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This blog is written by a group of liberal patriots who aren't quite as pissed off as they were a couple of years ago, but aren't taking anything for granted, either. We share a fierce dedication to the Constitution - the only words ever put to paper worth dying for, and we'll argue it's finer liberal points with anyone.
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Remember a couple of years back when we were told that there would be a $500k cap on pay packs for execs of companies that took massive amounts of taxpayer provided bailout dollars? Did you really believe that there was going to be a $500k cap for execs of companies that took massive amounts of taxpayer provided bailout dollars? Well, if you did, here's your sign.
According to Juan Gonzales @ the New York Daily News, what actually happened was exactly what anyone with half a brain should have known would happen and the Headline says it all... or a lot of it anyway.
Come on, really... is there anyone who didn't see that coming? If you didn't, then you're a major part of the flipping problem in this country and those of us with enough sense to know when our ass is on fire would be better off if you just went ahead and moved to the Confederate States of Retardia and let the Newt run your lives while we get on with trying to put out the damned fire.
Tim Geithner is simply a worm, a Wall Street tool and a card carrying member of the one percent and I would bet anything the sucker has never voted Democrat in his life. Can I get an "amen" on that? Good, thank you. Moving on to the actual numbers:
The Treasury Department approved pay packages worth $5 million or more for 49 executives at a handful of firms that received the biggest taxpayer bailouts between 2009 and 2011.
A scathing new audit this week by the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program blasted those payments, all of which occurred despite a $500,000 salary cap that President Obama and Congress established in 2009 at firms receiving "exceptional assistance" under TARP.
Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank of New York officials joined behind the scenes with the bailed-out firms to repeatedly pressure Kenneth Feinberg, the special federal master overseeing the compensation packages, to approve higher salaries, the audit found.
You can read Timmy's bio if you don't see the significance there. He came to Treasury from... three guesses and the first two don't count... the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And I have no doubt that when he leaves... and I'm hearing now that he's leaving next year, no matter who wins... that it will only because he's sucked up every easy dollar he can reasonably expect to get for the people who actually retain his allegiance and that ain't you and me.
Feinberg had the power to allow waivers to the cash cap, but the report found the program's contradictory goals meant "he could not effectively rein in excessive compensation."
The CEO of one bailed-out firm, Ally Financial, actually complained that one of his underlings, who was paying for private school forhis kids, would be "cash poor" if relegated to a salary of just $500,000.
The audit looked at seven of the biggest TARP recipients - Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, General Motors, Ally, Chrysler, and Chrysler Financial.
Two of those, Citigroup and Bank of America, paid back their government loans before the end of 2009, so they would be free to pay their execs whatever they wanted.
Of the remaining companies, AIG repeatedly insisted on the biggest pay packages and represented 80% of Feinberg's "headaches," the audit said.
The company received more than $180 billion in federal bailout money in 2008, and even today, after paying back billions, it is still 70% owned by the federal government.
But at the recession's height in spring 2009, AIG had the audacity to press Feinberg for raises ranging from 20% to 550% for its top employees, the report said. Backed by top Treasury aides, AIG argued that unless it got those raises, key people would leave and the government would not get its money back.
What's more, AIG wanted those salaries in cash, not stock.
Company execs confided to Feinberg that the firm's common stock was "essentially worthless," the report said.
To his credit, Feinberg resisted the most outrageous salary demands, but he still approved dozens above the government's $500,000 cash cap.
In 2009, for instance, he approved a $10.5 million package for AIG chief executive Robert Benmosch, which included $3 million in cash.
The following year, Feinberg approved another $10.5 million for Benmosch, while signing off on packages of from $3 million to $7.6 million for 17 of AIG's 22 top employees.
Ally CEO Michael Carpenter got approval for an $8.1 million package. General Motors chief Fritz Henderson got $5.1 million. AIG's Executive Vice President Michael Herr declined to comment Thursday.
As for those dire warnings that many execs would flee, it simply didn't happen. The audit found that 85% of top employees covered by the federal salary caps in 2009 were still working at the same company two years later.
All that talk about limiting pay at companies the taxpayers bailed? It was just that - talk.
Well actually, a lot stronger words than "just talk" come to mind but whatever. Not only are these people never going to be prosecuted for the crimes they've committed against this country and it's people, the bastards are being allowed to continue committing those crimes while our government "watchdogs" stand in a corner shakin' like a dog shittin' peach pits and allowing themselves to be... at best... blackmailed or extorted into helping them and Tim Geithner is the bag man.
Trust Women was started by the late martyr Dr. JGeorge Tiller to support a woman's right to abortion.
Dr. George Tiller was an inspiration to reproductive health care professionals and advocates. We at Trust Women shared his vision of an America where women could, without burden, control their reproductive lives, have healthy pregnancies, and deliver safely.
For many women here in the United States, these basic rights are out of reach. That's why Trust Women will expand abortion care and maternal health care to tens of thousands of women by opening more clinics.
In every state where we open a clinic, we will create model policy agendas to expand access to care. We will build deep community support for these services and the policy makers who stand up for them.
Trust Women will:
Open clinics that provide abortion and maternal health care; full spectrum reproductive health care.
Build community investment in those clinics.
Create model state public policies to expand abortion care and improve maternal health.
We will do this in the Midwest and the South, where women's reproductive rights have been limited more than in any other region of the country. We will measure our success by the number of women in this region who can easily access abortion and who have healthy pregnancies and safe deliveries. Period.
The cowardly weasel has slashed the state parks budget every year he's been in office, to the point that parks employees are working so few hours that they are losing their benefits and are having to take food stamps and Medicaid.
Kentucky's second-biggest industry - more profitable and employing more people than does Big Coal - is tourism. Kentucky's state parks are the state's crown jewels, and cutting their budget is a knife to the state's economic jugular.
Ironically, the only state park likely to get more money - a bunch more money - from the state is the one state park that declared itself so fucking special a few years ago that it's not even part of the state park system, but has its own fundraising foundation.
As most state agencies brace for dramatic budget cuts, the Kentucky Horse Park could be getting millions of additional dollars.
In Gov. Steve Beshear's recommended budget, the Horse Park faces no budget cuts, and instead would receive an additional $3.5 million increase this fiscal year, plus another $1.6 million each year of the next two-year budget.
State officials told lawmakers on Tuesday that the funds are needed to cover operational shortfalls that stem from utility costs for roughly 264,000 square feet of new facilities built at the park in anticipation of the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.
Lawmakers said they want to hear more before agreeing to increase the park's funding.
The Horse Park is a fabulous place, and I strongly recommend you visit it. But it has a fundraising arm Kentucky's State Parks don't, and giving it money taken from parks that are really hurting is just plain stupid.
"Sorry, we're closed." In one of the saddest signs of the times, this message is popping up all across the country, as governors and legislators are cutting off funds (and shutting off access) to one of the finest, most popular assets owned by the people of our country: state parks.
The logic is familiar by now: If God had meant for us to have amenities like parks, if he felt we deserved amenities like parks, he would have made us rich enough to afford amenities like parks -- and He would probably have probably come up with one of His famously mysterious ways to scam it so that somebody else paid for them. (Rich people just love it when they can get somebody else to pay for their stuff. And I'm sure they can direct us to any number of bought-and-paid-for clergyfolk who''ll explain that this too is part of God's mysterious plan.)
Jim takes a rather different view, as you might expect from one of those goddamn liberal class warriors. "Parks," he writes, "are a tangible expression of America's democratic ideals,"
literally a common ground for every man, woman and child to enjoy, learn, absorb . . . or just be. Especially for the middle class and the poor -- the great majority of our people who can't jet off to luxury resorts for a getaway for vacation -- these spaces offer a form of real wealth, something of great value that each of us literally "owns," knitting us together as a community and nation.
In the wonderful world of Austerity, however, it's a perfect time to hack away at this blatant waste of what should properly be Rich People's Money, the way most all money should be Rich People's Money, at least in the minds of Rich People, and goodness knows they've gone a long way toward making it so.
"Spiritually shriveled, small-minded and short-sighted" he calls the state officials who "are snuffing out this invaluable, uniting social force." (Come on, Jim, isn't any "uniting social force" by definition class warfare?)
The majority of states have been closing many of their parks, slashing hours and services at others or simply handing the public's asset to profiteering corporations. Idaho's governor has proposed eliminating the entire parks department; California shut the gates of a fourth of the state's parks last year; officials in Arizona and Florida intend to privatize their parks; Washington state has cut off most of its park funding; and Ohio has okayed oil drilling in its parks to replace state financing.
As Woody Guthrie said of outlaws, "Some'll rob you with a six gun/Some with a fountain pen." This is theft by the in-laws, the political insiders who're stealing The People's property -- stealing from America itself.
At least in the case of his home state, Texas, Jim isn't being poetic or metaphorical when he talks about those "spiritually shriveled, small-minded and short-sighted state officials" stealing The People's property." He's here to tell us a tale.
Things tend to be bigger here -- bigger hair and hats, for example, bigger money and egos . . . and bigger thievery by political con men.
Last year, the gang of GOP hucksters who control our state government pulled off a huge heist, covering it up with an equally huge boast: "We balanced our budget. Not by raising taxes but by setting priorities and cutting government spending," bragged the gang leader, Gov. Rick "Oops" Perry. How'd they fill the $27 billion shortfall that they themselves had created by their previous budgetary mismanagement? By stealing money from already poorly funded programs -- from education to parks -- that ordinary Texans count on.
People here are justly proud of their 94 parks, but many of these treasures are now understaffed, open fewer hours and in disrepair because the system's budget was whacked by 21.5 percent in order to spare the wealthiest families and corporations in this enormously rich state from paying a teensy bit more in taxes.
But that was only part of the robbery. A state sales tax on sporting goods, dedicated by law to help finance the people's parks will generate about $236 million this year and next. But the governor and his legislative henchmen raided this pile of revenue, filching two-thirds of it for the state's general fund so they could claim that they "balanced our budget (without) raising taxes."
To replenish some of the tax money taken by The Perry Gang, the head of parks for the Great State of Texas is now engaged in a shocking spectacle: public begging. In a video played at 11 December press conferences in state parks across Texas, the chief of a major state agency is reduced to shaking a tin cup, pleading for $4.6 million in donations. "Please act now to help keep our state parks open for all Texans to enjoy," he beseeches.
These right-wing politicians howl that they want to shrink government -- but they are the shrunken ones, and the narrowness of their vision is diminishing what it means to be American.
I'm going to be honest here -- I have never given The Daily Caller any serious consideration at all. I mean, it's a Tucker Carlson joint, and Jon Stewart has a higher opinion of that schmuck than I do.
So it makes me cranky when I am forced to pay attention to him and/or any project he happens to be involved with, which is where I find myself now. I scoffed when Carlson announced the launch of the site, and probably mused about the underwriter of the wingnut welfare checks that were supporting him.
Now it seems pretty clear who is behind him. Or at least it does to me, anyway.
The Daily Caller has been the driving force in trying to keep the "Fast & Furious" gun-walking scandal alive -- and they recently added a tab to the top of their site. The "Guns and Gear" page regurgitates NRA propaganda and talking points and features articles by such Second Amendment champions as OIiver North and Jerry Curry. They have even gone so far as to poll about an imaginary "U.N. gun ban."
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't believe in coincidences. Not ones that big, anyway. Not when the attacks on Attorney General Holder and calls for his resignation by the Daily Caller coincide with the appearance of the Guns and Gear tab last month. Someone with more time and resources than I have ought to try to follow the money...
[This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters' mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism. The fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.]
Together with the more confrontational tone he's taken with Republicans since they rebuffed him on his jobs package last summer, President Obama's State of the Union Address on Tuesday shows he's finally learned his lesson from the previous three years: That while he was off chasing independent "swing" voters said to prize compromise and moderation above all things, scheming Republicans had picked his pocket of those pitchfork-wielding populists who should've been Obama's all along.
"After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party's defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist," writes the New York Times conservative columnist, Ross Douthat.
Peter Beinart of the Daily Beast agrees: "From Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck, the conservative assault on Barack Obama comes down to this: unfettered capitalism is true Americanism. Obama's efforts to use government to make American capitalism more stable and just constitutes an alien imposition, hatched in foreign lands, and designed to make us less free. Obama will either effectively answer that charge, or he will lose the 2012 election."
"It's time to apply the same rules from top to bottom," said the President in his speech this week. "No bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs. Republicans say they find that kind of talk "divisive." What this talk does instead is expose the divisions that Republicans have been allowed to exploit for themselves and for far too long.
Call this course correction Obama's own "Southern Strategy." The original phrase got its name back in 1968 after Richard Nixon had a Eureka! Moment when he realized there was no way Southern whites who voted with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and were now standing with George Wallace at the schoolhouse door belonged in the Democratic Party of Civil Rights and the Great Society. And today, they don't.
Nearly 50 years later, Barack Obama had his own epiphany when he looked around at those shaking their fists at Big Government but who'd been put out on the street by Big Banks and Big Business, and then wondered: How can these people possibly be Republicans?
Proof that President Obama is onto something with his new, more populist approach is the fact that the unerring homing missile of popular resentments named Newt Gingrich is going after plutocrat Mitt Romney as a "malefactor of great wealth" while dancing on Romney's grave with a victory speech in South Carolina that spit out the word "elite" 27 times.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. In both the physical world and in politics the law of gravity decrees that when things fall apart they are supposed to fall down. So, by all rights a second Great Depression that incinerated $16 trillion in household wealth and was brought about by the same kind of financial shenanigans and Wall Street recklessness that caused that first big depression back in the 1930s, should have provoked the very same kind of anti-business popular backlash that brought FDR to power and which today should create a Second New Deal.
Yet, as Kansas populist historian Thomas Frank writes in his new book, Pity the Billionaire: the Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, so far the most visible response to the recent economic catastrophe has been a right wing "campaign to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain and to clamp down on federal spending."
There is nothing new in the idea that the free market is the distillation of freedom itself, says Frank. But what is new "is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud."
The resurgence of the Republican Party so soon after the debacle of the George W. Bush administration and the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 is a testament to human adaptability.
Rather than allow themselves to be crushed underneath a tide of populist anger directed against the plutocrats and tycoons who stole their dreams away from them, as happened to Republicans in the 1930s, conservatives were determined this time around to lead the populist, anti-Wall Street crusade themselves instead of be swallowed by it - even if it was a crusade cynically designed to serve the interests of a disgraced Wall Street in the end. Republicans reasoned: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Sort of.
Everywhere you looked after all, says Frank, Republicans were warning of "a colossal struggle between average people and the elites who would strip away the people's freedoms."
Wall Street barons who accepted bailouts while paying themselves bonuses came in for as much criticism as did the government itself among Republican leaders who were nevertheless careful to make sure any cures they offered only did away "with the Big Government side of the equation," said Frank.
Congressman Paul Ryan, for example, was both the author of the "kill Medicare as we know it" budget as well as an article in Forbes titled "Down with Big Business," where Ryan argued that giant corporations could not be counted on to defend capitalism in its hour of need and so it was up to "the American people - innovators and entrepreneurs and small business owners -- to take a stand."
Conservative infatuation with "entrepreneurs" and "small business owners" was no accident. Like those prairie farmers who fed the Populist Movement of the 19th century, mom and pop hardware store owners have no lost love for giant corporations and so are as outraged by "crony capitalism" as by "European-style socialism."
The Tea Party movement understands itself as an expression of "the great American entrepreneurial spirit," says Frank. "But its actual function is to ensure than an economic collapse brought on by Wall Street does not result in any unpleasant consequences for Wall Street."
And by passing the torch of free market capitalism from the international conglomerate to the local chamber of commerce, conservatives knew they could give a populist gloss to a free market agenda that meant lower taxes for the rich and fewer regulations for the big Wall Street players.
But the perfect expression of the Republican Party's bait-and-switch cynicism came when Republicans were trying to beat back Obama's financial industry reforms on behalf of the GOP's Wall Street constituents. Since "public outrage about the bailout of banks and Wall Street is a simmering time bomb set to go off," wrote pollster Frank Luntz in a February 2010 memo to his Republican clients, the single best way for Republicans to kill Wall Street reform is to "link it to the Big Bank Bailout."
And that is what Republicans did, piously intoning how the Democrat's reforms weren't reining in financial industry abuses at all but were instead seeking to "punish" taxpayers while rewarding "big banks and credit card companies."
While all this revisionist history was going on liberals and Democrats were largely caught napping.
After the disasters the Republican Party caused, "what the polite-thinking world expected from the leaders of the American Right was repentance," says Frank. Instead what they got was the opposite - "delivered on the point of a bayonet."
It was wholly corrupt and wholly cynical. Immediately after the economy collapsed in 2008 and 2009, says Frank, conservatism positioned itself as a protest movement for hard times. "Aspects of the conservative tradition that were either haughty or aristocratic were attributed to liberals," says Frank. "Symbols that seemed noble or democratic or popular, even if they were the traditional property of the others side, were snapped up and claimed by the Right itself."
Corrupt and cynical though it might be, Republican efforts to portray themselves as champions of little guy standing tall against "the interests" was not wholly implausible as the leaders of the revivified Right found the soil for this sort of misdirection to be uncommonly fertile.
First of all, it's not as if the Democrats have covered themselves in glory when it comes to making clear whose side they are on. When "Clintonism" is a word that means how far "The Party of the People" has gone to cater to the interests of the rich and powerful few -- and when neo-liberalism" defines an economic system indistinguishable from laissez faire -- you can forgive the average voter for having a hard time separating Wall Street elites from Washington ones.
But secondly, conservatives trying to rewrite history by muddying political alliances also have the advantage of writing on a blank slate.
In their year-long study of the Tea Party movement -- The Tea Party and the Remaking of the Republican Conservatism -- authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson find Tea Party members impresarios of political organization but largely ignorant when it comes to "what government does, how it is financed and what is actually included (or not) in key pieces of legislation and regulation."
The authors blame the more "pathological aspects" of Tea Party activism on "the content of right wing programming." This is especially true of Fox News, which they say propagates falsehoods "often as a matter of deliberate editorial policy."
With a powerful media network like Fox News at its disposal, able to "make viewers both more conservative and less informed," it's not difficult to to see why Republicans have been able to lead a mass revolt against "elites" that largely serves the interests of those elites.
Like lizards hiding from predators, there has always been something chameleon-like about right wing conservatives who must adopt protective coloration to survive in a hostile liberal environment.
That is why conservatives have had to learn to speak the language of liberalism, using words like freedom, liberty and democracy even though their belief system rejects the ideals those words are meant to describe.
That is why members of the Religious Right and Conservative Movement are more familiar with the liberal community organizer Saul Alinsky than Alinsky's intended liberal audience seems to be - and even more than liberals have taken Alinsky's advice in Rules for Radicals to heart when he says that the way for political movements to get things done is to "go home, organize, build power."
Even today's neo-conservatives are the direct progeny of Cold War era communists who never forgot the lessons they'd learned about revolutionary organizing and hand-to-hand rhetorical combat even as their politics moved further and further right.
And after the financial meltdown three years ago, right wing conservatives knew a popular uprising by angry and distressed Americans against the Powers That Be was in the offing, which is why this time Republicans were determined to lead that revolt instead of be the victims of it -- and in that way channel populist anger away from the Wall Street barons who perpetrated the crisis and toward a Washington government trying to solve it.
No wonder, then, that Republicans call President Obama "divisive" when he tries to reclaim from Republicans the backing of The People that rightfully belongs to him.
The FULL song all in one video...
Arlo Guthrie- Alice's Restaurant
This is on the new album called the massacre revisited.
This was originally released in 1967 off of the album "Alices Restaurant". It was used in the movie "Alices Restaurant" in 1969. This rendition of it was done by Arlo in the 90's.
The Republicans in the Colorado state legislature are making another run at expanding gun rights, reintroducing legislation that would allow concealed weapons in schools and expand the "castle doctrine" to businesses. Republicans say they are just defending the Second Amendment while Democrats accuse them of grandstanding and straying from the job-creation agenda that both parties promised would be their legislative focus this year.
A proposal running simultaneously in the House and Senate would allow concealed weapons on school grounds and college campuses if a person has a permit and another bill would let business owners and employees use deadly force against intruders. Both proposals have previously failed, including last year when Senate Democrats rejected the concealed weapons bill.
Another proposal would prevent state officials from restricting the use of firearms during a declared state of emergency. Another bill would eliminate background checks done by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for firearm purchases. Republican Rep. Mark Waller, the legislation's sponsor, said the state is spending unnecessarily on its background check program because it duplicates checks already done federally.
CBI spokesman Lance Clem said the agency opposes Waller's bill because the federal checks are not as fast or thorough as the state checks.
Republican Rep. Kevin Priola, a sponsor of the concealed weapon legislation, said the goal is to improve public safety by allowing people to protect themselves.
Just what the state that gave us the Columbine massacre needs! Guns on every campus!
The presence of guns in schools does not make anyone safer. In fact, the presence of guns on campus creates a negative learning environment and increases the level of inherent danger by increasing the odds of a tragic accident occurring, as well as increasing the odds of a gun falling into the wrong hands via theft, a more common occurrence in communal settings than private residences.
But they aren't stopping there. Oh heavens no! They are also considering legislation that would eliminate background checks for firearms purchases, which would make it even easier for people who shouldn't have guns to get their hands on one -- and that's a problem that is already manifesting itself in tragic ways. It certainly doesn't need to be helped along and made worse, which is exactly the results that would be realized if the GOP legislators in Colorado get their way.
[This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters' mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism. The fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.]
I put a question mark on that title because I think it's a proposition that may go a bit too far. There are definitely brainy conservatives, and I have had the misfortune of knowing a number of very vapid, ungrounded and ironically intolerant liberals.
But a new study does seem to establish a certain connection among factors of low IQ, social conservatism and prejudice. This story made the rounds on the Internet, but in case you didn't see it, here's a link.
Even before this study, this was not entirely new as a general observation. The English political philosopher John Stuart Mill routinely referred to British Conservatives, the Tories of the 19th century, as "the stupid party." A famous quote from Mill was something to the effect that while not all conservatives are stupid, most stupid people are conservatives.
But after 55, going on 56 years on the planet, I've also seen that advancing age does make many people more "conservative." That's not connected with stupidity, despite the inevitable loss of brain cells with age. One does become more cautious and circumspect. Some 35 years ago, I was a hard-core social libertarian, believing that any human activity in which a direct and arbitrary victim cannot be identified should be quite legal and tolerated.
I can't say I'm there anymore. I've never been to Vegas, but I've been to a few casino spots closer to here. Looking around, it was pretty easy to see the very grave social costs of legal gambling.
As for hookers, I have absolutely no personal experience with them. But I've heard of areas of the city in which I live where families have said their teenage son was approached and propositioned, in the front yard of their home, by a local prostitute. Not cool.
While there's still the argument that people are going to pursue gambling and sex-for-money anyway -- they always have -- I've come to see that it's not a bad idea to give communities the option of at least zoning such activities, so that they are legally restricted to specified areas. Over decades, I suppose I've become what could be described as a social moderate.
So I would hesitate to say that there's an entirely direct link between social conservatism and stupid people. It's characteristic of more liberal types to be cognizant of ambiguity, so I'll be "liberal" here, in that way. It's not nearly that simple, and never has been.
I would go so far as to say that, among people I am now aware of who do things like call the president "Barack Osama" and doggedly allege that he was born in Kenya, they are indeed pretty fucking stupid. I think the study is quite on the mark that there is a connection between prejudice and stupidity. And incidentally, virtually all such people are "social conservatives."
I grew up in a libertarian-style, Goldwater-Republican conservative family, so the grounding I had was much more related to neoliberal capitalist economics and a sort of 19th-century rugged individualist way of thinking about the world.
It has been asserted that people's politics and religion are generally fixed by the time they are, say, 10 years old. That was never true of me at all. To me, public philosophy is a quest that one pursues for a lifetime, and the behavior of forever thinking only what Dad and Mom taught you to think -- well, that is the true hallmark of stupidity. Whether it's a "red diaper baby" rebelling against Marxist ideas as an adult, or a Southern reactionary becoming a liberal after going to college -- that shows that at least the person is actively thinking about the issues, rather than smugly hanging onto family platitudes.
In my case, I noticed that my friends were usually more tolerant, liberal types, and that I didn't get along as well with the small-minded philistines I usually found among conservatives. Later I spent much time dwelling on economic questions -- well into my 30s, when I spent three years editing college economics textbooks. After reading all sides of such questions, I came to view laissez-faire as one undesirable extreme, and Marxism-Leninism as the other. The neo-Keynesian, mixed-economy model was the one that made the most sense to me, both historically and theoretically. It seems to be the one that truly delivers the goods to the many, not just the few.
Since libertarian-type conservatives are usually what could be described as civil libertarians, once my economic view had changed it was a very short walk toward liberalism. But I remain reluctant to wear that label. Liberals believe certain things that I do not, and am unlikely to ever embrace.
But as the American political scene has become so stupifyingly reactionary since around 1980, that simplifies things quite a bit. The bottom line has become that anybody who can't watch Fox News for 15 minutes without telling himself/herself that this is bullshit propaganda -- you become a liberal by default.
I personally prefer the term "progressive." That's a label that differentiates one from the capitalist neoliberalism that has become despised the world over, but also from the more knee-jerk sort of leftism that one sees so often among "conditioned" liberals.
In his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk put forth six "canons" of conservatism that can be summarized as follows:
1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
2. An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
5. A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.
Kirk had no use for libertarian thinking, which he associated with 19th-century classic liberalism. His most enduring book touched very little on economics at all, so what he was describing was the phenomenon of "social conservatism," which has become a powerful force in contemporary U.S. politics.
Let's take these "canons" one at a time. Some of them seem to make good sense, so why would an intelligent person take exception?
1. Muslims also believe in a transcendent order, as do Hindus. There's quite a bit of diversity on this point among Christians, and there appears to be that among other major world religions as well. Who's got the right formula? I have no idea. And I suspect that anyone who claims to have the right one is either delusional or a liar. That's one thing experience has most decidedly taught me.
2. Hard to argue with that one. In fact, it appeals to the liberal habit of seeing the world as an ambiguous and complex place, rather than a simple, structured and absolute one.
3. Ever suffered a stupid and/or foolish boss? With the world being the kind of capricious and dicey place that it is, it's not uncommon to see the most silly kinds of people sitting in exalted positions, lording it over people who are vastly superior to them on many levels. Conservative canon No. 3 has no relationship to merit, that seems certain.
4. What conservatives -- and libertarians -- routinely forget is that property is a purely human construct. It's a legal artifact that exists on paper, and routinely protects weak from strong. That's great, and I'm all for it on that level -- but then don't hypocritically turn around and argue that it exists because of any kind of natural law. It exists in spite of natural law. NATURAL LAW is survival of the fittest. If I can get the drop on you and yours, murder all of you, bury all of you in the back yard, and take all the property -- according to natural law, it's now MINE. Property rights, as enforced by society's laws, are the very rights that prevent me from doing that.
In other words, property rights are not, and have never been, absolute. They are conditional.
5. There are plenty of "customs" and "traditions" in the Roman Catholic Church. Need I say more?
6. This is another one that's hard to argue with at first. But today's conservatives seem totally out of touch with that. They want to take U.S. society back to a time (the first Gilded Age) in which 1 out of 3 Americans lived in poverty -- and that was 1 out of 2 among the elderly, since there was no pension system. In contrast, they seem to demonize the era from 1935 to 1980, in which poverty was greatly reduced and the U.S. saw its global power multiplied with the creation of our great middle class. Exactly what is "conservative" about their current position?
I suppose I've covered enough ground here for one post. Suffice it to say that I see much wisdom in the J.S. Mill quote mentioned earlier. I've known a few brilliant conservatives in my time. But I've known many more imbecilic right-wingers.
Ohio's GOP Secretary of State urges repeal of Kasich's voter-suppression law. "Earlier this year, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) signed a radical elections law that shortens the state's early voting period, bans in-person early voting on Sundays, and prohibits boards of election from mailing absentee ballot requests to voters. If this law had been in effect in 2008, over 200,000 voters in Columbus, Ohio alone would not have been able to cast their ballot in the way that they did. ... Kasich's plan to make it harder to vote is now facing a surprising dissenter, however, his fellow Republican and Ohio's secretary of state."
New Hampshire republicans want to roll back domestic violence laws to help abusers avoid arrest and accountability. "A lot has changed since 1993 when a New Hampshire judge, in sentencing a man to a 29-day jail sentence for savagely beating his wife, said that though the man might have been provoked, he "should have merely slapped her." New Hampshire has what could be the toughest law in the country when it comes to domestic violence and that, in tandem with a continued public education campaign, has changed the culture. Domestic violence is no longer taken lightly legally or by society. That's the way it should be, but two bills under consideration by this most unusual of legislatures, would undo that progress and put lives in danger. Both deserve a speedy defeat. ... House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That's an exceedingly dangerous change. ... It's impossible to say how many lives the policy, in place since the 1970s, has saved or how many injuries it's prevented. If they adopt House Bill 1581, lawmakers might find out, but the price paid could be extraordinarily high. ... House Bill 1608 would also almost certainly cost lives. It removes judicial discretion by severely restricting when someone who has violated a domestic violence protective order can be arrested to three offenses: committing an act of abuse or an offense against the person named in the protective order, or engaging in prohibited contact."
Yellow Dog has already vowed to underwrite the critter's upkeep for the next year. "Lawmakers weren't the only ones doing business on the Kentucky Senate floor on Tuesday. ... State Senate President Pro Tem Katie Stine (R-Southgate) had brought an African blackfooted penguin named Paula as a part of her presentation for a resolution honoring the Newport Aquarium. ... "Are we talking about the penguin that just defecated on the floor?" state Senate President David Williams (R-Burkesville) asked."
Proud moments in American politics: 2012 edition "A former Lake Worth city commissioner was removed from an event featuring Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in Coral Springs, Florida on Wednesday because authorities feared the candidate's supporters might turn on her. ... "Do you work for the people or Freddie Mac?" Cara Jennings shouted, standing about 50 feet from the candidate. ... "Shut up!" a Gingrich supporter bellowed. "You're an imbecile!" ... As Jennings continued heckling the candidate, his fans seemed to grow more angry. ... "Shut your big mouth!" a man howled. "We don't want to hear your shit! Get that asshole out of here! Get the hell out of here you asshole!" ... The Daily Beast noted that police officers eventually formed a ring around Jennings and removed her for her own safety."
By now you know that Jan Brewer The Wicked Witch of the West got all up in the President's face, like an escaped mental patient or something, yesterday..."President Obama didn't exactly walk away from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) during their disagreement on Wednesday on an airport tarmac near Phoenix, said one of the only people to witness the exchange up close. The president simply began talking to the other two elected officials who were there to greet him. ... Mayor Scott Smith of Mesa, Ariz., declined to say exactly what he heard Obama and Brewer talk about during their now-infamous tiff next to Air Force One. ... But the mayor said he was standing right next to the governor when the exchange took place and Obama didn't seem to be in any kind of hurry to leave. ... "There was no sense that he was running to or from anything," Smith told TPM. In fact, he said, the president stayed and had a pleasant conversation with Smith, who's a Republican, and Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, a Democrat. ... It was "just the four of us," Smith said. "Mayor Stanton and I had a decent talk with him." ... The portrayal of a calm, friendly president seems to at least partly contradict what Brewer has said about the encounter in numerous interviews since Wednesday afternoon. She described the president as "tense" and said he walked away from her while she was in mid-sentence. She told a Phoenix television station she felt "a little bit threatened" by the encounter."
Speaking of that classless harpie..."Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer will not release a copy of the letter she delivered to President Obama on Wednesday, her spokesman said, because it was a "personal, handwritten" correspondence and no one in her administration has a copy of it. ... The spokesman, Matthew Benson, directed The Arizona Republic to the White House to obtain a copy, later writing in part, "The only copy is with President Obama." ... A spokesman for the White House said Thursday the executive branch typically does not release letters sent to the president and directed the newspaper to Brewer's office."
There are a handful of mensches in Congress, and Ron Wyden is one of them. "Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced on Thursday that he was supporting a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court's controversial ruling in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission. ... "Americans deserve to know the true interests behind the political ads they see and the campaigns of the candidates they choose to support," Wyden said. "This is impossible in a system where unlimited sums of money can be anonymously raised and spent to support a candidate or derail a campaign." ... The proposed amendment was introduced to the Senate in November 2011 by Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Michael Bennet of Colorado. ... In Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as people, overturning campaign finance laws that restricted the amount of money a corporation could spend in an election."
Chill the hell out, you morons. Time will take care of the Castros, not Mittens or Newticles. "The two leading candidates in the Republican primary, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, came to Miami on Wednesday to win the support of tens of thousands of Cuban Republican voters by blasting the Castro brothers and outlining their plans for improving U.S-Latin American relations. ... Predictably, both candidates' main focus was a hard-line stance toward Cuba and a hope for regime change. ... First up was Gingrich, who spoke before about 250 people at Florida International University's Wertheim Performing Arts Center. A much more aggressive policy toward Cuba is needed to bring about a "Cuban spring" and usher in democracy, he said during a morning speech. ... Romney chose a much more symbolic setting for his afternoon address on Latin American: The Freedom Tower where thousands of Cuban exiles were processed when they first entered the United States. ... Romney and Gingrich agreed that they disagree with President Barack Obama on Cuba policy. ... "This president does not understand that by helping Castro; he is not helping the people of Cuba; he is hurting them," Romney said to cheers inside the ornate downtown Miami building . "I want to be the American president that's proud to be able to say, 'I was president at the time that we brought freedom back to the people of Cuba.'""
This isn't just wrong, it's criminally so. "Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) falsely claimed on Thursday that it was nearly impossible for someone to contract AIDS through heterosexual contact. ... "Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community," he told Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a radio program on SiriusXM OutQ. "It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall." ... "My understanding is that it is virtually -- not completely, but virtually -- impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex."" (In reality, straight women are the fastest growing group among the HIV positive.)
Mittens' tax troubles continue to mount. "Mitt Romney released his tax returns to put to bed discussions of his wealth and lack of transparency. Instead, they have only spawned more unanswered questions. ... Thursday afternoon, the LA Times reported that Romney's tax returns listed 23 funds and partnerships that did not appear on Mitt Romney's personal financial statements -- the disclosure forms candidates are required by federal law to file with the Federal Elections Commission. Romney filed his disclosure forms in August 2011. The timing of this revelation couldn't be worse. Hours before a GOP debate and days before the crucial Florida primary, Democrats now have new fodder for demanding additional tax return information from the Romney campaign. ... Democrats are using the discrepancies to call on Romney to release all his tax returns from years in which he filed public financial disclosure statements. On a conference call with reporters, DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell stressed the importance of these newest revelations, saying they show what Mitt Romney was trying to hide on his regular disclosure forms. Roussell's charge that the LA Times "found what it looks like he was trying to hide" is based on the fact that the of the 23 funds and partnerships left off the disclosure, 11 were overseas investments in funds in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda as well as the already-notorious Swiss bank account the Romney's closed in 2010. .... Further, Romney staked his credibility on these forms. As Roussell pointed out on the conference call: "This is the form that Mitt Romney has been using for months, and years in fact, since he ran for the Senate, as an excuse not to release his tax returns in the first place." It's a potent argument; why trust that one year of Romney's tax returns are sufficient if they revealed new information? That's the crux of Democrats' argument that they now need all returns corresponding to past disclosures."
Not that we expected much from the thugs who took over from Gaddafi, but this should keep anyone from including Libya among the Arab Spring successes. "Aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has halted its work in detention centres in a Libyan city because it said its medical staff were being asked to patch up detainees mid-way through torture sessions so they could go back for more abuse. "Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for more interrogation," Christopher Stokes, MSF general director, said in a statement on Thursday. Rights groups have repeatedly raised concerns about torture being used against people, many of them sub-Saharan Africans, suspected of having fought for former dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's forces during Libya's nine-month civil war. The agency said it was in Misrata, about 200km east of Tripoli, the capital, to treat war-wounded detainees but was instead asked to treat fresh wounds from torture. "This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions," said Stokes."
Now here's a motherfucker who makes Dick Cheney seem like a peace-mongering hippie. "Guatemala's former military leader Efrain Rios Montt, 85, has appeared in court to face accusations of genocide and other human rights crimes allegedly committed during his 17-month long rule. Rios Montt, known for his "scorched earth" campaign against Guatemala's leftist rebels, may have to answer charges that his regime was responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of people. Thursday's hearing was to determine whether the former dictator should be formally charged with alleged atrocities that occurred during his regime from 1982 to 1983, prosecutors said. The hearing is the first since Rios Montt lost the congressional immunity that for years had shielded him from prosecution for human rights crimes. Guatemala's truth commission, which has been tasked with investigating the bloodletting, estimates that there have been some 200,000 casualties from the country's 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Some of the worst atrocities are said to have taken place during Rios Montt's rule. The UN-backed group, the Historical Clarification Commission, found that the government was guilty of a deliberate campaign of genocide against the mostly poor, indigenous massacre victims, many of whom were caught in the crossfire as the government battled leftist rebels."
While Assad massacres with impunity in Syria, Yemen's violence is flying under the radar. "At least 22 people are reported to have been killed in clashes in a province under rebel control in rugged northern Yemen. A source close to rebel group known as Houthis said on Thursday fighters from a Sunni group known as the Salafi attacked the rebels overnight in Hajja and in the Kataf area of Saada province, an area that has seen intense sectarian fighting in recent months. "We blocked the attack in under an hour and 13 people died in Hajja and nine in Kataf," said the Houthi source. The Houthis, who draw their name from a tribal leader, had fought government forces for years until an uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh last year gave them free rein in Saada province, which borders the world's number one oil-exporter Saudi Arabia. Political upheaval has severely weakened central government control over swathes of Yemen, allowing some groups to seize whole provinces including Saada."
And finally...
We curse Bill Gates personally ever time our PC acts up, but the truth is the man is the single greatest philanthropist in history. "Bill Gates, the chairman of computer software giant Microsoft, has pledged $750m to the troubled global AIDS fund during an annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Gates, who spoke at the forum on Thursday, urged governments to continue to support the fund and save lives, despite the current economic downturn. "These are tough economic times, but that is no excuse for cutting aid to the world's poorest," he said. "The Global Fund is one of the most effective ways we invest our money in every year." The new commitment is in addition to the $650m that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Gates founded with his wife, has already contributed since the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria was launched 10 years ago at Davos, according to a statement. The public-private organisation, which has the backing of celebrities such as rock star Bono, accounts for about one quarter of international financing to fight HIV and AIDS, as well as the majority of funds to fight TB and malaria. But it has been forced to cut back and said last year it would make no new grants or funding until 2014."
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