The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 09, 2013 9:25 am

OCTOBER 09, 2013

Congressional Tea Party Farce
The New Bolsheviks?
by DAVID ROSEN
In his 1852 pamphlet, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx famously revised Hegel’s quip: “… all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Is this the real lesson of the current inside-the-Beltway showdown: farce?

The 1917 Bolshevik revolution turned out worse then a tragedy. While motivated by the noblest of intentions, the revolution led to an historical catastrophe that has plagued Russia for nearly a century. Lenin’s seizure of power was the culmination of a nation state in crisis.

The Western historic order was facing fundamentally challenges, the First World War grinding on with the bodies of more and more dead soldiers piling up in mud-encrusted trenches across Europe. Russia’s decrepit Czarist regime could no longer govern and was forced to turn over the state apparatus of a near-feudal empire to an incompetent gang of bourgeois politicians who wanted only to stabilize an untenable situation and press-on with a bloody war. They were doomed.

Armed with the slogan, “Peace, Land and Bread,” and backed by the Petrograd garrison, the Bolsheviks were poised to act. Lenin issued his call for insurrection in a now-famous letter to his wife, Krupskaya, ending in part:

The government is tottering. We must deal it the deathblow at any cost. To delay action is the same as death.

These words, unknowingly, may well inspire today’s Tea Party zealots who seek nothing less then to inflict a “deathblow” on what they perceive as a failed established order. For them, the “government is tottering.” Pres. Obama’s Affordable Care Act is the apparent target, but their ultimate goal is to overthrow the entire edifice of the New Deal social-welfare order. They seek to return the U.S. to the glory days of late-19th century Robber Barron capitalism.

* * *

On October 6th, the New York Times published a front-page story detailing a plan by leading rightwing Republicans to shut down the government. Their goal was to undermine the Obama administration and, in tern, to lead to their “seizure” of state power through the 2014 and 2016 elections. The Times’ piece identifies a number of the usual suspects who attend the gathering held earlier this year, including the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation. These upstanding citizens committed hundreds of millions of dollars to wreck the Obama presidency, the U.S. government.

Among the dubious characters attending the private gathering that planned the current (legal) “putsch” campaign was Ed Meese, Pres. Reagan’s attorney general. He is a sinister ghost of old reappearing on the historical stage, a harbinger of doom. Meese was deeply involved in the illegal Iran-Contra campaign, issued a dubious report on pornography and was forced to resign due to involvement in what was known as the Wedtech scandal, an influence-peddling scheme. Even historic shame will not halt these (im)moralists.

Around the same time that the anti-Obama healthcare conclave of 21st century rightwing Bolsheviks gathered to plan the “overthrow” of an elected government, Meese called for the impeachment of Pres. Obama. Shortly after the December 2012 New Town, CT, mass shooting, Meese argued that Obama had overstepped his Constitutional authority by ordering the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to vigorously enforce all federal gun regulations. He defended an ostensible 2nd Amendment right to bear arms no matter the social consequences. “It would be up to the Congress to take action, such as looking in to it to see if, in fact, he has really tried to override the Constitution itself,” Meese opined. “In which case, it would be up to them to determine what action they should take — and perhaps even to the point of impeachment.”

* * *

How today’s political game of Congressional Russian roulette plays out is anyone’s guess. However, if this political game of chicken is farce, what was the tragedy that determined it?

Over the last 200-plus years, the U.S. has been threatened three times. Would the nation win its independence?; would the North end slavery?; and would it overcome the mid-20th century crisis of capital, the Great Depression? In retrospect, 9/11 will appear as an epiphenomenon. It was not Pearl Harbor; the attack did not kick-start a new world war.

From the 1929 stock market crash until the end of World War II in 1945, capitalism was in a sustained period of crisis. It lasted 15 long years. The crisis transformed capitalism from its “pre-modern” laissez-faire or entrepreneur phase to its “modern” phase, one based on the public state subsidizing private corporation gain.

The election of Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed a popular perception that traditional private capitalism was incapable of dealing with the crisis the Depression posed. However, many resisted the restructuring of capitalism and this resistance took different forms, especially from the conservative right.

In 1934, the right formed the American Liberty League to contest the New Deal. Like today’s Tea Party, the League was backed by major financial interests including the du Pont family and the heads of Chase National Bank, General Foods, General Motors and Standard Oil. The Supreme Court was a major force resisting the New Deal. In 1935, it effectively declared the National Recovery Administration (NRA) illegal; in ’36, it declared the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAC) un-Constitutional. Adding fury to the rightwing call, the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin used his weekly radio programs to attack Roosevelt for being “anti-God.”

The battle over the 1935 Social Security Act (like the Medicare battle of the 197s) is the closest parallel to today’s Tea Party opposition to Obama care. In addition to Congressional Republicans, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce mobilized against it. One of the false claims promoted by Republicans was that all American workers would have to wear a metal tag with their Social Security number on it. In 1937, the Supreme Court upheld the Act’s constitutionality.

In 1937, FDR faced enormous pressure from Congress, numerous rich, conservative businessmen and members of his own administration over federal spending and mounting budget deficits. He responded by balancing the budget, cutting spending and imposing austerity. This resulted in what is known as the as the “Roosevelt’s recession” of ’37 and ’38. Only the coming mass military spending for World War II pulled the nation out of the recession.

* * *

The U.S. today is neither Russia of 1917 nor the U.S. of the Great Depression ‘30s. However, the U.S. is amidst a fundamental economic and social restructuring as globalization recasts the capitalist world order. Over the last quarter-century, conservative interests have aggressively pushed this restructuring and today’s Tea Party movement represents a mop-up operation going after the remaining social welfare programs originally established by the New Deal. To this end, Obama care had to be defeated.

While Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) may have fantasies of being a postmodern Lenin, the Tea Party is not about to seize state power by force of arms anytime soon. Tea Party activists often invoke the actions of December 1773 when colonists threw tea into the Boston Harbor. They even use the word “revolution” – like “Revolution is Brewing” and “Restore the Republic, Revolt Against Socialism” — to give voice to their ultimate goal.

Sadly, while the right’s efforts against the New Deal might well be seen in retrospect as a tragedy, the current Republican Tea Party efforts in Congress to undermine the Obama administration will be remembered as a pathetic farce.

David Rosen regularly contributes to AlterNet, Brooklyn Rail, Filmmaker and Huffington Post. Check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com; he can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 09, 2013 7:49 pm

:roll:


Koch Industries: We Are Not Behind The Government Shutdown
Image
AP Photo / AP
DYLAN SCOTT – OCTOBER 9, 2013, 12:44 PM EDT17237
In a letter to U.S senators dated Wednesday, Koch Industries denied ever advocating for a government shutdown as a way to force the defunding of Obamacare. The letter was in response to comments on the Senate floor Tuesday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in which he blamed Koch for the shutdown, which followed a conservative push to pressure Democrats into defunding or delaying Obamacare to keep the government open.

"Koch believes that Obamacare will increase deficits, lead to an overall lowering of the standard of health care in America, and raise taxes," the letter said. "However, Koch has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution to defunding Obamacare nor have we lobbied on legislative provisions defunding Obamacare."

The letter was sent by Philip Ellender, president of government and public affairs for Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC. It was not immediately clear if the letter was sent to all senators.

Koch Industries is headed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who are major contributors to various conservative causes. A New York Times story on the origins of the defund Obamacare fight noted that groups that received Koch support have been significant forces in opposing the health care reform law.

The full letter is below.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 09, 2013 9:13 pm

Study Finds Modern Race Attitudes Parallel Old Slavery Zones

Posted on Oct 8, 2013


quadelirus (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
It turns out the New South is a lot like the Old South.

A recent study by three political scientists at New York’s University of Rochester found a distinct link between contemporary racial attitudes by whites toward blacks, and the old “cotton belt” regions of the South, where slavery and the plantation economy were most prevalent. Conversely, in areas of the South where slavery was a minor presence, modern attitudes more closely track those of the North, the researchers found.

The study, which came out last month to little notice, also draws a distinct connection between the slave zones and modern political opposition to affirmative action, and a tendency to vote Republican:

We argue that emancipation was a cataclysmic event that undermined Southern whites’ political and economic power. Indeed … the sudden enfranchisement of blacks after the Civil War was politically threatening to whites, who for centuries had enjoyed exclusive political power. In addition, the sudden emancipation of blacks substantially undermined whites’ economic power by producing an abrupt increase in black wages, threatening the viability of the plantation economy.

Taken together, these political and economic changes gave the Southern white elite an incentive to promote local anti-black sentiment by encouraging violence towards blacks, racist norms and cultural beliefs, and, to the extent legally possible, the institutionalization of racist policies such as Jim Crow laws. These incentives were obviously more pronounced in areas, such as the “Black Belt,” that had large proportions of newly freed slaves. This motivates our hypothesis that the prevalence of slavery in the years just before it was abolished is a predictor of whites’ attitudes towards blacks, and their political attitudes more generally.

“Slavery does not explain all forms of current day racism,” Avidit Acharya, who conducted the study along with Matthew Blackwell and Maya Sen, said on the college website. “But the data clearly demonstrates that the legacy of the plantation economy and its reliance on the forced labor of African Americans continues to exacerbate racial bias in the Deep South.”

And it’s somewhat hereditary, with new generations reflecting the racial and social attitudes of their parents, the report says.

In announcing the study last month, the University of Rochester said the researchers “considered whether there could be alternative explanations for their findings.”

For example, they looked at whether whites who live around larger black populations have more negative racial attitudes—- what’s known as the “theory of racial threat.” But they found that share of black population actually predicts warmer attitudes toward blacks among whites once slavery is accounted for.

They also considered whether what they found was related to slavery being more prevalent in rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than urban areas, or whether it had something to do with Civil War destruction, or with whites holding particular racial attitudes migrating to areas with others of like mind. But again, those hypotheses did not hold up to scrutiny.

The study also compared Southern counties with very few slaves in 1860 to non-Southern counties with no slaves in the same period. It found very little difference.

“Thus, in the absence of localized slavery, it appears that the South would have had a distribution of present-day political beliefs indistinguishable from comparable parts of the North,” the authors write. “This provides evidence that the effect that we see comes primarily from the local presence of many slaves, rather than state laws permitting the ownership of slaves.”

Another aspect to explore: the relationship between the slavery zones and the current tea party power base. But at the very least, the study shows that the legacy of “the peculiar institution” still echoes through the political culture.

—Posted by Scott Martelle.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby 8bitagent » Thu Oct 10, 2013 7:24 am

"7 Doomsday Default Scenarios"
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/whats-w ... 8C11366851

Good lord any one of those would be ugly. I definitely can see how people could see violence toward DC as a legitimate outlet. Not saying I advocate such things...but if people see the Republicans or Washington in general as the ones responsible for a situation that completely cuts off veterans money/benefits, social security, or greatly devalues the dollar and causes a depression or banks halt money. You could even see both anarchists, every day people and tea party people going ape. While it's all speculative, "what if the US went to war with Iran/what if a low yield nuke went off somewhere" type of stuff, still just the notion of it.

Man it's like the scriptwriters are just asking for violence. No "MK Ultra" needed here
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10 ... gress?lite
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 10, 2013 8:50 am

WEDNESDAY, OCT 9, 2013 04:20 PM CDT
Right-wing coup: Deluded secessionists have already won
Conservative secessionists want their own country? Their agenda already rules, even though a majority opposes it
BY DAVID SIROTA

Thanks to a confluence of three events, the S-word — secession — is once again in the air. In Washington, new questions are emerging about whether the United States can function as a unified nation after a partial government shutdown was engineered by a largely regional party — one whose home territory looks eerily similar to the Confederacy. Adding to the questions about the viability of the post-Civil War union is the fact that the shutdown has been orchestrated by a Texas legislator whose state party stalwarts — including its governor — seem to support secession, to the point of taking concrete legislative steps to prepare for independence. On top of all that, in states across the country, incipient secession movements have sprung up only a few months after secession petitions flooded the White House website.

In his seminal book “Better Off Without ‘Em,” Chuck Thompson marshals data to argue that America would benefit by letting the Republican Party and its strongholds formally secede from the country. Whether or not you end up agreeing with Thompson, the argument he forwards is compelling on the policy merits. It also raises an important but less-explored political question: Why would today’s conservatives want to formally secede from a nation that gives them the privilege of governing the whole country, even though they remain in the electoral minority and even though their policy agenda is opposed by a majority of the country?

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Partisans on both sides will inevitably deny this reality, because they see the world exclusively through a red-versus-blue prism. The reality-distorting effects of such a prism cast Democratic politicians as uniformly liberal, and therefore creates the illusion that Democratic Party control of the presidency and the U.S. Senate mean those institutions are similarly liberal. But such a partisan view obscures ideological conservatism’s undeniable dominance of both parties — and, thus, American politics.

Inside the Beltway, you can see this dominance in (among other things) the transpartisan support for the escalation of wars, the expansion of the surveillance state, the perpetuation of the Drug War and the preservation of corporate welfare. You can also see it in the annual budget fights that interminably shift to the right.

The last few months illustrate that point. Today, draconian sequestration-gutted budgets that were recently considered controversial are the new mainstream center. Indeed, to Democrats, the sequestration levels they once criticized as too harsh are now the new acceptable normal. At the same time, to Republicans, the sequestration levels they once could only dream of are now the overly “Big Government” that allegedly requires a full-on government shutdown to rein in.

Underscoring the rightward shift, that government shutdown is not coincidentally structured to keep funding conservatives priorities (the Military-Industrial Complex, the Surveillance State, etc.) while eviscerating liberal social programs. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare ideas championed by the Republican Party’s most recent presidential nominee are now billed as a socialist plot, thus pushing the Overton Window even further to the right and marginalizing anything genuinely liberal like, say, single payer. Oh, and as all this is happening, popular liberal priorities like gun control can’t get an up-or-down majority vote even after children are massacred.

It’s the same story of conservative domination in many state legislatures, regardless of party control. On economics, the debates in both Republican and Democratic states are typically not about reducing corporate welfare and tax cuts and using the recovered cash to better fund the social safety net. Instead, whether in a red or blue legislature, it usually is a debate about how much more corporate welfare and tax cuts to hand out, and how much more the social safety net must be gutted. At the same time, the serious state-level gun control proposals are stymied despite their strong public support, and legislatures keep passing new restrictions on a woman’s right to choose, despite strong public opposition.

What’s news here is not that the right has a hammerlock on American politics, but that it has engineered such a hammerlock even as public opinion polls show America is moving to the left on issue after issue after issue, and even as national electoral results show America continuing to overwhelmingly vote against the Republican Party’s ultraconservative agenda. This dichotomy between political power and public will represents far more than mere tolerance of a political minority’s rights in a republican democracy. It is more than even a tyranny of the conservative minority. It is nothing short of the conservative movement declaring independence from America yet still ruling the America it abandoned with the entitled arrogance of an occupying force.

None of this is an accident. It is the result of a preconceived strategy that relies on two sets of tools.

The first is the unprecedented use of the U.S. Senate filibuster and the creation of the so-called Hastert Rule. The former gives just 11 percent of the population enough Senate representation to stop anything (like, say, minimal gun control) that the other 89 percent may want. The latter basically does the same thing, only with U.S. House rules that prevent any bill from even being voted on unless it has the support of a majority of the House Republican Conference. This particularly empowers a tiny minority of conservative voters considering that the GOP Conference didn’t even win a majority of votes for U.S. House in the last election.

How, you ask, did Republicans win the lower chamber but receive far fewer total votes for the U.S. House than Democrats? They employed the second set of tools: redistricting and the gerrymander.

As Mother Jones magazine documents, Republican legislatures in 2010 used the decennial practice of redrawing district lines to all but guarantee the GOP control of the House, irrespective of whether a majority of American voters actually cast their ballots for that. The result is exactly what President Obama described at his press conference yesterday when he said: “There’s no competition and those folks are much more worried about a Tea Party challenger than they are about a general election where they’ve got to complete against a Democrat or go after independent votes — and in that environment, it’s a lot harder for them to compromise.”

Why is it harder to compromise? Because a Republican in a gerrymandered district doesn’t have to worry about a general election in which he gets painted as an extremist. In such a district where the primary winner is the automatic general election winner, that incumbent is mostly concerned with creating a voting record that appeases ultraconservative Republican primary voters and therefore prevents a primary challenger from calling him a moderate.

While it is true that none of this comprises a formal secession, it is also true that all of this together does indeed represent a genuine unofficial political secession by the right. Through the filibuster, conservatives now use the brinkmanship of threatened government shutdowns and debt defaults to successfully legislate their pro-militarism, anti-social-program agenda over the objections of everyone else. At the same time, through gerrymandering, conservatives have geographically walled themselves off in a way that prevents them from having to electorally answer to anyone but themselves.

They have, in other words, made a deliberate choice to secede into their own separate nation. Call it Conservastan.

This was a choice, of course, that the right didn’t have to make. To start winning national elections and electoral mandates again, the conservative movement could have used redistricting to dilute Republican districts, make more Democratic districts potentially competitive, and then defeat Democrats in those competitive elections. That would have required the difficult work of broadening the movement’s agenda and expanding its electoral base, but if successful, it would have also led to actual mandate-worthy majorities and genuinely national governance for the long haul.

Instead, the right chose to use redistricting to create a whole separate political country for themselves. Inside this new country, the Fourth Estate check on power isn’t an objective news media — it is Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and right-wing media enforcing dogma against the perceived threat of ideological traitors. Inside this country, the Republican Party isn’t interested in broadening its agenda; the incentive in Conservastan is for the party to continually narrow its agenda to intensify conservative fervor so that the gerrymandered districts that comprise Conservastan remain impenetrable GOP strongholds.

As a pure power grab, the strategy has been wildly successful. Not only does the conservative movement’s less populous breakaway country now control the political destiny of those of us still here in regular old America, it does so while making sure all of us in liberal America financially subsidize Conservastan.

Thus, we return to that first question: Why would any conservative want to formally secede from the union when the conservative movement’s undeclared political secession has been so incredibly successful for the right? If, say, you are a conservative living up the road from me in Northern Colorado, why would you want to formally secede when the conservative movement’s aggressive abuse of the state constitution and recall process allows your fellow Colorado conservatives to shape large portions of state policy without actually having to win statewide elections anymore? Why, too, would you want to give up such privilege and also give up subsidies that, according to the I-News Network, makes the rest of Colorado give you a net cash transfer of “between about $60 million and $120 million or more a year”?

These are the same kinds of questions you could ask of any of the secession campaigns across the country, and the fact that there are no politically rational answers is probably, in part, why many leaders of the conservative establishment do not openly support actual secession. They know that the filibuster and the gerrymander have already let them politically secede and yet still rule this country. They know they are still ruling because they see government shutdowns structured to protect conservative priorities and they see a Democratic president endorsing conservative healthcare, Social Security and national security ideas. And most important, they know their continuing rule doesn’t have to involve any of the downsides of an official secession, even though a secession has already happened.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 22, 2013 4:11 pm

Fla. congressman compares Tea Party to Ku Klux Klan
ON POLITICS
Catalina Camia, USA TODAY 1:38 p.m. EDT October 22, 2013

Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida sent a fundraising pitch equating the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan, which includes an image of a burning cross for the letter "T."

The fundraising e-mail plays off an interview Grayson did last week with Al Sharpton on MSNBC after the federal government reopened following a 16-day shutdown. "The Tea Party is no more popular than the Klan," Grayson said in that interview — a transcript of which the Florida lawmaker posted on Twitter Monday night, along with link to a donation page.

"Ask yourself this: Who else in American public life today is as honest and as blunt as this? Congressman Alan Grayson deserves your support, like no one else," reads the end of Grayson's message. "He, and only he, is saying the things that you are thinking, and so much need to be said."

The National Republican Congressional Committee is highlighting Grayson's fundraising e-mail and Klan comment. Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the House GOP campaign committee, said Grayson is using "hateful words and imagery" that should be condemned by House Democrats.

Grayson was elected to Florida's 9th Congressional District last year after he was defeated for re-election in 2010 in a different House seat. He has been known for outspoken and combative comments, including saying during a House speech on health care, "If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly."
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Oct 22, 2013 4:28 pm

Damn, Grayson, why? Why must we always become the monsters we fight?

Dude needs to fire that intern/employee/contractor and say he did publicly.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Tue Oct 22, 2013 5:38 pm

he's probably right though.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 22, 2013 5:50 pm

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:25 pm

“When the president visited my home of Orlando, Tea Party protesters shouted ‘Kenyan Go Home,’” Grayson told the Sentinel. “Other examples include Tea Party chants of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and Tea Party posters saying ‘Obama’s plan: White Slavery.’ One could go on and on, because there is overwhelming evidence that the Tea Party is the home of bigotry and discrimination in America today, just as the KKK was for an earlier generation.”
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Wed Oct 23, 2013 3:44 am

Grayson forgot to mention a few things:

"Steve King and White Nationalist CPAC Panel Warn that America's Greatest Threat is its Diversity"
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...

Southern Poverty Law Center: "Former Congressman Tancredo to Address White Supremacists"
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/...

Tea Party's White Supremacist problemo: "People & Power - White Power USA (Documentary)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

IREHR Report: "Tea Parties - Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse"
http://www.irehr.org/issue-are...

"White Supremacist Stampede:
A startling number of white-power candidates are seeking public office. Eve Conant reports on their under-the-radar strategy and David Duke’s White House flirtation."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

"Steve Smith, White Supremacist, Elected To Republican Party Committee In Pennsylvania County"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

"Neo-Confederate Behind Pro-Huckabee Flag Ads in South Carolina"
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...

Video: "Ron Paul Gives Speech on Civil War in Front of Giant Confederate Flag
http://littlegreenfootballs.co...

“Ron Paul Curriculum Launched by Reconstructionist Gary North and
Neo-Confederate Thomas Woods”
http://www.talk2action.org/sto...

[Ron Paul] "The former presidential contender is back, this time as head of a new ‘institute’ for ‘peace’ comprised of anti-Semites, 9/11 truthers, and dictator lovers. James Kirchick reports."
http://www.nationalmemo.com/ro...

"Ron Paul to Keynote Catholic Traditionalist Summit with NeoFascist and Overtly Anti-Semitic Speakers" (and racists):
http://www.talk2action.org/sto...

"Meet the 'Southern Avenger'! Another Member of Rand Paul's Team Has White
Supremacist Past"
http://www.alternet.org/3-most...

Also: http://freebeacon.com/rebel-ye...
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby Searcher08 » Wed Oct 23, 2013 7:14 am

The things which was missing from Sirota's analysis for me was:
How does the role of the individual States intersect what he is saying?

My understanding (from memory) is that the Federal cash flow to the conservative states is actually proportionally bigger than to liberal ones, which could mean that any form of localisation (and unplugging from the Federal cash pipe) would have major consequences for them.

I think the hijacking and perversion of the Tea Party would be a great case study for some organisational historian...
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Postby IanEye » Wed Oct 23, 2013 2:12 pm

GOP Senate Candidate Addressed Conference Hosted by Neo-Confederate Group That Promotes Secessionism
Mississippi Republican Chris McDaniel, who is challenging Sen. Thad Cochran and backed by the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth, took the stage with a historian who says Lincoln was a Marxist.

Chris McDaniel is taking the "GOP Civil War" to a new level. Two months ago, the tea party-backed Mississippi Senate candidate addressed a neo-Confederate conference and costume ball hosted by a group that promotes the work of present-day secessionists and contends the wrong side won the "war of southern independence." Other speakers at the event included a historian who believes Lincoln was a Marxist and Ryan Walters, a PhD candidate who worked on McDaniel's first political campaign and wrote recently that the "controversy" over President Barack Obama's birth certificate "hasn't really been solved."


more @ LINK

.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 23, 2013 6:10 pm

Dick Durbin · 20,257 like this
October 20 at 9:11am ·
Many Republicans searching for something to say in defense of the disastrous shutdown strategy will say President Obama just doesn't try hard enough to communicate with Republicans. But in a "negotiation" meeting with the president, one GOP House Leader told the president: "I cannot even stand to look at you."

What are the chances of an honest conversation with someone who has just said something so disrespectful?

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Nov 13, 2013 11:27 am

I think Richard Cohen's latest blunder "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children" could fit well in this thread.

Richard Cohen in Context
Some people are defending his abysmal column. Their argument is not very good.

TA-NEHISI COATES NOV 12 2013, 7:01 PM ET

There are a few people defending Richard Cohen's abysmal column today as though it were the victim of a giant reading-comprehension fail. I think this piece by J. Bryan Lowder offers the gist of the argument:

But before I get to that, though, let’s break down what Cohen actually wrote. The offending paragraph is embedded in a longer segment about the mindless, reactionary social conservatism of Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats and how nasty their insurgence was for a more moderate Democratic Party back in the 1948 election. Cohen calls the similarities to contemporary tea-partying Iowans “ominous,” and warily eyes the trenchant, anti-modern (and politically costly) attitude that can emerge when a group of people perceive their “way of life under attack and they [fear] its loss.” Now, it’s true that he doesn’t condemn this faction as forcefully as he might, but my takeaway from the piece as a whole was that Cohen is none too pleased with what their ascendancy bodes for mainstream conservatism.

Of course, a few highly ambiguous phrases (that probably should have been edited out) in the “gag” sentence make this reading harder, but let’s try. “Conventional” is the most unfortunate word choice, with its connotations of “common sense,” “widely shared,” or “unremarkable”; as many critics have already pointed out, studies show that disapproval of miscegenation is none of those things today. But recall that Cohen has been describing a limited, if still very much extant, mindset that (he at least wants us to believe) is not his own; in that worldview, dislike of interracial marriage is very much conventional, as is dislike of former lesbians—these are literally the conventions of that social group.


This is not a very good defense. I read the entire column. I saw the preceding grafs where Cohen offers a rough history of the Dixiecrats and segregationists wing of America. And then I read this:

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled—about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.


The problem here isn't that we think Richard Cohen gags at the sight of an interracial couple and their children. The problem is that Richard Cohen thinks being repulsed isn't actually racist, but "conventional" or "culturally conservative." Obstructing the right of black humans and white humans to form families is a central feature of American racism. If retching at the thought of that right being exercised isn't racism, then there is no racism.

Context can not improve this. "Context" is not a safe word that makes all your other horse-shit statements disappear. And horse-shit is the context in which Richard Cohen has, for all these years, wallowed. It is horse-shit to claim that store owners are right to discriminate against black males. It is horse-shit to claim Trayvon Martin was wearing the uniform of criminals. It is horse-shit to subject your young female co-workers to "a hostile work environment." It is horse-shit to expend precious newsprint lamenting the days when slovenly old dudes had their pick of 20-year-old women. It is horse-shit to defend a rapist on the run because you like The Pianist. And it is horse-shit for Katharine Weymouth, the Post's publisher, to praise a column with the kind of factual error that would embarrass a j-school student.

Richard Cohen's unfortunate career is the proper context to understand his column today and the wide outrage that's greeted it. We are being told that Cohen finds it "hurtful" to be called racist. I am sorry that people on the Internet have hurt Richard Cohen's feelings. I find it "hurtful" that Cohen endorses the police profiling my son. I find it eternally "hurtful" that the police, following that same logic, killed one of my friends. I find it hurtful to tell my students that, even in this modern age, vending horse-shit is still an esteemed and lucrative profession.
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