It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt.
Tacitus
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by justdrew » Sun Oct 06, 2013 2:52 pm
It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt.
Tacitus
by seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 07, 2013 10:16 am
The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government
Monday, 07 October 2013 09:10
By Chris Hedges, TruthDig | News Analysis
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill after his speech in Washington, Sept. 25, 2013. (Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / The New York Times)
There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.
“What we have here is our core values as Americans and Christians slipping away into this facade where we should take care of our poor, sick, and disabled,” Ted Cruz said in the Senate last month during a 21-hour speech that he gave in an attempt to block the funding of Obamacare. “It is disheartening to know that the nation our forefathers built is no longer of importance to our president and his Democratic counterparts. Not only that, we are falling away from core Christian values. I don’t know about you, but I believe in the Jesus who died to save himself, not enable lazy followers to be dependent on him. He didn’t walk around all willy-nilly just passing out free health care to those who were sick, or food to those who were hungry, or clothes to those in need. No, he said get up, brush yourself off, go into town and get a job, and as he hung on the cross he said, ‘I died so that I may live in eternity with my Father. If you want to join us you can die for yourself and your own sins. What do I look like, your savior or something?’ That’s the Jesus I want to see brought back into our core values as a nation. That’s why we need to repeal Obamacare.”
Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.
All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness.
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in what they see as the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They work with the rest of us only because they must. Given enough power—and they are working hard to get it—any such cooperation will vanish. They are no different from the vanguard described by Lenin or the Islamic terrorists who shaved off their beards, adopted Western dress and watched pay-for-view pornography in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack. The elect alone, like the Grand Inquisitor, are sanctioned to know the truth. And in the pursuit of their truth they have no moral constraints.
I spent two years inside the Christian right in writing my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I attended services at megachurches across the country, went to numerous lectures and talks, sat in on creationist seminars, attended classes on religious proselytizing and conversion, spent weekends at “right-to-life” retreats and interviewed dozens of followers and leaders of the movement. Though I was sympathetic to the financial dislocation, the struggles with addictions, the pain of domestic and sexual violence, and the deep despair that drew people to the movement, I was also acutely aware of the dangerous ideology these people embraced. Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values. These movements attract, as has the radical Christian right, those who are disillusioned by the collapse of liberal democracy. And our liberal democracy has collapsed.
We have abandoned our poor and working class. We have created a government monster that sucks the marrow out of our bones to enrich and empower the oligarchic and corporate elite. The protection of criminals, whether in war or on Wall Street, is part of our mirage of law and order. We have betrayed the vast and growing underclass. Most believers within the Christian right are struggling to survive in a hostile world. We have failed them. Their very real despair is being manipulated and used by Christian fascists such as the Texas senator. Give to the working poor a living wage, benefits and job security and the reach of this movement will diminish. Refuse to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class and you ensure the ascendancy of a Christian fascism.
The Christian right needs only a spark to set it ablaze. Another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism, hyperinflation, a series of devastating droughts, floods, hurricanes or massive wildfires or another financial meltdown will be the trigger. Then what is left of our anemic open society will disintegrate. The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.
by IanEye » Mon Oct 07, 2013 11:42 am
“What we have here is our core values as Americans and Christians slipping away into this facade where we should take care of our poor, sick, and disabled,” Ted Cruz said in the Senate last month during a 21-hour speech that he gave in an attempt to block the funding of Obamacare. “It is disheartening to know that the nation our forefathers built is no longer of importance to our president and his Democratic counterparts. Not only that, we are falling away from core Christian values. I don’t know about you, but I believe in the Jesus who died to save himself, not enable lazy followers to be dependent on him. He didn’t walk around all willy-nilly just passing out free health care to those who were sick, or food to those who were hungry, or clothes to those in need. No, he said get up, brush yourself off, go into town and get a job, and as he hung on the cross he said, ‘I died so that I may live in eternity with my Father. If you want to join us you can die for yourself and your own sins. What do I look like, your savior or something?’ That’s the Jesus I want to see brought back into our core values as a nation. That’s why we need to repeal Obamacare.”
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Oct 07, 2013 11:49 am
by IanEye » Mon Oct 07, 2013 11:51 am
by IanEye » Mon Oct 07, 2013 12:03 pm
by justdrew » Mon Oct 07, 2013 1:54 pm
Chalk one up for life imitating satire. Fox and Friends host Anna Koolman was discussing the closure of the World War II memorial in Washington during the shutdown Saturday, and claimed “President Obama has offered to pay out of his own pocket for the museum of Muslim culture” while allowing the memorial to remain shuttered.
That’s not true, of course.
The source of this claim came from the satirical website National Report, which mocks news coverage much like The Onion does. Snopes has a cottage industry of debunking National Report pieces along with Onion satire and other on-line mockery passed off as legitimate news.
And Media Matters noted that this isn’t the first time Fox has been taken in by a satirical story that’s too good to check. Fox News hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade dodged a lawsuit in 2008 for repeating an online parody news report of a school prank that included fabricated quotes as fact. “gullible.”
by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 08, 2013 9:19 am
A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
"You are here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare. This is a fight we can win." SENATOR TED CRUZ, speaking in August to a Heritage Action gathering in Dallas
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MIKE McINTIRE
Published: October 5, 2013
WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
DRIVING FORCES David Koch of Americans for Prosperity, Michael A. Needham of Heritage Action and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III played roles in the health law fight.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.
“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A. Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”
Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that strategy: a standoff that has shuttered much of the federal bureaucracy and unsettled the nation.
To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.
With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say that shutting down the government was not their objective, the activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.
A defunding “tool kit” created in early September included talking points for the question, “What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”
The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.
The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.
The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable Republican members of Congress with scorecards keeping track of their health care votes; have burned faux “Obamacare cards” on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for phone calls to Congressional offices, sample letters to editors and Twitter and Facebook offerings for followers to present as their own.
One sample Twitter offering — “Obamacare is a train wreck” — is a common refrain for Speaker John A. Boehner.
As the defunding movement picked up steam among outside advocates, Republicans who sounded tepid became targets. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee dedicated to “electing true conservatives,” ran radio advertisements against three Republican incumbents.
Heritage Action ran critical Internet advertisements in the districts of 100 Republican lawmakers who had failed to sign a letter by a North Carolina freshman, Representative Mark Meadows, urging Mr. Boehner to take up the defunding cause.
“They’ve been hugely influential,” said David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “When else in our history has a freshman member of Congress from North Carolina been able to round up a gang of 80 that’s essentially ground the government to a halt?”
On Capitol Hill, the advocates found willing partners in Tea Party conservatives, who have repeatedly threatened to shut down the government if they do not get their way on spending issues. This time they said they were so alarmed by the health law that they were willing to risk a shutdown over it. (“This is exactly what the public wants,” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, said on the eve of the shutdown.)
Despite Mrs. Bachmann’s comments, not all of the groups have been on board with the defunding campaign. Some, like the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, which spent $5.5 million on health care television advertisements over the past three months, are more focused on sowing public doubts about the law. But all have a common goal, which is to cripple a measure that Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and leader of the defunding effort, has likened to a horror movie.
Enlarge This Image
Americans for Prosperity
SOWING DOUBT A site by Americans for Prosperity, which has spent $5.5 million recently on television ads critical of the health care law.
“We view this as a long-term effort,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. He said his group expected to spend “tens of millions” of dollars on a “multifront effort” that includes working to prevent states from expanding Medicaid under the law. The group’s goal is not to defund the law.
“We want to see this law repealed,” Mr. Phillips said.
A Familiar Tactic
The crowd was raucous at the Hilton Anatole, just north of downtown Dallas, when Mr. Needham’s group, Heritage Action, arrived on a Tuesday in August for the second stop on a nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour.” Nearly 1,000 people turned out to hear two stars of the Tea Party movement: Mr. Cruz, and Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator who runs the Heritage Foundation.
“You’re here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare,” declared Mr. Cruz, who would go on to rail against the law on the Senate floor in September with a monologue that ran for 21 hours. “This is a fight we can win.”
Although Mr. Cruz is new to the Senate, the tactic of defunding in Washington is not. For years, Congress has banned the use of certain federal money to pay for abortions, except in the case of incest and rape, by attaching the so-called Hyde Amendment to spending bills.
After the health law passed in 2010, Todd Tiahrt, then a Republican congressman from Kansas, proposed defunding bits and pieces of it. He said he spoke to Mr. Boehner’s staff about the idea while the Supreme Court, which upheld the central provision, was weighing the law’s constitutionality.
“There just wasn’t the appetite for it at the time,” Mr. Tiahrt said in an interview. “They thought, we don’t need to worry about it because the Supreme Court will strike it down.”
But the idea of using the appropriations process to defund an entire federal program, particularly one as far-reaching as the health care overhaul, raised the stakes considerably. In an interview, Mr. DeMint, who left the Senate to join the Heritage Foundation in January, said he had been thinking about it since the law’s passage, in part because Republican leaders were not more aggressive.
“They’ve been through a series of C.R.s and debt limits,” Mr. DeMint said, referring to continuing resolutions on spending, “and all the time there was discussion of ‘O.K., we’re not going to fight the Obamacare fight, we’ll do it next time.’ The conservatives who ran in 2010 promising to repeal it kept hearing, ‘This is not the right time to fight this battle.’ ”
Mr. DeMint is hardly alone in his distaste for the health law, or his willingness to do something about it. In the three years since Mr. Obama signed the health measure, Tea Party-inspired groups have mobilized, aided by a financing network that continues to grow, both in its complexity and the sheer amount of money that flows through it.
A review of tax records, campaign finance reports and corporate filings shows that hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised and spent since 2012 by organizations, many of them loosely connected, leading opposition to the measure.
One of the biggest sources of conservative money is Freedom Partners, a tax-exempt “business league” that claims more than 200 members, each of whom pays at least $100,000 in dues. The group’s board is headed by a longtime executive of Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by the Koch brothers, who were among the original financiers of the Tea Party movement. The Kochs declined to comment.
While Freedom Partners has financed organizations that are pushing to defund the law, like Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots, Freedom Partners has not advocated that. A spokesman for the group, James Davis, said it was more focused on “educating Americans around the country on the negative impacts of Obamacare.”
The largest recipient of Freedom Partners cash — about $115 million — was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, according to the groups’ latest tax filings. Run by a political consultant with ties to the Kochs and listing an Arizona post office box for its address, the center appears to be little more than a clearinghouse for donations to still more groups, including American Commitment and the 60 Plus Association, both ardent foes of the health care law.
American Commitment and 60 Plus were among a handful of groups calling themselves the “Repeal Coalition” that sent a letter in August urging Republican leaders in the House and the Senate to insist “at a minimum” in a one-year delay of carrying out the health care law as part of any budget deal. Another group, the Conservative 50 Plus Alliance, delivered a defunding petition with 68,700 signatures to the Senate.
In the fight to shape public opinion, conservatives face well-organized liberal foes. Enroll America, a nonprofit group allied with the Obama White House, is waging a campaign to persuade millions of the uninsured to buy coverage. The law’s supporters are also getting huge assistance from the insurance industry, which is expected to spend $1 billion on advertising to help sell its plans on the exchanges.
“It is David versus Goliath,” said Mr. Phillips of Americans for Prosperity.
But conservatives are finding that with relatively small advertising buys, they can make a splash. Generation Opportunity, the youth-oriented outfit behind the “Creepy Uncle Sam” ads, is spending $750,000 on that effort, aimed at dissuading young people — a cohort critical to the success of the health care overhaul — from signing up for insurance under the new law.
The group receives substantial backing from Freedom Partners and appears ready to expand. Recently, Generation Opportunity moved into spacious new offices in Arlington, Va., where exposed ductwork, Ikea chairs and a Ping-Pong table give off the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up.
Its executive director, Evan Feinberg, a 29-year-old former Capitol Hill aide and onetime instructor for a leadership institute founded by Charles Koch, said there would be more Uncle Sam ads, coupled with college campus visits, this fall. Two other groups, FreedomWorks, with its “Burn Your Obamacare Card” protests, and Young Americans for Liberty, are also running campus events.
“A lot of folks have asked us, ‘Are we trying to sabotage the law?’ ” Mr. Feinberg said in an interview last week. His answer echoes the Freedom Partners philosophy: “Our goal is to educate and empower young people.”
Critical Timing
But many on the Republican right wanted to do more.
Mr. Meese’s low-profile coalition, the Conservative Action Project, which seeks to find common ground among leaders of an array of fiscally and socially conservative groups, was looking ahead to last Tuesday, when the new online health insurance marketplaces, called exchanges, were set to open. If the law took full effect as planned, many conservatives feared, it would be nearly impossible to repeal — even if a Republican president were elected in 2016.
“I think people realized that with the imminent beginning of Obamacare, that this was a critical time to make every effort to stop something,” Mr. Meese said in an interview. (He has since stepped down as the coalition’s chairman and has been succeeded by David McIntosh, a former congressman from Indiana.)
The defunding idea, Mr. Meese said, was “a logical strategy.” The idea drew broad support. Fiscal conservatives like Chris Chocola, the president of the Club for Growth, signed on to the blueprint. So did social and religious conservatives, like the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition.
The document set a target date: March 27, when a continuing resolution allowing the government to function was to expire. Its message was direct: “Conservatives should not approve a C.R. unless it defunds Obamacare.”
But the March date came and went without a defunding struggle. In the Senate, Mr. Cruz and Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, talked up the defunding idea, but it went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled chamber. In the House, Mr. Boehner wanted to concentrate instead on locking in the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, and Tea Party lawmakers followed his lead. Outside advocates were unhappy but held their fire.
“We didn’t cause any trouble,” Mr. Chocola said.
Yet by summer, with an August recess looming and another temporary spending bill expiring at the end of September, the groups were done waiting.
“I remember talking to reporters at the end of July, and they said, ‘This didn’t go anywhere,’ ” Mr. Needham recalled. “What all of us felt at the time was, this was never going to be a strategy that was going to win inside the Beltway. It was going to be a strategy where, during August, people would go home and hear from their constituents, saying: ‘You pledged to do everything you could to stop Obamacare. Will you defund it?’ ”
Heritage Action, which has trained 6,000 people it calls sentinels around the country, sent them to open meetings and other events to confront their elected representatives. Its “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour,” which began in Fayetteville, Ark., on Aug. 19 and ended 10 days later in Wilmington, Del., drew hundreds at every stop.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, led by Mr. DeMint when he was in the Senate, put up a Web site in July called dontfundobamacare.com and ran television ads featuring Mr. Cruz and Mr. Lee urging people to tell their representatives not to fund the law.
When Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told a reporter that defunding the law was “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” the fund bought a radio ad to attack him. Two other Republican senators up for re-election in 2014, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, were also targeted. Both face Tea Party challengers.
In Washington, Tea Party Patriots, which created the defunding tool kit, set up a Web site, exemptamerica.com, to promote a rally last month showcasing many of the Republicans in Congress whom Democrats — and a number of fellow Republicans — say are most responsible for the shutdown.
While conservatives believe that the public will back them on defunding, a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority — 57 percent — disapproves of cutting off funding as a way to stop the law.
Last week, with the health care exchanges open for business and a number of prominent Republicans complaining that the “Defund Obamacare” strategy was politically damaging and pointless, Mr. Needham of Heritage Action said he felt good about what the groups had accomplished.
“It really was a groundswell,” he said, “that changed Washington from the outside in.”
by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 08, 2013 9:47 am
10/03/2013
A Tyranny by the Minority, Part 1: We Are Living Through an Attempted Coup:
The Rude Pundit has been thinking for the last day or so about the extensive use of surveillance by the Obama administration, but not for the usual reasons.
First, kudos to the House GOP. See, the left was fracturing a bit when it came to things like the collection of metadata and more by the NSA. That story continues, and the divisions still exist between those who don't think the government should be tracking everyone online, on phones, all the time, and those who see it as a necessary evil in a time where our enemies exist in the shadows. However, the House GOP's complete and utter disregard for the well-being of the nation and their callous placement of ideology over common sense, compassion...well, pretty much over everything has unified the left once again behind the Democrats and President Obama. So a big thumbs up on strategy, you stupid motherfuckers.
The other thing the Rude Pundit has been thinking is how the NSA surveillance has an analogous purpose to the tactics of the GOP. See, a great deal (or all, depending on who you ask) of the NSA's universal anal probe has been perfectly legal. However, just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right. To take this further, just because it's legal does not, by any definition, mean it's not evil. You can bend laws right to the point of snapping, but as long as it doesn't crack, you're fine, man.
What the GOP has done, first through the ludicrous overuse of the filibuster and now through the shutdown and the threat of breaking the debt ceiling if they do not get a law overturned, is to use perfectly legal means to achieve their goals. It is, however, a contortion of the Constitution and the rules of Congress that'd make a circus performer say, "How the fuck did you get your head all the way up your own ass?" The ultimate goal of the effort is to undo the will of the people of the United States by forcing the President to accept the GOP agenda.
So let's just call this what it is: it's an attempted coup.
The Tea Party, having cowed the leadership of the Republican Party, are attempting to stage a creeping coup by using the Constitution against the nation. It's so breathtakingly ballsy it's almost admirable. Fuck, it's even something the GOP laid out in a plan, the Williamsburg Accord. We just didn't pay attention. The nation is currently being wrecked by a tyranny of the minority, and, unfortunately, it's up to the cowards leading the Republican Party to stop it.
And that, dear liberals, dear Americans, is why it's not just economic anxiety that hangs over us like a guillotine blade. It's existential nausea that we may finally reap the seeds of our doom that we planted a generation ago.
10/04/2013
A Tyranny by the Minority, Part 2: The Reign of the Cracker Babies:
You remember when there was supposed to be an epidemic of "crack babies"? They were babies whose mothers had smoked crack (or done coke) during pregnancy and would give birth to drug addicted bundles of joy. They were going to grow up to be sociopaths who would wreak havoc on the nation. Yeah, not so much.
However, what we are seeing now is the plague of the cracker babies. These are primarily white people who grew up insulated in communities that had fucked-up beliefs about God, guns, and America, who became resentful of people different than them who might have gotten help from the government, who watched Fox "news" since it started and listened to conservative talk radio before that, who have been pandered to and exploited by opportunists and snake oil salesmen who made them think that their stunted intellectual development is an asset. We are now in the grip of their electoral choices, which even includes some of their own (lookin' at you, Louis Gohmert, you god among cracker babies).
Let's just put it this way: When its new season premiered back in August, more people watched Duck Dynasty, a TV show about crazed, conservative, religious fundamentalists who happen to have gotten rich making a decent duck call, than watched the series finale of Breaking Bad. More people will watch the antics bearded backwoods tree carvers who barely speak anything we might acknowledge as "English" than will ever watch Mad Men, Homeland, or any of those shows that get TV critics all hard and wet.
Is this intellectual elitism? You fucking well bet it is. By pretending that the beliefs of yahoos, crackers, and cousin-fuckers are worthy of consideration in the public sphere, we have degraded the nation to the point that, well, fuck, they have successfully taken over one chamber of Congress by essentially threatening the leadership of the GOP with a banjo-accompanied ass raping while they giggle out their last couple of teeth.
These seeds were sowed back when Ronald Reagan cravenly allowed Jerry Falwell and other charlatans to have a seat at the table of power instead of treating them and their followers as pariahs whose goal was to upend the entire relationship between church and state. As on so many things, Reagan should be dug up and have his bones dressed in rags and paraded about so people can throw tomatoes and eggs at him.
We are a nation held hostage by idiots elected by idiots. While you can say, smugly, "Oh, but that's been true all throughout history," there's a hilarious fuckin' twist this time. These Tea Party fucknuts have no master. It's less Frankenstein's monster being let loose than it is nuclear bombs awaking Godzilla.
See, the teabaggers owe little to nothing to Wall Street or to big business. Oh, no. The pathetic truth about America is that the capitalists, not our pussy media, are the final check and balance to our political system: if they are displeased, they normally can fund the shit out of candidates to oppose those who have not done their bidding. But the anarchists we have now in the House don't give a happy monkey fuck about the backing of banking whores and portfolio pimps. You wanted deregulation, motherfuckers? Here ya go. If we default on the debt, the days of even milquetoast laws like Dodd-Frank will seem like salad days.
But you wanna know how awful the cracker babies are? Two quick examples from their ilk in Congress: Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas barked at a park ranger because she was doing her goddamn job, saying she should be "ashamed" for blocking access to the World War II memorial, closed because of Neugebauer. And Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina was asked if she would give up her salary during the shutdown, where millions of government workers are furloughed without pay or working without pay. She said, "I need my paycheck. That's the bottom line."
Somewhere, "God Bless America" is being played by a jug band.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 08, 2013 12:50 pm
The End Times of President Obama, as Staged and Orchestrated by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch
BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
BirtherIn 2010, Harold Camping, a founder, and at the time president of Family Stations, Inc., an Oakland, California-based religious broadcasting network, made his boldest proclamation ever: He prophesized that the Day of Judgment would be May 21, 2011, and the world would end on October 21 of that year. May 21 passed without The Rapture, and October 21 was a day like all days ... followed by October 22, 23, and so on and so on and doobie doobie doobie, as Sly and the Family Stone famously sang.
Now, along comes Larry Klayman -- the founder and former chairman of Judicial Watch who is now running a group call Freedom Watch --with his own End Times scenario. This time, however, the only target for Klayman's End Times is President Barack Obama.
Klayman is advocating a November 19, uprising that will jam the streets of Washington, D.C., and force the removal of Obama from the White House.
In a piece published at Renew America and titled "Obama's reckoning to come on November 19!: Klayman Calls for the Masses to Force Resignation of Convicted President," Klayman maintained that Obama was recently convicted by "a people's court of defrauding the American people and Floridians by proffering them with a fake birth certificate."
Klayman wrote: "The day of reckoning has come. Obama, having failed to plead in response to the indictment that was served upon him, waived his right to a jury trial. Thumbing his nose at We the People, as the citizens' prosecutor, I appeared before a citizens' court judge and presented evidence from Cold Case Posse investigator Michael Zullo showing that Obama tricked voters into electing him in 2008 and 2012. As a result, the citizens' judge found him guilty on two counts of falsifying information to federal and state election officials. He was thus sentenced to the maximum prison term for these offenses of 10 years, and ordered to immediately surrender himself into the custody of the citizens of the United States and Florida."
A "cowering" Obama will not yield power easily, Klayman pointed out. Therefore, he is calling on the multitudes "who have been appalled and disgusted by Obama's criminality – his Muslim, socialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-white, pro-illegal immigrant, pro-radical gay and lesbian agenda – among other outrages, to descend on Washington, D.C., en masse, [on November 19] and demand that he leave town and resign from office if he does not want to face prison time."
Klayman is advocating the complete shut down of the nation's capital "by blocking roads and massing in front of the White House chanting for Obama to get out of our nation's capital." He also "propose[s] bringing the victims of his reign of terror to a podium across from the White House in Lafayette Park to give their testimony on how he has singularly severely harmed and in some instances even killed their loved ones through his actions."
Klayman, a former federal prosecutor in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, "is a lawyer with a long history of filing suits to make the government open its records; he attracted a lot of attention during the Clinton scandals, and he has continued to take the authorities to court under Bush and Obama," Reason's Jesse Walker recently pointed out. "Sometimes these suits have exposed genuinely significant information, and sometimes they have led Klayman into, ah, weirder territories."
According to People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch, Klayman has been plowing Obama-bashing ground for quite some time.
In July, Klayman predicted that "President Obama's supposed drive to 'refashion the nation through intimidation and threat, in his own Muslim, socialist image' will push the US military into removing him as leader, just as the Egyptian military deposed Mohamed Morsi.
He claims that Obama, 'like Morsi before his downfall,' is 'pushing the American people to the limit' and 'playing with fire among the military.'
by IanEye » Tue Oct 08, 2013 12:55 pm
The power play in the House is, simply put, a tacit admission that they're unlikely to take back the Presidency anytime soon. It isn't just that they don't have the Presidency now; it's that they think they've lost it permanently.
If the President makes any concessions at all to resolve either the shutdown or the debt ceiling fight (and Republicans are convinced he will), it will (as Reid notes) permanently diminish the Presidency. But where [Reid's] wrong is, that's not something the Republicans are afraid of; that's the whole point of this exercise. They know on some level they aren't going to win the Presidency, so they're going to do the next best thing: destroy it. And so transfer power to the body they still hold (thanks to a playing field skewed partly by gerrymandering and partly by the concentration of Democrats in urban districts)--which they believe they're going to keep for a long time to come.
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by seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 08, 2013 1:00 pm
IanEye » Tue Oct 08, 2013 11:55 am wrote:The power play in the House is, simply put, a tacit admission that they're unlikely to take back the Presidency anytime soon. It isn't just that they don't have the Presidency now; it's that they think they've lost it permanently.
If the President makes any concessions at all to resolve either the shutdown or the debt ceiling fight (and Republicans are convinced he will), it will (as Reid notes) permanently diminish the Presidency. But where [Reid's] wrong is, that's not something the Republicans are afraid of; that's the whole point of this exercise. They know on some level they aren't going to win the Presidency, so they're going to do the next best thing: destroy it. And so transfer power to the body they still hold (thanks to a playing field skewed partly by gerrymandering and partly by the concentration of Democrats in urban districts)--which they believe they're going to keep for a long time to come.
link
by bks » Tue Oct 08, 2013 1:23 pm
by The Consul » Tue Oct 08, 2013 4:04 pm
by Pele'sDaughter » Tue Oct 08, 2013 7:32 pm
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