Category Archives: Politics

February 11, 2011 · 4:58 pm

10 Historical ‘Facts’ Only a Right-Winger Could Believe | | AlterNet

This is definitely worth reading…

As you may have noticed by following their writings, conservatives are not sticklers for historical accuracy, especially when they have a point to defend and not a lot of evidence to support it. Get a load, for example, of John Podhoretz explaining how the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani reduced abortions in New York City (though, um, not really) because he cut crime, which is one of “the spiritual causes of abortion.”

Yeah, deadline pressure’s a bitch. But there are some bizarre notions of American history in which conservatives have become so invested they’ve adopted them into their worldview. The best-known example is probably Jonah Goldberg’s notion of “Liberal Fascism”; nowadays anytime a conservative talks about, say, Woodrow Wilson or Hillary Clinton, you may expect him to mention their resemblance to Benito Mussolini. They don’t even have to think about it, even when normal people are gaping at them open-mouthed like audience members at “Springtime for Hitler” — it’s part of the folklore that helps them understand the American experience.

There are plenty of others. I’ve picked out 10 such ideas that are widespread enough to qualify. (In the nomenclature I have treated “Republican” and “conservative” as synonyms because, come on.)

MORE:   10 Historical ‘Facts’ Only a Right-Winger Could Believe | | AlterNet.

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February 11, 2011 · 4:53 pm

Former Fox News employee: ‘Stuff is just made up’ | Raw Story

This isn’t news to most of us…

A former employee of Fox News called the company a “propaganda outfit” that is determined to undermine the Obama administration and Democrats.

“I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up,” the employee, whose name was kept anonymous, told the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters.

“They say one thing and do another,” the former employee said. “They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they’re balanced or that they’re not right-wing extreme propagandist.”

“You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks,” the former employee added. “And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned.”

The former employee’s comments did not come as a surprise to many critics of Fox News, who have long suggested the channel is biased in favor of conservatives. The 2004 documentary film “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” criticized the channel and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for skewing its reporting of events to promote conservative viewpoints.

via Former Fox News employee: ‘Stuff is just made up’ | Raw Story.

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February 11, 2011 · 4:51 pm

Kochs brothers’ plan for 2012: raise $88 million – Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Smith – POLITICO.com

This is an under-reported story by the Corporate Press…

Our best hope is the Koch’s cause Civil War in the GOP…

In an expansion of their political footprint, the billionaire Koch brothers plan to contribute and steer a total of $88 million to conservative causes during the 2012 election cycle, according to sources, funding a new voter micro-targeting initiative, grass-roots organizing efforts and television advertising campaigns.

In fact, as the annual Conservative Political Action Conference meets this week in Washington and conservatives assess the state of their movement, the Koch network of nonprofit groups, once centered on sleepy free-enterprise think tanks, seems to be emerging as a more ideological counterweight to the independent Republican political machine conceived by Bush-era GOP operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie before the 2010 midterm elections.

The aggressive embrace of political activism by the Koch brothers, Charles and David, has cheered fiscal conservatives, who hope they will reorient the conservative political apparatus around free-market, small government principles and candidates, and away from the electability-over-principles approach they see Rove and Gillespie as embodying.

But not everyone on the right is happy about the brothers’ increasing political profile. Some conservatives complain that the political operatives who work for the Kochs don’t play well with others in the movement and worry that their efforts to steer big money to favored groups undermines other, potentially valuable conservative efforts.

via Kochs brothers’ plan for 2012: raise $88 million – Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Smith – POLITICO.com.

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February 11, 2011 · 7:46 am

Standing Up to Glenn Beck

Great article from Kevin Drum at MotherJones.com…

I’m convinced watching Fox News and Glenn Beck sped up the deterioration of my Mother’s mental capabilities….

I really think Glenn Beck is employed by the Assisted Living Industry to help make older people so crazy their children have to spend a fortune to put them in their facilities.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t get a kickback….

 

Glenn Beck is, for a liberal like me, far more entertaining to watch than, say, Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. The latter are garden variety blowhards and their subject matter is predictable. But Beck? He’s crazy! He thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is going to take over the entire Mediterranean! Fabian socialists are a fifth column working to subvert everything that makes America great! (But slowly. Sneakily.) The Tides Foundation is on a mission to “warp your children’s brains”! And Obama the secret Marxist is behind it all! It all fits together!

This is actually sort of entertaining in small doses. But in bigger doses, not so much. Conor Friedersdorf:

“As I’ve said before, lots of Glenn Beck listeners aren’t in on the joke. Unlike Roger Ailes, Jonah Goldberg, and every staffer at the Heritage Foundation happy hour, they don’t realize that the Fox News Channel puts this man on the air fully understanding that large parts of his program are uninformed nonsense mixed with brazen bullshit.”

….Conjure in your mind a retired grandfather. He served in World War II, voted twice for Ronald Reagan, and supports the Tea Party. Awhile back, he started watching Glenn Beck….

Actually, we don’t have to conjure this. Richmond Ramsey has done it for us. I’ve mentioned before that lots of Fox viewers have the channel on all day long, basically as background noise, and Ramsey says he’s noticed this too. His piece is called “Fox Geezer Syndrome”:

“Over the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping track of a trend among friends around my age (late thirties to mid-forties). Eight of us (so far) share something in common besides our conservatism: a deep frustration over how our parents have become impossible to take on the subject of politics. Without fail, it turns out that our folks have all been sitting at home watching Fox News Channel all day — especially Glenn Beck’s program.”

“….I asked my father privately why Mom, who as far as I know never before had a political thought, was so worked up about Obama all the time. “She’s been like that ever since she started watching Glenn Beck,” Dad said.”

“….Then I flew out for a visit, and observed that their television was on all day long, even if no one was watching it. What channel was playing? Fox. Spending a few days in the company of the channel—especially Glenn Beck—it all became clear to me. If Fox was the window through which I saw the wider world, for hours every day, I’d be perpetually pissed off too.”

“….Back home, I mentioned to a friend over beers how much Fox my mom and dad watched, and how angry they now were about politics. “Yours too?!” he said. “I’ve noticed the same thing with mine. They weren’t always like this, but since they retired, they’ve gotten into Fox, and you can’t even talk to them anymore without hearing them read the riot act about Obama.”

And that’s from a conservative. It’s all entertaining enough until you come face to face with the consequences. Sure, Beck’s audience is relatively small: a few million, probably no more than one or two percent of the adult population of the country. But that’s misleading. These are the shock troops, the true believers, the ones who have turned our politics so toxic. And worse, they’re being deliberately conned by Roger Ailes and his pals, who know perfectly well that this stuff is nonsense. And it’s all in the service of selling yet another con, getting the geezers to invest their money in endless gold scams.

I know this is whistling into the wind, but it’s long past time for the adults in the Republican Party to speak up about this. Glenn Beck is the Father Coughlin and the Robert Welch of his generation rolled into one, and his brand of noxious conspiracy theorizing isn’t something to be tolerated just because it produces a few useful idiots. It’s time for this to end.

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/02/standing-glenn-beck

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February 10, 2011 · 7:41 pm

Cruel and Unequal, Sojourners Magazine/February 2011

Another great article…

Do you think if Lindsey Lohan had been a poor African-American girl she would still be walking around free?  Or Paris Hilton?

See the key paragraph- with my emphasis in bold blue….

A vast new racial undercaste now exists in America, though their plight is rarely mentioned. Obama won’t mention it; the Tea Party won’t mention it; media pundits would rather talk about anything else. The members of the undercaste are largely invisible to those of us who have jobs, live in decent neighborhoods, and zoom around on freeways, passing by the virtual and literal prisons in which they live.

But here are the facts: There are more African-American adults under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. In major urban areas such as Chicago, Oama’s hometown, the majority of working-age African-American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. Millions of people in the United States, primarily poor people of color, are denied the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement: the right to vote, to serve on juries, and to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. Branded “criminals” and “felons,” such people now find themselves relegated to a permanent second-class status. They live in a parallel social universe: the other America, where they will stay for the rest of their lives.

We, as a nation, are in deep denial about how this came to pass. On the rare occasions when the existence of “them” — the others, the ghetto dwellers, those locked up and locked out — is publicly acknowledged, standard excuses are trotted out. We’re told black culture, bad schools, poverty, and broken homes are to blame. Almost no one admits: We declared war. We declared a war on the most vulnerable people in our society and then blamed them for the wreckage.

And yet that is precisely what we did. The so-called War on Drugs has driven the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades. The vast majority of the startling increase in incarceration in America is traceable to the arrest and imprisonment of poor people of color for nonviolent, drug-related offenses. Families have been torn apart, and young lives shattered, as parents grieve the loss of loved ones to the system, often hiding their grief under a cloak of shame.

Politicians claim that the enemy in this war is a thing — drugs — not a group of people. The facts prove otherwise.

Studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates, yet in some states African-American men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than white men. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African Americans. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.

 

 

 

 

 

via Cruel and Unequal, Sojourners Magazine/February 2011.

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Filed under Politics, Race, Social Justice, The Economy

February 10, 2011 · 7:31 pm

Budget Cuts and Bad Faith – Jim Wallis – God’s Politics Blog

I do like to remind myself and others sometimes that not all Christians are Evangelical loonies….

I continue to enjoy reading Sojourner’s Magazine that my friend Renee put me on to…

Great article/blog on Social Justice and true Christian expectations…

House Republicans announced a plan yesterday to cut $43 billion in domestic spending and international aid, while increasing spending for military and defense by another $8 billion. This proposal comes just months after billions of dollars were added to the deficit with an extension of tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. House Republicans focused in on only 12 percent of federal spending, and targeted things like education, the environment, food safety, law enforcement, infrastructure, and transportation — programs that benefit or protect most Americans. They also proposed cutting funding for programs that benefit the most vulnerable members of our society, such as  nutrition programs for our poorest women and children. We don’t yet know all the cuts Republicans are targeting in their proposals, but it’s good to finally know what their priorities are.

Under the proposed budget cuts, deficit reduction will not come from the super-rich; it will come from the rest of us. And the poorer you are, the more vulnerable you become, and the more you will pay for the burdens of deficit reduction. For example, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), a program that helps provide food to hungry mothers and their children faces a $758 million cut. Also, the proposed budget cuts $544 million in international food aid grants for organizations such as World Vision. AmeriCorps, a program that provides public service opportunities for our young adults, would be eliminated entirely. But our military and defense budget, which sends our young adults off to kill and be killed, would receive an $8 billion increase.

It used to be very popular for Christians to ask, “What Would Jesus Do?” They even wore bracelets with the initials “WWJD.” The bracelets acted as reminders that as Christians, our actions should always reflect the values and example we see in the life of Jesus. Already, in a first wave of response to the proposed cuts, thousands of Christians told their members of Congress that they need to ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Cut?” They believe, and so do I, that the moral test of any society is how it treats its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. And that is exactly what the Bible says, over and over again.

via Budget Cuts and Bad Faith – Jim Wallis – God’s Politics Blog.

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February 10, 2011 · 7:26 pm

12 Examples of Stunning Hypocrisy from Tea Party Republicans In One Short Month| AlterNet

Dare I say “I told you so?”

It’s only been a month since the new Tea Party lawmakers took office, but the entirely predictable results of their ascension are already coming in. The Republican Party’s newest class of “mavericks” have again stormed into office intent on proving their theory that government is inherently evil by screwing up everything in sight.

Before we embark on our tour of the Tea Party politicians’ early moves – and those of the party they were supposed to be “taking back” — let’s recall exactly what they promised: they were relentlessly focused on economic issues – and, we were told, would eschew the kind of social issues that had long marked Republican politics in the era of the Religious Right. They would bring greater transparency and accountability to government. They promised to be good fiscal stewards, respond to the wishes of the people and, above all else, they swore up and down to obey the letter of the Constitution.

Let’s see how they did in the early going.

MORE:   12 Examples of Stunning Hypocrisy from Tea Party Republicans In One Short Month | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet.

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February 10, 2011 · 7:24 pm

Vision: New Approach Brings US Homeless in from The Cold | AlterNet

Interesting article on a new approach that seems to be working…

I just don’t believe anyone should be homeless…

It’s just not acceptable that we as a society allow this to happen…

And the problem really started  to build during the Reagan years…

“We know there are strategies out there that actually work. It’s a matter of committing to those strategies and making sure we keep that momentum going,” says Anthony Love, deputy director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, which brings together 19 federal departments and agencies.

Officials and advocates alike argue that housing the homeless is not only the most humane solution but also the cheapest, since it reduces the cost of emergency medical care and law enforcement.

There are fears, however, that as governments at every level are forced to slash budgets to cope with the lingering economic crisis, the available funding may not match the ambitious goals set by Housing First campaigns.

“There’s just less local money available for housing as state and local budgets have gone down,” says Jeremy Rosen, program director at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

“Ending homeless at this point is really not a mystery in terms of tactics, it’s a question of being able to get the resources.”

via Vision: New Approach Brings US Homeless in from The Cold | News & Politics | AlterNet.

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February 10, 2011 · 6:43 pm

PolitiFact Rates Republican Statements as False at 3 Times the Rate of Democrats

Duh….

And who is surprised?

I’ve never seen anything like the GOP ability to look the camera in the eye and downright lie…

Amazing…

Republican statements were graded in the dreaded “false” and “pants on fire” categories 39 percent of the time, compared to just 12 percent for statements made by Democrats.

That means a supermajority of falsehoods documented by PolitiFact over the last year – 76 percent – were attributed to Republicans, with just 22 percent of such statements coming from Democrats.

As a consequence, Democrats have therefore been presented as much more truthful – with over 75 percent of statements receiving the top three grades of True (16 percent), Mostly True (27 percent), or Half True (33 percent).

Less than half of Republican statements graded by PolitiFact were regarded as half truths or better – just 90 out of 191 (47 percent).

Republicans were also assigned a larger percentage of “Barely True” statements than Democrats, bringing the tally of all falsehoods or near falsehoods in the bottom three categories to 52.9 percent of Republican statements to just 24.6 percent of those made by Democrats.

via Smart Politics – Selection Bias? PolitiFact Rates Republican Statements as False at 3 Times the Rate of Democrats.

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February 10, 2011 · 8:06 am

The GOP Unleashes a Horrifying Attack on Women | | AlterNet

I don’t think people are paying enough attention to this….

What’s shocking about all these attacks is that the GOP doesn’t even pretend to care about women this time around, as they sometimes do–instead, they’re waging an all-out war on women’s health. One of the most egregious salvos in this war on women is the treatment of “rape” exceptions to a proposed abortion funding ban. A massive outcry arose when the phrase “forcible rape” appeared in the notorious H.R. 3 bill–essentially redefining “acceptable” rape using an arbitrary term. It was a nasty bit of work, allowing for rape exceptions only if was the “right kind of rape.” Note to Republicans, women said: all rape is forcible. The bill’s sponsors claimed the offensive phrase had been removed. But according to reports on Wednesday, it was still there.

And yet another controversy has followed in this one’s wake, thanks to anti-choice congressman Joe Pitts (PA) who introduced a new facet to yet another awful bill, H.R. 358. This new provision would allow emergency room and other hospital and health personnel to refuse emergency care rather than perform abortion procedures they disagree with. As Dante Atkins at Daily Kos writes, “This modification is simple: it would allow hospitals to make a ‘decision of conscience’ to let women die.”

via The GOP Unleashes a Horrifying Attack on Women | | AlterNet.

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