Wingnut False Equivalence In Wisconsin Will Not Stand — Wisconsin Workers Speak Out!

Dudes, you asked for it. You tried (still trying) to smear the protesters in Wisconsin. You tried calling them haters, thugs, violent rioters. You looked real hard for Hitler signs, hate signs, violence-promoting signs. You got nothin' but a couple of pictures that look suspiciously staged. The kind of thing right wing infiltrators and provocateurs like Breitbart (being sued for libel) and O'Keefe (arrested, under FBI investigation) specialize in. The truth is, teachers like the one below, are civilized people; they're just not hip to the thuggery of the right (wingnuts projecting, again — as always).

Wingnuts — Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Scarborough, Breitbart, O'Keefe, WorldNet Daily, Daily Caller, et al — you pushed and smeared and trashed and lied about us, about good, decent people once too often; we're not going to take it anymore. This is a call to action. We're fighting with everything we've got. Not with our muscle, although we've plenty of that; but with our intellect, our passion and our commitment. We will not be defeated. We have just begun to fight.

This is how it's done, wingnuts. This is how our people do it: With grace, humor, smarts, class, and imagination. All qualities the thugs on your side, and your Teabagger tools are sorely lacking in. These images represent the real face of the Wisconsin protesters:

WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY?

 

VOU  CAN HELP! GO TO WISDEMS.ORG AND CONTRIBUTE WHAT YOU CAN TO RECALL THE GOP WISCONSIN STATE LEGISLATORS.

Fascism in America: Wisconsin Governor Creates FALSE Budget Crisis To Bust Public Employee Unions

You wouldn’t know it by tapping into the wingnut media. They’re all in a coordinated frenzy of attack mode aimed at the peaceful public service employees — teachers, nurses, firefighters — calling them “violent” and “thuggish” and that imbecile Paul Ryan gleefully lying to the cameras about “riots” in Madison just “like Cairo.” Big Eddie, doing his must-see show from Madison, slammed these wingnuts with the truth:

Our triangulating President made a tepid statement — in tone — about the demonstrations with his one step forward-two steps backward MO: He said Governor WANKER’s approach “seems like more of an assault on unions” (oh really, Mr. Obama — what else could it possibly be?!?) but OTOH commiserated with the Governor about everybody making “some adjustments” to new “fiscal realities.”

What if these “fiscal realities” turned out to be a whole lotta BULLSHIT?

As TPM points out, slashing the unions’ hard-fought right to collective bargaining does NOTHING to save funds in a true austerity budget:

“The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures — service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money — rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own.”

But the state’s fiscal bureau which is its “equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office” says there’s no need for an austerity budget in Wisconsin and the state could end the year IN SURPLUS! In fact, the entire budget shortfall is contained in Gov. WANKER’s tax cuts for special interest groups which he’s trying to fund off the hides of middle class public employees, as this Op-ed in a Madison paper points out:

“In its Jan. 31 memo to legislators on the condition of the state’s budget, the Fiscal Bureau determined that the state will end the year with a balance of $121.4 million.

To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker’s new spending schemes — or delay their implementation until they are offset by fresh revenues — the “crisis” would not exist.”

What is happening in Wisconsin is a coordinated assault by the ruling corporate plutocracy, its political Republican/Tea Party arm, its propaganda arm of Fox/Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck et al, to break the labor unions in America and completely defund the Democratic Party’s last reliable source of campaign financing, without which — in this post-apocalyptic Citizens United world — it will cease to exist as an effective political party. Money, as they say, is the mother’s milk of politics. Never more so now as the Democratic Party struggles to stay competitive against the unlimited buying power of the corporation, that “person” that went on a spending spree last November, purchasing a political party, a political movement, and just about every elected official in Washington, D.C. to varying degrees, up to and including the President.

Oh, Progressives still have a pulse. We’ve got Independent Senator Bernie Sanders in Vermont and Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio (they’re going to toss the kitchen sink at Brown in the next election) and a few outnumbered Spartans in the House. And of course, Senators Durbin of Illinois, Schumer of NY, Whitehouse of RI remain reliable liberals. But the bottom line is that liberals are vastly outnumbered by corporate money and influence.

So yeah, Rachel’s partly correct when she says this is a fight for the survival of the Democratic Party. And Big Eddie too, when he says Wisconsin is “Ground Zero” for the unions’ stand against the corporations and the GO/TeaP. But more than this, no one dare mention (it is one of the unstated PROHIBITED words in the MSM) the “F” word — and I don’t mean THAT one; it’s already been appropriated by Big Ego politicians running for president.

I’m talking about FASCISM in America. Simply put, Fascism is a totalitarian (or gentler, kinder authoritarian) system of government that bases its economy on capitalism. Corporations, for example, are already structured in this way. They are not democratic institutions. At best, they are benignly authoritarian if they are small enough or have a competing representative of workers’ rights — the union — with which they must negotiate salaries, hours, working conditions, healthcare and safety, etc. At worse, and more commonly, they are totalitarian. Corporations are not democratic institutions.

They can slash jobs, close plants and move overseas where labor is cheap and slavish, fire employees almost at will, give and take away benefits including health care, which are merely an inducement for work-valued employees to remain — until they can be cast aside. Corporations are amoral. They are rapacious of people, of the environment, of entire nations sometimes. They say they’re for a laissez-faire competitive economy, but that is a useful myth. They are all about consolidating markets and eliminating their opposition in business and government — by whatever means necessary, including assassinations, or simply buying out their opposition, because everyone has a price.

There is always a tension, a competing interest that goes beyond merely the business interest — for the rest of us. That's the quality of life interest. The worker's right to a living wage, safety in the workplace, health care (still to be secured), and a comfortable retirement. The community's right to a safe environment, safe food and drinking water, clean air to breathe, and a reasonable expectation the corporation will not rip out the economic heart of the community chasing cheap jobs and ever higher profits overseas. The Commons, the community interest necessarily runs afoul of the corporate interest, which is simply to make a profit. That is why the people's democratic government regulates the coporation, just as the undemocratic, fascist corporation seeks to gut all regulatory impediments to its bottom line.

So it isn’t a big leap for the corporation to transpose its fascist culture onto our vanishing public institutions of government and the courts. They are already in control of the Supreme Court, as noted in the recent dalliances of Justices Scalia and Thomas with the Koch Brothers. For these Justices this is a slam of the system they are willfully destroying, an arrogant ‘because I can’ power-play, their version of the end zone dance. It’s not as if Scalia and Thomas would have voted any differently on corporate versus individual rights or restricting the influence of corporations in our political campaigns. The corporations always win their vote. Thomas is so seemingly disinterested he hasn’t even bothered to make an oral argument in years. His wife is gallivantin’ around with the Tea Party, in another obvious (to most of us) conflict of interest, while her husband decides cases directly impacting groups that are paying her.

Now, after this past election, the corporate plutocracy controls both chambers of Congress, the Republican governorships, and holds enough influence over the President that he must come before the Chamber of Commerce, hat in hand, as a supplicant or a beggar: “Oh please, won’t you consider investing just a little on the people? Pretty please?”

Fascism is the unspoken word. I think it will remain so because America still clings to its myths. They are the last thing to go before harsh reality hits. That’s what got Reagan, the American mythmaking cowboy, elected. And amid all of his self-evident destruction, the Reagan myth is still going strong in parts of America. Bill Moyers put it best in this piece, “America Can't Deal With Reality — We Must Be Exposed to the Truth, Even If It Hurts.” He said, “Many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign.”

By the time history — as distinct from revisionism — catches up to reality, it will have been too late. Because in the last analysis, most people just don’t want to know about it. Unless the working people of Wisconsin can raise the nation's consciousness and awaken a sleeping giant.

Suggested Miss. License Plate Honoring American Terrorist, War Criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest

In trying to wrap our minds around this story, the first obstacle to it is the realization that this is 2011 — more than one-half century after the seminal civil rights landmark court case and legislation, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lynchings and hate crimes are now against the law, and the disgrace of all-white juries acquitting murderers of civil rights workers, terrorist bombers of black churches, killers of African American men, women and children in the Deep South are no longer tolerated.

Or so we thought. The Southern disgrace of the former Confederate states' racist history is being whitewashed, literally and figuratively, by a pustular eruption of Southern pride and Civil War revisionist history groups (the "War of Northern Aggression" was all about "states' rights" and not slavery) crawling out from under their rocks, when only a few years ago they wouldn't have dared revive the open and ugly bigotry of their elders. One such group in Mississippi, Sons of the Confederacy, has proposed a state license plate "honoring" American terrorist, war criminal and ideological racist — as founder of the terroristic Ku Klux Klan — Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest, a Confederate cavalry general, instigated and initiated war crimes that would meet the standard of death by hanging set by history's greatest war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg which tried Nazi war criminals and exacted the ultimate punishment for the atrocities they committed. Here is an excerpt from the Southern Law Poverty Center's report on the real Nathan Bedford Forrest:

Union Gen. William Sherman, no slouch himself, described him as a "devil" who should be "hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury."But there was more to Forrest than that. He was renowned for a terrifying temper that transformed him into something resembling a blood-engorged beast. He personally shot his own men if they tried to shirk a battle. He was given to duels and furious arguments, oversaw savage whippings of recalcitrant slaves, shaded the truth in his own behalf repeatedly, and once wrongly shot innocent "deserters."

The severest of the criticism of Forrest — subjects studiously avoided by today's neo-Confederate activists — centers on three indisputable facts:

• Forrest was a Memphis slave trader who acquired fabulous wealth before the war;

• He commanded the troops who carried out an 1864 massacre of mostly black prisoners; and

• He led violent resistance to Reconstruction as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Obviously, the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP was deeply offended by this latest resurgence of white Southern organized bigotry, an attempt to re-mythologize their craven Civil War history, and has asked Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to stop this. It is part of a much broader pattern of historical revisionism that is right wing, racist and ideological in its aim to pollute the teaching of science and history. The confluence of these forces include Civil War revisionists and states' righters, Christian fundamentalists, nativists, and Tea Party activists.

Against this backdrop, Mississippi Governor and presidential hopeful Barbour has refused to do the right, decent and responsible thing, which is to reject attempts by one extremist organization to revive his  state's racist past:

Here is one FACTUAL historical depiction of Nathan Bedford Forrest's crimes suggested for the Mississippi license plate proposed by the Sons of the Confederacy: In this bracingly pastoral scene from Harper's Weekly issue of May 21, 1864, Forrest is pictured shooting and killing a captured free black man. Racist applicants may also choose a depiction of Forrest's slaughter of federal troops who were trying to negotiate their surrender under a white flag while Forrest illegally improved his position. Further, racist white supremacist license plate applicants have a choice of Swastika or Confederate flag to adorn their pick-up trucks, gun racks and all, with the racist hate symbol of their choice and ideological proclivity:

Back in the 60s at the height of the struggle for civil rights, one of the great troubadors of that era, Neil Young, wrote this powerful and evocative song, "Southern Man," that was meant in a sense to celebrate the shifting tide of the Deep South's heinous and despicable racist history — one that was kept alive mostly by angry, bigoted white males. I wonder how true these words ring today; or is it yet another ironic reminder that the "arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice"— yet the event horizon seems to be always just out of reach. Neil seems to be conceding as much in this 2000 CSNY version in which the last verse, "Lily Belle" ... opens the song after the chorus:

SOUTHERN MAN

By Neil Young

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

Lily Belle,
your hair is golden brown
I've seen your black man
comin' round
Swear by God
I'm gonna cut him down!
I heard screamin'
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

I saw cotton
and I saw black
Tall white mansions
and little shacks.
Southern man
when will you
pay them back?
I heard screamin'
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

Quotable: Bobby Kennedy, to President Obama And His Cruel Budget

... Because it bears repeating:

"There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly and destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor....This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men." ~ Robert F. Kennedy, speech to Cleveland City Club, April 5, 1968

President Obama's Budget From Reagan Hell

This is the budget of a DEMOCRATIC president!?!

Draconian cuts of Pell Education Grants, Food Stamps, community block grants, the environment, from our national parks to the Great Lakes reclamation project, intended to keep one of the world’s largest fresh water reservoirs viable, and perhaps most savage and shameful of all, the slashing by fifty percent of home heating assistance, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps the poor, elderly and handicapped pay their heating and cooling costs. This is a death sentence to tens of thousands of our fellow citizens on fixed incomes who cannot afford skyrocketing utility rates.

According to a report released ahead of the President’s budget by the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association (NEADA), record numbers of households over the last three years have been requesting heating assistance due to the economic downturn and the rising cost of home energy. Demand for assistance is expected to reach a record 8.9 million in fiscal year 2011, even as the program is slashed. The number of households served by LIHEAP has increased from about 5.8 million in FY 2008, to 7.7 million in FY 2009, to 8.3 million in FY 2010.

HEEEEEeere's BRRRRRRRArack!!!!!

 Shame on you, President Obama, for behaving like a grotesque caricature of  Repugnant Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. The President who insistently complains about living in a surreal Washington, D.C. bubble, is behaving as if he’s succumbed to the unreality of that bubble, the abstraction of numbers on a page. You like to talk in practicalities, Mr. President? Here’s a practical consequence and expected outcome of your budgetary cruelty — your budget is a harsh example of what Bobby Kennedy called “the violence of institutions.” Mr. Obama, you’re no recognizable Democratic president; a Republican-Lite hybrid perhaps; but no Democratic president.

"According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, about 650 people died of hypothermia each year between 1999 and 2002. About half of those people were over 65 years old. According to the National Institute on Aging, older people are at increased risk for hypothermia, even after exposure to a small drop in temperature, and even while indoors. The institute recommends keeping thermostats between 68 and 70 degrees. "Even temperatures that just feel chilly to younger people may be dangerous to older people," said Dr. Jack Guralnik at the National Institute on Aging."

Then again, according to your cynical political calculations, as diagnosed by a doctor-turned-political-diagnostician like Charles Krauthammer, you’re playing the Left and your liberal base against the Right, throwing up a smokescreen, just so you can keep your pledge (which should have been no pledge at all, but an ironclad article of faith) that Social Security and Medicare will not be touched — let the Republicans take that third-rail shock, if they dare. Medicaid, hey that’s poor people, right Mr. President? They have no political clout, no representation, no powerful advocacy groups. They’re just pawns, as they’ve always been, in this Reaganesque Washington parlor game of yours, sir.

Shame on you, Mr. President.

We know we’re being played, Mr. President.  But when the pushback comes from both parties:

“31 senators — including John Kerry (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) — sent OMB director Jack Lew a letter Friday challenging the cuts. On the House side, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said Obama’s budget means families will be “forced once again to decide between heating and eating.”

We also know this sledgehammer approach isn’t very effective “triangulation” let alone conduct becoming of a Democratic president.

Shame on you, Mr. President.

Meanwhile, one of every third dollar (total Defense outlays) of this budget is spent on the Pentagon war machine to perpetuate this war economy on the backs of the poor in the euphemistic line items, “discretionary non-Defense spending.” This is Orwellian perpetual war come to life. Are we really to believe that $2.5 billion can’t be found in the Pentagon’s war budget instead of condemning our elderly on fixed incomes to statistically significant deaths during heat or cold waves?

Here’s my proposal, Mr. President. Take the Afghanistan/Iraq/Pakistan wars off-budget. COMPLETELY OFF-BUDGET. Impose a WAR TAX on the richest one percent to pay for every last penny of our military crusades in these godforsaken countries. Let those motherfuckers on whom you lavished another round of UNSUSTAINABLE and UNJUST tax cuts pay THEIR FAIR SHARE — FOR ONCE! They’re profiting from it. They’re the war profiteers, the oil and gas tycoons, the corrupt government contract racketeers. Let these scum PAY for their damned wars.

The late, great comedian George Carlin once said:

You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there... just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs.

Only now those jobs have disappeared somewhere in China, India and the ravaged Reagan-(Obama?) middle class is beginning to slide into poverty in ever-larger numbers.

Best Mubarak Toon, And Its Reference To Another Historic Resignation

... For those who weren't yet born in 1974:

  (Artist is Deering, published in the Arkansas Post-Gazette.)

Libertarian Superman, Ron Paul, Wins CPAC Poll ... OTRA VEZ!

Confounding and frustrating some wingnuts. Paul, the Libertarian champion whose presidential aspirant highwater mark has been the CPAC poll, won easily again, beating Mitt Romney 30-23. This must add fuel to the rumor mill that dangerous Islamic radicals (CODE for gay Republican groups) have infiltrated CPAC.

JOBS JOBS JOBS, YOU SAY? VOTE DEMOCRATIC: UP AND DOWN THE LINE

This Republican Congress was elected by a fickle, ignorant and scared electorate that was easily, so easily manipulated by the Chamber of Commerce with its unlimited funds, the GOP/Tea Party, aka political arm of transnational corporations, their propaganda arm led by Fox, Limbaugh, and the entire universe of wingnut media mobilized around Goebbels-like Big Lies and Frank Luntz-generated talking points, to one end: The pretense of creating JOBS.

Mr. Speaker, where are the jobs?

To date, the Boehner version of Congress has surpassed Truman's original "Do-Nothing Congress" in do-nothingness. If a Congress reflects its leader, then this one is true to form. Nancy Pelosi was driven and disciplined. John Boehner is lazy and distracted. Nancy Pelosi amassed an amazing record of legislative accomplishments. Her place is secure as one of the greatest House Speakers in history. John Boehner is drifting, slip-sliding in the other direction; ignominy bordering on early retirement, either through the ballot box or the bedroom.

And despite the perception that JOBS topped the voters' priorities list — another is the non-repeal of healthcare — neither has made much of an impression on this group of radical right wing rookie GOP/Tea Party representatives. Also, the Chamber of Commerce has yet to clarify how many of these JOBS will be created in the United States.

But the electorate is like a drunken sailor, acting on impulse rather than reason or logic. If only they knew these RepubliCONS are least equipped to assert credibility on creating JOBS. Here are the facts, in the historical performance record of how the Democratic and Republican parties have fared, going head-to-head in job creation statistics. Guess who wins? (Rhetorical question.)

From the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, "U.S. job growth (and loss) under presidents; Democrats and Republicans":

• 654,000: The net gain in jobs since the national job number hit a 10-year low of 129.6 million in December 2009, seasonally adjusted. The latest estimate of 130.2 million jobs for September is subject to possible revision as more data is collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• 54.2 million: The number of jobs created during the nearly 30 years in which Democrats have held the presidency, beginning with President Truman in April 1945. (Comparable BLS data is not available for full presidencies before then.)

• 34.6 million: The number of jobs created during the 36 years in which Republicans have controlled the White House during the same time period.

• 3.4 million: The loss of jobs since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. If the loss holds through his presidency, it would mark the first time since the data became available that the country lost jobs during the full tenure of a president.

• 1.1 million: The number of jobs gained under President George W. Bush, the smallest job growth for any president completing at least one term. The seasonally adjusted jobs number fell in each of Bush's last 12 months in office as 4.4 million jobs were lost.

• 22.7 million: The number of jobs gained under President Clinton, the biggest job growth of any president.

Here is a chart detailing every president's performance in creating JOBS:

Measuring income inequality under Republican and Democratic administrations, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels, according to Slate, "has gone a long way toward proving" that the United States has grown more unequal under Republican administrations:

Larry Bartels, a Princeton political scientist, looked at average annual pre-tax income growth from 1948 to 2005, which encompassed most of the egalitarian Great Compression and the entire inegalitarian Great Divergence (up until the time he did his research) and published his findings in the book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press: 2008). His calculations showed that pre-tax income increased overall about 1.42 percent for people in the lowest quintile of the population and 2 percent for those in the top 5%. His research did suggest that income inequality increased under Republican administration and not under Democratic administration. Timothy Noah in the series “The United States of Inequality” summarized Bartels's findings below:

“In Democrat-world, pre-tax income increased 2.64 percent annually for the poor and lower-middle-class and 2.12 percent annually for the upper-middle-class and rich. There was no Great Divergence. Instead, the Great Compression—the egalitarian income trend that prevailed through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—continued to the present, albeit with incomes converging less rapidly than before. In Republican-world, meanwhile, pre-tax income increased 0.43 percent annually for the poor and lower-middle-class and 1.90 percent for the upper-middle-class and rich. Not only did the Great Divergence occur; it was more greatly divergent. Also of note: In Democrat-world pre-tax income increased faster than in the real world not just for the 20th percentile but also for the 40th, 60th, and 80th. We were all richer and more equal! But in Republican-world, pre-tax income increased slower than in the real world not just for the 20th percentile but also for the 40th, 60th, and 80th. We were all poorer and less equal! Democrats also produced marginally faster income growth than Republicans at the 95th percentile, but the difference wasn't statistically significant.”

What Would Bobby Say About The Chamber of Commerce And Obama's Missed Opportunity?

When President Obama addressed the Chamber of Commerce last week, some of us had hoped for fireworks from the President, a righteous indignation and reckoning for the Chamber's despicable, un-American conduct subverting our democracy in the last election. Going before these anti-American corporatist sharks, President Obama did his best impression of Ghandi, turning the other cheek, almost as a supplicant. It was a strange position for arguably the world's most powerful man to be in.

The President seemed to strike a harder tone, for two sentences, then retreated into a familiar pattern of appeasing his adversaries: "But I  want to be clear; even as we make America the best place on earth to do business, businesses also have a responsibility to America." With nary a hint of irony, the President said, to make room for government investments in education, innovation, and infrastructure, government has a "responsibility to cut spending we can't afford." The President touted his spending freeze, which will hit programs for the poor and middle class the worst, not to speak of federal employees. Meanwhile, President Obama's Fat Cat audience are busily squirreling away their billions in tax cuts into offshore tax havens — indecent bonuses  we truly cannot afford and which are downright immoral.

In a rather cynical and bizarre bow to the Chamber, President Obama said, "Now, I understand the challenges you face. I understand that you're under incredible pressure to cut costs and keep your margins up. I understand the significance of your obligations to your shareholders. I get it.

(Please. Pass the barf bag!) With all due respect, no sir, you do not get it.

The President was altogether too conciliatory, promising to cut "burdensome regulations" and giving these criminal tycoons a fifth-grade lesson in the perils of a laissez-faire society run for greed and profit; sort of like the corporate-run America we live in today: "few of us would want to live in a society without the rules that keep our air and water clean; that give consumers the confidence to do everything from investing in financial markets to buying groceries." Really? It depends to which "few" you refer, Mr. President. These contemporary robber barons are doubling down on their demands for deregulation, as if the financial collapse and the BP oil disaster and the multiple food recalls never happened.

Who are you kidding, Mr. President? Sometimes, it seems as if you're trying to convince yourself more than anyone else. When Bobby Kennedy addressed business leaders in 1968, he said:

"There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly and destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor....This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men."

These words are as relevant today as they were when Bobby spoke them, some 43 years ago. In some ways, the "violence of institutions" both public and private is more crushing today, with tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes, their jobs, their hope, their dignity and their health care, with one-in-six children going hungry. One can only imagine what Bobby would have said to that hideous governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, for cutting critically ill patients from the transplant list, allowing two to die. For a miserable five million in savings that could have been matched with federal funds and found in less lethal portions of the state budget. For strictly despicable ideological and bureaucratic reasons from a right wing political apparatchik who lost her soul somewhere along the way and the sense that public servants exist, first and foremost, to serve the people.

Waiting (in vain?) For President Obama to Be More Like Bobby.

Whatever he'd say to, and about her, it would have been blistering. This is the speech some of us have been waiting for President Obama to deliver to the Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps it would not have been politic but it would have been true. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of Bobby's favorite authors. One of the passages from Emerson that Bobby marked, declared: "If the single man plant himself on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."

Beck to Critics: GO TO HELL!

Massive fluctuations detected in the Beck’s Brain force field.

It appears Glenn Beck is on a path of regression back to the womb with increasingly bizarre and childish rants. It all started after Beck was scolded by elders of the conservative movement, who commanded him to tone down his lunacy and (privately) to seek professional psychiatric help.

We do what we can, but owning Beck's brain is a thankless task. There's no reason not to have a little fun with it, though. Our aim is to let Beck dangle, pull him back, dangle, pull him back, and when we're finally bored with him, let go and walk away as Beck flips over the edge ...

Back on January 22 I wrote a piece about Keith Olbermann’s departure in which I used a nice bit of imagery (if I may say so, myself) to describe Ed Schultz: “Big Eddie is an authentic voice. He muscled his way in like a trade union organizer in corporate enemy territory, planted his flag, and built his audience without help, often at cross-purposes with The Man upstairs.”

Then, a couple of weeks later, Glenn Beck starts repeating, dramatically, “I planted my flag” to describe what he wants us to believe is his unique, courageous and prophetic stance against his critics — this weasely little punk has cast himself as the prophet of the lazy, uninformed, ignorant "low-information voter" (because it takes one to know one). Then he shows up in a costume suspiciously similar of  this blog’s caricature of him.

Everything Beck says, every utterance to come out of his mouth, can be traced to outside sources like this blog, because we own Beck's brain, or to the wingnut lunatic fringe (there is such a place and Glenn Beck occupies it), far far right, fascist, paranoid black helicopter universe. Nothing Glenn Beck says is original. Just Google anything he says, and you’ll see it originates someplace else. Much of his perverted ideology is taken from Robert Welch, founder of the radical right John Birch Society, literally word-for-word.

Glenn Beck is a SERIAL PLAGIARIST. (Beck even borrows a perceived Siciliano obscene hand gesture from Antonin Scalia! Read about it here.)

Then again, we could have planted the suggestion in Beck’s crummy, fecal brain. Considering the fact that wingnuts have little or no imagination, it's inevitable that stuff we say will keep cropping up in Glenn Beck's material. Following is PORN FROM BECK. Favorite Beck false analogy: "You are witnessing the Archduke Ferdinand moment, which led to transformative change called World War I; you are watching the beginning and the birth of the New World Order."

Well, for starters, the Archduke Ferdinand "moment" was the ASSASSINATION of the Austrian Archduke, which triggered the outbreak of war. The Egyptian Revolution is peaceful; the palace coup which forced Mubarak's resignation was peaceful; the transfer of power to Egypt's army, whose officer corps was trained in the U.S., was peaceful. Beck makes another ludicrous analogy to the French Revolution with its executions by guillotine. Again, wishful thinking on his part: The Egyptian Revolution has been largely peaceful.

But why should we take anything Glenn Beck says even half-assed seriously? Anyway ...

Here is PORN FROM BECK:

Rachel and Richard: MSNBC's Rock Stars

Hmm ... If memory serves, I do believe we said something mildly complimentary of Richard Engel back when the Egyptian Revolution began. It's great to see everyone else catching up, and Richard getting his just deserts for outstanding reporting of history being made.

What sets Richard apart is that he's steeped in Egyptian culture, he speaks the language fluently, hence can bring layers of understanding, subtlety and complexity to this once-in-a-lifetime story that no one else in Western media can match. It doesn't hurt that Richard is fearless and cool under pressure, earning all this high praise and possibly a marriage proposal or two.

And for in-depth analysis and commentary no one has done it better than Rachel Maddow. Her coverage of this story is of award-winning caliber. I really love that Rachel (and Chris too, surprisingly) have reached outside the usual suspects (not counting the excellent regulars) to Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, among others, for expert and knowledgeable voices that are seldom heard in the usual corporate media circles.

Richard & Rachel, Los R's Terribles: Crossed Paths in College, Reunited to Lift MSNBC From The Doldrums.

It sounds crazy to say this, but I trust Rachel. I trust her news judgment, her intelligence, her sensitivity, her enthusiasm for being a journalist. I love that about Rachel. And I can even dig her occasional lapses into syrupy-ness as when she told Matthews the American people "instinctively" side with the demonstrators because we harbor such qualities only the Tea Party can discern ... or something. Just as I was beginning to wince, with the violins playing in the background, Chris broke in to remind Rachel that the wingnuts are horrified by this, cowering in fear of the Islamic Brotherhood, and so on.

Whew ... back to reality for Rachel. And it might just be that our politics are more distorted than they have ever been, with the proverbial tail on the far right fringes wagging the dog, those of us with eyes wide open, and the rest who do not vote and allow this barbarity to unfold. Those Americans should not be held up for praise, Rachel. They're part of the problem. They ought to be cowering just like the wingnuts — not in fear, but in shame.

But yeah. Rachel, for what it's worth (I'm no Madeline Albright (thank God)): You're doing an awesome job.

HISTORY IN THE MAKING: Mubarak is OUT, But Suleiman Remains

Vice-President Omar Suleiman announced moments ago (10:08 AM, CST) that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is GONE.  Suleiman, Mubarak's 'power behind the throne', once army chief and strongman, remains in office. For now. Suleiman issued a brief statement announcing Mubarak's resignation and said the army is now in charge.

The people on the streets are celebrating ecstatically. Illustrating how the Egyptian people have rattled the geopolitical ruling elites, one international investor described them as "Lilliputians," the tiny people in Gulliver's Travels bringing down the giant. Well, they're not so small anymore. They have found their voice, they have risen against the dictator to claim their freedom and their destiny, and it's a beautiful thing to see. The Egyptian people's revolution has triumphed!

To follow THE BEST Live coverage anywhere, link to the Al Jazeera Live stream on Huff post, here. The excitement and joyful explosion in Tahrir Square, reported by the correspondents there,  is "absolutely insane" and "indescribable." Tahrir Square has become in fact and for real, LIBERATION SQUARE:

Musical Interlude: The Dictator's Always The Last to Know Game's Over

ZOMBIE AMERICA: The Effect of FOX Propaganda And Indoctrination

This foucs group of Iowa Republicans conducted by the GOP's chief propagandist and Goebbels disciple, "Dr." Frank Luntz — "it's 'Dr.' to YOU," he corrected Hannity ... granted, like Dr. Mengele, Dr. Kissinger, Dr. Death, Dr. Frankenstein ... and on down the line —preening proudly as his pupils robotically repeat the LIES he's been feeding them: "Obama is a Muslim," "Obama's religion is liberalism," "Obama is not proud of America," "Obama is making excuses for America" — the most disgusting, ignorant, CRUDE fearmongering from the crazy, discredited wingnut rumor mill.

The profound IGNORANCE of a large portion of the American electorate, as displayed by this focus group, is hard to believe. It's total, complete brainwashing. Not even a factual reading of history can turn people like this around. It's simply astonishing:

Wingnut False Equivalence, Courtesy of The Daily Puker

This obvious false equivalence comes, of course, courtesy of the Daily Caller, from our favorite intrepid wingnut correspondent, Poor Jeff:

Pot meet kettle.

During all the Bush years, there were few harsher critics of the White House than HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher. Now, Maher is taking issue with Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly’s Super Bowl interview with President Barack Obama. On Tuesday night’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” on MSNBC, Maher attacked O’Reilly for his treatment of Obama.

Now, since wingnuts have but a vague conception of what journalism is, little to zip-o sense of humor, hence difficulty making the distinction between a journalist (even if we stretch the definition to encompass Fox "News" windbag and propagandist Bill O'Reilly) and a comedian (I repeat, for the hard of hearing/reading, COMEDIAN) like Bill Maher, then it's perfectly understandable that Poor Jeff should confuse the nightly lampooning of presidents by comics with a presidential interview in the White House by a Fox journalist. 

Bill Maher, COMEDIAN, was simply conveying a widely held perception of the Bill O'Reilly interview with President Obama — that it was disrespectful of the office, disrespectful of this President, and to many of us who are sick and tired of making excuses for white bigots with a history of racism, that it was racist to the core. Imagine if the situation were reversed, wingnuts, if the President was a white man and the interviewer a black man.

The black man would have been skewered by the wingnut media for having the audacity to address the Big White Father in the White House with such disrespect. The President was interrupted 48 TMES by O'Reilly. I have NEVER seen a president treated with such disrespect by a member of the media in a face-to-face interview. And I challenge the wingnuts to produce any equivalent show of disrespect toward a REPUBLICAN president in a one-on-one interview. It does not exist.

Pot meet HOLE. As in pothole ... Voilá! 

CHRIS, THE CRAIGSLIST CONGRESSMAN ...

GUESS WHO, GUESS WHAT PARTY?
 Hint: He's from New York, hence this sad, pathetic pic on the front page of the New York Times:

Hahahahahahahahahaha! You got it ... How PATHETIC these Repugnants are! Highlights follow:
Chris Lee (R-NY), elected 2008, reelected 2010. Married, one child. CRAIGSLIST: Divorced (Married) Lobbyist (Congressman), 39 (46) ... "Fit (?), fun (!), classy guy" .... Between Gawker and the National Enquirer, the House Republicans could wind up in the minority if this keeps up.

Rep. Christopher Lee is a married Republican congressman serving the 26th District of New York. But when he trolls Craigslist's "Women Seeking Men" forum, he's Christopher Lee, "divorced" "lobbyist" and "fit fun classy guy." One object of his flirtation told us her story. 

House Speaker John Boehner issued a tear-stained farewell statement: "We (I) forgive you, Chris. I'm going to miss you at the House gym and our favorite after-hours watering hole." (BwaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhHH!)

Healthcare Hypocrisy, Repugnant Party Weasels And Their Repugnant Excuses

Some real doozies from Republican hypocrites who campaigned against so-called 'Obamacare' and now are accepting it for themselves and their families/staffs in Congress:

• Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA): Refused government healthcare but told staff they are "free to choose" a taxpayer subsidized health plan if they wish;

• Rep. Chris Gibson (R-NY): Refused government healthcare but communications director disingenuously said staff are "federal employees, so if they and their families choose to elect to do so, then yes."

• Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA): Refused government healthcare but says staff can have it because he doesn't "want to impose his feelings about this on anyone."

These refused government healthcare then whined about it; what do these imbeciles want, sympathy? To  unburden themselves? LIVE WITH YOUR DAMNED VOTES, YOU WEASELY WORMS! INSTEAD, IT'S PASS THE BARF BAG:

• Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL): "I can simply, honestly say that this is going to impact my wife and I to a fairly serious degree, like it would any average American out there"... No sir. You're A LOT BETTER OFF THAN THE AVERAGE AMERICAN OUT HERE, DEMON BREATH. He's whining because he has to pay out-of-pocket for his wife's procedure. (I'm beginning to think there must be something to this 'God's punishment' thing, since Republicans are clearly spawns of Satan.)

• Said Rep. Richard Nugent, another Repugnant Party scum: “I have a niece who has pre-existing conditions, and I worry about her if she was ever to lose her job.” Have a prayer circle, pal, summon a Shaman, try healing crystals, whatever rocks your boat, ABSENT HEALTHCARE. 

• Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL): Took the government healthcare and had the AUDACITY to claim he was "actually lowering premiums for older lawmakers."

And here's the BEST REPUGNANT HYPOCRITE AWARD (a two-hypocrite tie):

• Rep.  Bill Posey (R-FL) gets the Alfred E. Neuman Award: “I don’t know. Am I a federal employee?”

• Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) gets the 'WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO QUESTION MY ANGRY WHITE MALE ENTITLEMENTS TEABAGGER AWARD': “What am I not supposed to have health care?…God forbid I get into an accident and can’t afford the operation. That can happen to anyone.”

Keith Unchained And Unleashed!

Keith Olbermann has found a new home in the small (is non-corporatist = is beautiful) Current TV hosting a one-hour primetime show and as its "chief news officer." As David Schuster (formerly of, Marbles-Mouth conglomerate) said, MSNBC dropped the ball on this one and is looking pretty foolish right now. Keith is unchained from his mega-corporatist bonds and unleashed to go after the BAD GUYS, the PSYCHO TALKERS, the 'Marbles-Mouth' CORPORATE MSM from the perfect perch: anchoring and managing the news content of a small, INDEPENDENT media outlet with unlimited room to grow, going against the ginormous mega-corporate monoliths.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, KO!

Poor Jeff who, appropriately enough, has the Pigman beat, says the drugster speculates Olbermann is being paid "in carbon credits"... a weak jab at Al Gore, Chairman of Current TV. Better carbon credits than Oxycontin, ya think? I miss Ruthie too; she must be thrilled! Ruthie, you should properly thank Keith for giving you a job ... perhaps send him some flowers on Valentine's Day? (We know you have a thing for him.)

Speaking to the question of whether Keith would be able to donate to political candidates, Al Gore made it clear that his position is the ANTI-mega-corporatist-Marbles-Mouth:

"The answer is yes. We believe at Current that every citizen has freedom of speech, and that freedom of speech includes the ability to donate to candidates of your choice — full disclosure of that is important."

Ronald Reagan: One of The Worst-Ever Presidents

An unintended benefit to the American consumer of news, particularly TV and cable news, is that the riveting images from Cairo of the Egyptian revolution have knocked Ronald Reagan off the front pages, the lead TV news stories, and atop the public's consciousness on the eve of the 100th anniversary of his birth. Indeed, there's enough misinformation going around about the ludicrous threat of a "Caliphate" without our having to endure endless hagiograpies and bombastic praise of the conservatives' icon Numero Uno.

 Despite the best efforts of conservatives and the Right wing to deify Reagan, history and reality have a way of intruding upon the mythology, in a society that still allows the free flow of ideas, information and facts to counter the falsehoods of the Right wing propaganda machine. It has been more than 30 years of steady economic decline for the United States since the election of Ronald Reagan — a fault line that divides the three prior decades which saw historically unprecedented growth and prosperity in our economy and the rise of our middle class.

Between 1950 and 1980, The income gap between the richest and the poorest had closed, there was progressive taxation, with growing prosperity for a wide swath of the population. Our manufacturing base was strong; we built things in this country. President Lyndon Johnson completed the social safety net for our seniors with Medicare and  dramatically decreased the rate of poverty. Medicaid ensured that life-threatening illness did not turn into the death sentence for those who could not afford it that it is today, in the Republican Death Panel state of Arizona.

In the mid- to late 1970s the perfect storm generated by the confluence of Watergate (public cynicism of government), the OPEC oil crisis leading to high energy costs, shortages, high unemployment and recession, lifted Reagan to the presidency. There was a radical shift away from Keynesian economics toward "trickle-down" supply side Reaganomics and the advent of the so-called "conservative revolution." It was an unmitigated disaster for the foundation of America's post-WWII prosperity, which was our once-prosperous and growing middle class.

The brief respite of the Clinton years did little to reverse Reaganomics. Bill Clinton, a Republican-Lite president, signed off on NAFTA (a disaster for U.S. manufacturing workers, wage growth, and the environment), welfare "reform" which tossed more people into poverty when the economy turned, and banking deregulation (which led to the financial collapse of 2007) — all Reaganomics-inspired initiatives. The only 'Democratic' achievements of Bill Clinton were a tax on the rich to pay down the debt, creating a surplus for George W. Bush which he promptly gave back to the rich, and a stellar jobs performance based partly on an unsustainable dotcom boom.

The Income Inequality Historical Chart — From 1917 to 2005: Share of pre-tax household income received by the top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01%.  Notice the 1925-29 spike and rising inequality beginning in 1981.

Every single issue that leads us to despair of our country today, whether we're in the Tea Party or the Democratic Party, whether we count ourselves liberals or conservatives, can be traced to Reagan's presidency. The Right will never admit it. They're in a constant steady state — of denial. Consider this: Our crushing deficits can be traced to Reaganomics; the growing disdain, bordering on phobia, of government can be traced to Reagan — Watergate and Vietnam too — but Reagan popularized it with his "government is the problem" and the 10 most feared words in the English Language: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

Patent nonsense. But when his fans dubbed him "the great communicator" this was the "communicating" he was good at. Ronald Reagan reversed the progress made by successive Democratic administrations and even some Republican ones building on the foundation laid by FDR. The climate of deregulation led to a series of boom-and-bust cycles and a Wall Street run amok resulting in the financial collapse of 2007, the BP oil spill disaster, the breakdown of food safety standards and environmental protection and preservation — an idea that every president since Teddy Roosevelt had embraced.

The "greed is good" decade of the 80s was a mixture of the "roarin' 20s" and the "Gilded Age" of the turn of the century, leading inexorably to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. It took roughly 30 years for the robber barons to wreck the U.S. economy. Ronald Reagan doubled down, and 30 years of Reaganomics reached the same result. Ronald Reagan slashed social programs, waged war on unions, neglected our cities and our manufacturing base, and initiated the destruction of America's middle class. Here's the reality:

"Wages for the average worker declined and the nation’s homeownership rate fell. During Reagan’s two terms in the White House, the minimum wage was frozen at $3.35 an hour, while prices rose, thus eroding the standard of living of millions of low-wage workers. The number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from 26.1 million in 1979 to 32.7 million in 1988. Meanwhile, the rich got much richer. By the end of the decade, the richest 1 percent of Americans had 39 percent of the nation’s wealth."

And he never even uttered the word 'AIDS' as the disease was ravaging Americans like the Black Plague. None of Reagan's hagiographers will mention the scandals of his administration, Iran-Contra, the terrorist bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, leading America to evacuate Lebanon with its tail between its legs. They will not mention the invented "welfare queen" which perpetuated a negative stereotype of poor people, as if they were to blame for being poor. This is the legacy of Reagan that persists to this day in his sycophants and acolytes in government taking pleasure in throwing millions and millions of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens under the bus, into the gutter, to die quickly and quietly. This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan: Callous and cruel people who find virtue in campaigning to destroy health care for millions of Americans. And destroying Social Security. And Medicare.

In early 1984 on “Good Morning America,” Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement. He said that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.”

This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Here are 10 things conservatives don't want you to know about Ronald Reagan. Read it at you peril, wingnuts. Warning: Your heads might explode.

Wingnut Math, Courtesy of The Daily Puker

Viewed in our favorite wingnut rag, The Daily Caller, where facts and figures are fungible and flexible — veeeeeery FLEXIBLE.

Remember Rush Limbaugh's repulsive racist rant on the occasion of the Chinese president's state visit? Well, in this hilarious wingnut whitewash of Limbaugh's racist insult of an entire people and culture, the writer (let's call him paisan) interpreted Limbaugh's racist diatribe as "Rush Limbaugh’s sarcastic imitation of the Chinese language." Um ... paisan, sarcasm is one thing; it can be biting, mocking. But when it's racist, when it derides an entire people's language and culture, then the racism takes precedence.

The paisan then did something really bizarre, and arguably racist. Certainly it was tasteless. But that's par for the course in Rightwingville. He actually took the time to publish the phonetic pronunciation of the garbage spewing from Rush's mouth:

“Normally, you’d have somebody translate every couple of words,” Limbaugh explained, “but Hu Jintao was just going ‘ching cha, ching chow cho cha, chan cha ching, chee ba ba ba, hon chong hee, ee kah ah ahh! Che, cheech eh! Jing ja, bo ba, ya ya, cha che cheech che! Cha gee! Doohhh, kit bah le bah!  Bah, cheech cho bah!’”

 Naturally, the paisan included a link to the video. But that's not all. Just as he was trying to make a joke out of Rush's racist rant, he wrote a skeptical account of the threat received by California state senator Leland Yee after Yee called on Rush to apologize. And, for good measure, paisan unilaterally minimized the level of public support for Senator Yee's petition to boycott Rush's racism, with this false assertion in quotation marks:

Actually paisan, this is what the link you provide to Senator Yee's site indicates in the headline and first paragraph:

Oops. Either the wingnut can't count or he just accidentally dropped a zero from the count. How convenient! Let's face it, wingnuts are expert undercounters, especially when stealing close elections. Or writing hit pieces.

In another hit piece written by Poor, Jeff  the wingnut blasts Rep. Anthony Weiner for "bizarre attack on Beck audience: ‘He has less than 300k viewers and so that’s about 150k shoes’" Okay, Anthony's attempt to make a joke may have fallen a bit flat, but I thought it was funny and so did Bill Maher! (Then again, I have an admittedly strange sense of humor ...)

The fun and frivolity begins when Poor, Jeff decides to make his point, by relying on fellow wingnut John Fund's numbers ... somewhat:

THEY'RE ALL WRONG!

First, to Poor, Jeff: Even if we grant Weiner the 200,000 extra viewers Poor did, he "grossly understated" Beck's audience by 1.262 million viewers — not the two million claimed by Poor, Jeff ... BECAUSE BECK POSTED 238,000 FEWER VIEWERS THAN TWO MILLION. Oops ...

As for John Fund ... Well, he was just 738,000 viewers off the mark. Liberals and progressives should know by now that wingnuts are just not that into accurate facts and figures. Whatever flies their kite is the figure they'll go with. Facts and figures are fungible in Rightwingville — they are the means to a propaganda end; that is, they are meant to provide a perception of accuracy with bogus figures to boost false wingnut arguments.

Memo to Poor, Jeff  and paisan: Anthony Weiner knows Beck has more than 300,000 viewers — he was being sarcastic ... Don't you get it?

Memo to the Pigman: Don't forget to order lots of takeout Chinese food. And make sure you give them your real name!