'The Republicans Have Become A Cult': Rep. Kinzinger On Escaping And Sav...

The Republican Party is not interested in trying to "create a more perfect union",

they are instead interested in playing the politics of cultural issues much like

those interested in convicting the witches of Salem or Torquemada and the

prosecution of the Inquisition, none of which addresses the issues facing

keeping America greater than it was before -- because "great again" is 

just an illusion that America was greater before than it is today.  The

truth is America is greater today than it ever was because we have 

found ways to let more people express their opinions without breaking

the nation apart.  Then there's the coming new wave of robotics taking

employment away from more of the masses, yet the masses must 

earn a living or America will cease to exist.  Our elected officials are

supposed to be working on that and the issues of climate change, instead

they are bickering over abject stupidity and nominating candidates with

mental deficits and such.  None of which adds to the stability we need

to solve the thorny problems that reality is going to present soon if not

immediately.

Rand Paul's war on women journalists

Oy. So Rand Paul had a bad morning on the TV, when he got testily obnoxious and all mansplaining about how to do journalism with Savannah Guthrie. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no," he screeched at her. "Listen, you've editorialized. Let me answer a question. You ask a question, and you say, 'Have your views changed?' instead of editorializing and saying my views have changed."
In a later interview, Paul further explains how journalists are allowed to cover him.

In an interview in New Hampshire with The New York Times, after the appearance on "Today," Mr. Paul said he gets tired of questions with the built-in premise that he has contradicted himself. Questions, he said, like "'O.K., well we understand that you've been beating your wife for years and you've flip-flopped on 25 different issues and you used to believe this and you used to believe that,'" he said. "That isn't journalism."

Funny thing is, when it was Sean Hannity asking about the same flip-flops, Paul didn't blow up. He answered. Lamely, but he answered. So Hannity asking about the same things as Guthrie must have been journalism, while Guthrie asking about it was "editorializing." You could chalk it up to the fact that it was Hannity and Fox News, or you could look at Paul's previous testy interactions with female journalists. Like when CNBC's Kelly Evans asked him about a tax incentive proposal he came up with for U.S. companies to bring their overseas profits back to the United States and about his position on vaccination.  READ MORE

You Cannot Be A Republican And A Christian

No one in American life today proclaims their allegiance to Christ more conspicuously than those who have rejected most of what Christ actually taught: Republicans. The modern Republican Party’s hell-bent embodiment of nearly everything Christ warned against has become so serious that we have to call it out. You cannot be a Republican and a Christian.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time, maybe even as recently as the early 1990s, when to support the Republican Party was not altogether evil. And further back, of course, things were even more different. As Garrison Keillor once reminisced, Republicans used to be:

moderate, business-minded civic boosters and unapologetic patriots who were the linchpins and bulwarks of small towns across the Midwest, the enthusiastic backers of projects for the civic good, usually in partnership with the town liberals (the librarian, the bar owner, a lawyer or two, the Methodist minister, the banker’s wife). These Republicans were uniters and diehard optimists and persons of compassionate conscience, inveterate doers of good deeds.

Even today, there are probably some Republicans who still fit that description. The problem is that they are for all practical purposes invisible in American public life, and if their party found out about them, they would be hounded out of it. If they dared to compete in the lunatic talent show of Republican primary politics, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

The reason that you cannot be a Republican and a Christian is that today’s Republican Party doesn’t appear to stand for anything but what Christ strenuously rejected, like organized violence, self-righteous division, and greed. To say the least, this is hard to square with Christ’s teachings and example. I am not a Christian, and I’m certainly no Biblical scholar, but you don’t have to be. It’s not hard to tell the difference between who is and isn’t really a Christian, and Republicans, you’re not.
READ MORE

Launching A New Southern Strategy Based On Gunsense And Voter I.D. Laws

A "Good ol' Boy"

It's nice to see someone keep track of statistics on the disproportionate effects of gun violence on poorer, minority populations. Dr. Arthur Kamm extensively explains this awful phenomenon via factual data and statistics in his paper entitled Guns Government Race and Rights: The Demographics Stupid.

This paper examines the effect of our changing demography in elections, the racial and ethnic targeting of voter suppression laws, the Manchin-Toomey Senate vote vs Blue Wall States vs the State Ballot Initiative, effective deployment of capital, and, unapologetically, a consideration of obstacles in achieving this objective.

For the purpose of this article, I will focus on Dr. Kamm's suggestions for helping the South shake the domination of Republicans who absolutely do not represent the majority of the state(s)'s citizens.

The title of this piece is a play on the phrase coined by Democratic political strategist James Carville during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run, ‘The economy, stupid’. And regarding the attempts by activist groups to change the national political landscape on such issues as gun violence, voter discrimination, healthcare, income/wealth inequality, immigration reform and so much more, well, ‘It’s the demographics, stupid’. With this country having just observed the 50th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in the fight for African-American voting rights, the minority vote has over the past 50 years grown into a powerful force that, in 2012, showed the ability to more than off-set the ‘Southern Strategy’ and, if fully realized, the potential to flip the South back to Democratic control (no small matter for the progression of human and civil rights), perhaps even sooner than later. emphasis mine. READ MORE

Mitt Romney, Un-American

Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign rally in Bowling
Green, Ohio, 07/18/12. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast

21 July 12

Republicans have questioned the patriotism of Democrats for nearly a hundred years. But now, at long last, Barack Obama is turning the tables on the GOP.

ohn Sununu opened the "American" door the other day, and now the Romney campaign is barging through it, plotting attacks on Barack Obama's "biography," which will inevitably include veiled accusations about his alleged alien cast, his lack of American-ness. So now that it's open, let's stroll through it ourselves. What's taking place in the room on the other side of that door? Republicans and conservatives are bouncing off the walls because they face a serious risk for the first time in a generation that their definitions of patriotism and Americanism are losing. And not just losing - losing to, of all people, Barack Hussein Obama!

The Republican credo that theirs is the party of patriotism goes back a long, long way, at least to the 1920s. The Democrats then as now represented society's so-called rabble - immigrants, wets, cosmopolites of that gin-soaked decade when the urban population for the first time overtook the rural. Over time, Democrats added blacks, new immigrants, liberated women, gays. The Democrats have been the party of the Other. Impugning their patriotism to the target audience is so easy it can hardly even be called work. In doing so, of course, Republicans tied the concept strongly to their, um, values: the all-conquering free market, mostly; a good war now and then; the occasional (actually, more or less constant, now that I think about it) campaign against subversives real and imagined (the vast majority). Thus have things ever been.

You will find, as you scan our modern electoral history, say since 1968, that the Republican candidate has laid some Americanism-related charge at the Democrat nearly every time, but that the reverse has never occurred. Richard Nixon sent Spiro Agnew out to accuse Hubert Humphrey of being soft on communism and compare him to Neville Chamberlain, even while Nixon was committing treason by submarining the Paris peace talks. Democrats can't, and don't, peddle this merchandise, because it's pointless: they know it won't stick to the party that has owned the issue for decades.

  READ MORE

Senate Republicans Block Vote on Paycheck Fairness Act

Senate Republicans block paycheck fairness bill

Today, in yet another volley in the war on women, Senate Republicans blocked voting on the Paycheck Fairness Act. Proponents of the bill needed 60 votes in order to break a G.O.P. filibuster, but were able to muster only 52. Some 47 Republicans voted against a floor vote.

Because women continue to be paid less than men in similar positions, making just 77 cents to the dollar, the legislation was an effort to increase protections for women suing for gender discrimination. Businessweek described the legislation this way:

The bill, sponsored by Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, would increase potential damages to plaintiffs in pay- discrimination suits and enhance the legal burden on employers to show that pay disparities aren’t gender-based. It would create a grant program to train women on how to negotiate with employers on their pay.

From the Maddow Blog:   READ MORE

Jesus or Ayn Rand - can conservatives claim both?

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN)– Can a person follow Ayn Rand and Jesus?

That’s the question posed by a provocative media campaign that claims that some prominent conservative leaders cannot serve two masters: Jesus and the controversial author of  "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand.

The American Values Network, a group of political activists and pastors, sparked a debate when it recently released a video challenging some conservative and Republican leaders’ professed admiration for Rand,  an atheist who saw selfishness as a virtue and celebrated unfettered capitalism.

Eric Sapp,  AVN’s executive director, said the Republican Party cannot portray itself as a defender of Christian values and then defend the worldview of "the patron saint of selfishness" who scorned religion and compassion.

Sapp singled out Republican leaders such as Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh after all of them expressed admiration for Rand.
Ryan,  architect of the GOP’s propsed budget and Medicare plan, once said that Rand’s philosophy was “sorely needed right now,” and that she did a great job of explaining “the morality of capitalism.”

Sapp sees little morality in Rand's worldview:   READ MORE

Tea Party Focus Turns to Senate and Shake-Up

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
looks on as Republican leadership speaks to
reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington,
May 8, 2012. (Photo: Luke Sharrett /
The New York Times)

Sunday, 13 May 2012 09:27  
By Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer, 
The New York Times News Service | Report 

Washington - The primary victory of a Tea Party-blessed candidate in Indiana illustrates how closely Republican hopes for a majority in the Senate are tied to candidates who pledge to infuse the chamber with the deep-seated conservatism that has been the hallmark of the House since the Republicans gained control in 2010.

Richard E. Mourdock, who last week defeated Senator Richard G. Lugar, a six-term incumbent, promises to bring an uncompromising ideology to Capitol Hill if he prevails in November. And he is not the only Senate candidate who contends that Senate Republicans are badly in need of new blood.

In Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas, Republican Senate candidates are vying for the mantle of Tea Party outsider. A number of them say that they would seek to press an agenda that is generally to the right of the minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and that they would demand a deeper policy role for the Senate’s growing circle of staunch conservatives.

Some say they have not decided whether they would support Mr. McConnell, who could find himself contending with the type of fractious rank and file that has vexed the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio.  READ MORE

Republican 'War on Women' Backfires

The current 'war on women' is just another way for
the Republicans to build their bridge to the
17th century. (photo: Getty Images)

By Mark Weisbrot, The Sacramento Bee

21 April 12

he Republicans' gamble that they could ride a backlash against the Obama administration's efforts to increase the availability of contraception has gone terribly bad. It turns out that most Americans, especially women, agree that insurance companies should have to cover contraception - for example, birth-control pills - in their health insurance plans.

One result of this battle has been a record gender gap in the presidential race, with President Obama leading likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney by a huge margin of 57 percent to 38 percent among women registered voters.

A recent Gallup poll of swing states has Obama leading by a 2-1 margin among women under 50.

Romney will try to narrow this gap in the general election, but it may not be so easy. He is on the record saying that he would like to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood, as well as eliminate federal funding under the Title X program. This is a federal program that provides grants that pay for reproductive health services, including birth control and cancer screening - but not abortion - for millions of Americans, mostly women.  READ MORE

Why Keystone XL, War With Iran, and "Drill Baby Drill" Will Actually Raise Gas Prices

Photo Credit: SkyTruth

Republican energy policies are deliberately designed to raise gas prices in the short, near, mid, and long term -- and undermine America's economy and security to boot.

March 20, 2012

While Newt Gingrich travels the country extolling the power of a magical plan to lower gasoline prices (perhaps revolving around unicorns towing our cars), a simple fact:

The Republican policy agenda will lead to increased gasoline prices at the pump in the short, near, mid, and long term while undermining the American economy and American security.

While there are a plethora of other elements, let’s narrow down to just four key Republican agenda items:

  READ MORE

The Koch brothers' campaign to kill social security

The rightwing industrialists have spent millions funding opinion-forming propaganda to undermine a vital public service
 Robert Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 June 2011 12.30 EDT


The Brave New Foundation's new film, Counter the Koch Billions; Protect Social Security. Video: Brave New Foundation




Documents and interviews unearthed in recent months by Brave New Foundation researchers illustrate a $28.4m Koch business that has manufactured 297 commentaries, 200 reports, 56 studies and six books distorting social security's effectiveness and purpose. Together, the publications reveal a vast cottage industry comprised of Koch brothers' spokespeople, front groups, thinktanks, academics and elected officials, which has built a self-sustaining echo chamber to transform fringe ideas into popular mainstream public policy arguments.
"The Koch brothers job is to do everything they can to dismember government in general," Senator Bernie Sanders says in this video. "If you can destroy social security, you will have gone a long way forward in that effort."   READ MORE


 

Republican Party Is Rotted and Collapsing from Within -- And We Can Thank Super PACs for Exposing It

Super PACs are an affront to the democratic process, but they are hastening the Republican Party's fall.

March 26, 2012

They are anti-democratic and turning the 2012 presidential campaign into an extreme sport for the wealthy, but they are destroying the modern Republican Party in the process. Call it the paradox of the Super PACs. 

 

These big-money operations have made a mockery of campaign finance laws and even the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling by being shadow campaigns for candidates and giving a handful of rich people an unprecedented level of power in the presidential race. But perhaps we also should thank the multi-millionaires writing outsized checks to benefit Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum because their obstinate crusades—and Mitt Romney’s erratic replies—keep reminding anyone paying attention that today's Republican Party is not just a mess, but is collapsing from within.

 

It is not as if the Democrats are a model of unity—although they may have more discipline than today’s GOP. Rather, the super PAC-funded media wars among the Republicans have brought a breach into the open that the GOP establishment can no longer contain: the fight between the Republican Party's hardened right (religious conservatives and Tea Partiers) and the party's business-first corporatists.

  READ MORE

Georgia lawmaker compares women to cows and pigs

By David Edwards
Friday, March 9, 2012 14:41 EST

Republican Georgia state Rep. Terry England says that his experience with cows, pigs and chickens has proven to him that women should be forced to have their babies after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

In a debate over Georgia House Bill 954, which would ban abortions after 20 weeks even if the baby is not expected to live, England recalled the time he had spent with livestock.

“Life gives us many experiences,” he explained. “I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive — delivering pigs, dead and alive. … It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.”

England continued: “You know a few years ago, I had a man come to me in our store, it was when we were debating, talking about dog and hog hunting, I believe, and at that point there was some language inserted in there that dealt with chicken fighting. And the young man called me to the side and he said, ‘I want to tell you one thing.’ And y’all, this is salt of the Earth people I’m talking about, someone I would have never in a hundred years expected to tell me what he told me that day.”  READ MORE


Rep. Terry England compares women to cows, pigs and chickens. from Bryan Long on Vimeo.

Bill Maher | Republican Debate Review

Bill Maher, Reader Supported News

26 February 12

he Republicans sure have the right symbol with the elephant. Republican debates are nothing but elephants in the room.

The biggest of which must be: to someone out there who's hurting, they spend the whole two hours yammering away about earmarks and illegal immigrants and contraception and every other peripheral, wish-I-had-the-time-to-worry-about-it issue they can think of.

Then there is the elephant of how they all - with the sometime exception of Ron Paul - nod along to insane statements just because they don't want to ever look like they're to the left of anybody, on anything, especially the evilness of Barack Obama. So Wednesday night when Newt said the president of the United States had a history of practicing infanticide... yep, yep, yessir, that's what he does all right. Clubs infants like baby seals in his spare time. Ike played golf, Kennedy liked boating...

Ron Paul said foreign aid just helps our enemies. Which, I believe, would make Israel and Egypt our two biggest enemies. Yup, yup, hate foreign aid. A meaningless percentage of the budget, btw.

Newt said where government becomes the central provider of services, it's a move towards tyranny - yeah, except in all the countries where it isn't, like all of Scandanavia and much of Europe. Today a barium enema paid for by medicare, tomorrow Poland.  READ MORE

Why the GOP Is Trying to Pin High Gas Prices on Obama (and Gullible Americans Are Falling for It)

The Republicans are hoping to blame this rise in the price of gas on Obama's environmentally friendly policies. But here are two major problems with their story.

February 27, 2012

President Obama seems to be enjoying some good luck in that the economy appears to be picking up just in time for his re-election campaign. While the economy is still weak by almost any measure, growth is likely to be in the 2.5-3.0 percent range for 2012. This should lead to the creation of close to two million jobs and a modest drop in the unemployment rate.

That is not much to cheer about in an economy that is still down close to ten million jobs from its trend level, however compared to the recent past, this is good news. And research shows that voters tend to focus primarily on the direction of change. This means that if the unemployment rate is falling and the economy is creating jobs at a respectable pace throughout the year, President Obama stands a very good chance of being re-elected in November.

This explains the decision of the Republican Party to focus on the price of gas. The price of gas has long played a pivotal role in US politics. High gas prices will be forever a symbol of the economic malaise of the Carter presidency in the late '70s. The drop in gas prices under President Reagan was associated with a resurgence of America's political and economic power.

The fact that both the rise in the price of oil in the '70s and the subsequent decline in the '80s had little to do with domestic policy decisions and much more with international politics (e.g. the Iranian revolution in 1979) mattered little. President Carter got the blame for events beyond his control and President Reagan got the credit.

The Republicans are hoping to benefit from this pattern again in the fall election.   READ MORE

The Sad Race for Bottom on the Loony Right

As Santorum and Romney battle for the extremist vote, progressives should be worried, not gloating.

February 27, 2012

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.

But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.

Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

  READ MORE

Martin Bashir Exposes The Great Republican Hoax

January 28, 2012 06:30 PM
By karoli 

Martin Bashir may be the most underrated show host on cable television. His show is consistently smart, loaded with facts and good discussion without the incessant screaming and fireworks of other cable news shows. His interview of Rep. Joe Walsh was masterful and yet, polite. Which is why when Bashir closes his Thursday show with a three-minute comment where he's clearly a bit angry, it gets my attention.
  READ MORE

Trusting the Candidates With Indefinite Detention

January 18, 2012
Posted by Amy Davidson

Can a person trust Mitt Romney, and with what? All sorts of people, from all ideological directions, have asked this, usually with regard to a specific position on an issue like abortion or gun ownership. It was in an attempt to establish his credibility on the latter issue that Romney, in the candidates’ debate in South Carolina on Monday night, tried to remember the animal that he’d recently taken a shot at—not a moose, he decided, but an elk. The question is maddening enough when the parameters are clear—when, for example, he and the other candidates say what the rate in the highest federal income tax bracket should be. (Romney: twenty-five per cent; Ron Paul: “zero per cent. What’s so bad about that?”) Trust, and its opposite, are also behind the calls for Romney to release his tax returns.

More broadly, do we trust Romney or any candidate with power?
  READ MORE
 

Televangelist Pat Robertson joins ‘Obama dictatorship’ conspiracy

Pat Robertson

By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 15:43 EST

Even though the claim is wildly inaccurate, President Barack Obama’s critics have for years been calling him a “dictator,” and on Wednesday morning televangelist Pat Robertson joined the conspiracy parade by insisting that Obama secretly “wants to take control of every aspect of this nation by the federal government.”

“If you want a dictatorship, then that’s the way to get it because he’s giving it to you,” the 81-year-old said.
It wasn’t clear what exactly Robertson was talking about, other than making rambling allegations, but the claim that Obama wants to become a “dictator” springs from conservative backlash against President George W. Bush’s bailout of Chrysler and General Motors — a policy the Obama administration adopted and furthered to a considerable extent.

Conservatives began hurling allegations of a creeping dictatorship when the government effectively fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner after it had taken a large equity stake in the company to help them avoid complete collapse. In reality, the administration’s move saved tens of thousands of jobs — some say more — and GM has since returned to profit-making, allowing them to begin repaying the massive $49.9 billion given by taxpayers.

But most disappointing to many Republicans: While President Obama definitely owns the auto bailouts, Bush won’t stop taking credit for them.

“I didn’t want there to be 21 percent unemployment,” the former president told an audience in Las Vegas on Monday. “Sometimes circumstances get in the way of philosophy. I said, ‘No depression.’”
READ MORE

US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins

Mitt Romney's personal wealth is double that of the
last eight US presidents combined.
Photograph: TJ Kirkpatrick/Corbis

Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions
 Gary Youngeguardian.co.uk,
Sunday 29 January 2012 15.30 EST


Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s. Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented people, they will "self-deport".

Given the general state of the Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention. Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.

So the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."

The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.
READ MORE