Brain structure differs in liberals, conservatives: study | The Raw Story.

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