The House Majority Whip Spoke At a White Supremacist Conference

"I didn't know..." Yeah! Right! His staff doesn't vet!

We're having trouble with this one.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (LA) has admitted to being featured as a speaker at a conference of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO)--a white supremacist group run by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. As Majority Whip, Scalise is the third most powerful congressman in the House of Representatives. So how does he still have his job?

Scalise has voted against making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday twice. He has also claimed that he didn't know the white supremacist conference he was attended had a hateful agenda. But experts call these claims extremely dubious.

The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies EURO as a well-known "hate group led by America's most famous white supremacist". Along with USA Today and the Chicago Tribune, they have called on Scalise to resign. We agree.

 Tell Representative Steve Scalise his actions are offensive. It's time to resign!

PETITION TO HOUSE SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Demand Representative Steve Scalise's resignation as Majority Whip today! Click Here

Another Right-Wing Phony Embroiled in Sex Scandal -- Why Does Sexual Hypocrisy Flourish on the Right?

Dinesh D’Souza

Let’s call this Conservative Chaos Theory. Without hypocrisy, the conservative mind would explode from the sheer force of its eternal contradictions.

October 17, 2012

Forty years ago, conservatives awakened to the fact that their agenda was getting little traction in American public life. So they hatched a plan turn things around. Pooling their considerable financial resources, they would invest in the marketplace of ideas and fund books, professors, journalists – anything to promote, amplify, and disseminate their right-wing worldview. In short, they would buy the American mind.

Quite a bargain, that. One of their most successful investments was the support of an eager young man who got his start writing for the Dartmouth Review , a conservative newspaper founded in 1980 by disgruntled students who thought that the college’s daily paper was way too liberal. Dinesh D’Souza was carefully groomed to flower into what he is today – a vitriolic, one-sided, outrageously craven wingnut who will say anything and everything as long as it supports the most rancid right-wing agenda. You might think of him as the inhabitant of the deepest, darkest spot in our political discourse, the Mariana Trench of American intellectual life.    READ MORE

Meet the Christian Right-Wing Multi-Billionaire Out to Frack Our World

Philip Anschutz is involved in a lawsuit trying to overturn a fracking ban.

May 13, 2012

He is a billionaire several times over, a supporter of conservative causes, candidates, and organizations, including campaigns of the anti-immigrant former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo and the Intelligent Design-peddling Discovery Institute, and he's been a backer of anti-gay rights initiatives. He owns The Weekly Standard, a highly partisan conservative magazine, recently sold the conservative Examiner newspapers, but rarely will speak to the press.

After devoting years of building a massive Disneyesque entertainment complex in Los Angeles called L.A. Live - which tapped into tens of millions of government dollars -- he now has his eyes on building a $1 billion stadium in L.A. and securing a National Football League team for the city. He's also been putting the finishing touches on a deal that would have his company running the Coliseum complex in Oakland, California.

He is a native Kansan, and although he's not related to the multi-billionaire Kansas Koch Brothers, he certainly shares many of their interests.

We're talking Philip Anschutz, who, in 1999, was labeled the nation's "greediest executive" by Fortune magazine.

The Anschutz fortune  READ MORE

How the Right's Smear Machine Started

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

09 March 12

mericans sometimes wonder how the nation’s political process got so unspeakably nasty with vitriol pouring forth especially from right-wing voices like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, to name just a few. Yet, whenever called on this ugliness, conservatives insist that they are the real victims, picked on by the Left.

This destructive and whiny dynamic has existed at least since the late 1960s when angry passions spilled over from the Vietnam War and grew worse after Richard Nixon exploited Democratic dissension on the war to win the White House in 1968 – and then continued the war for another four nasty years.

As president, Nixon also responded to the fury splintering American society with wedge issues, appealing to the "silent majority" and denouncing anti-war protesters as "bums." He rode that divisive formula to a landslide victory in November 1972 but soon ensnared himself in the Watergate political spying scandal that drove him from office in August 1974.

Out of all that anger emerged an American Right that believed, as an article of faith, that the Democrats and the "liberal press" had turned Nixon’s run-of-the-mill indiscretions in Watergate into a constitutional crisis to undo Nixon’s overwhelming electoral mandate of 1972.

So, over the next two decades – with Nixon in the background egging on Republican politicians – the Right built an attack machine that was designed to defend against "another Watergate" but also was available to destroy the "liberal" enemy.   READ MORE

The Right-Wing Propagandist Charles Murray Exposes the Truth About Conservatives -- They Hate Poor People, White and Black

Charles Murray right wing loser/hater/pundit

As usual, Charles Murray twists and invents economic arguments to demonize poor people. But this time, his targets are white.

February 13, 2012

The article first appeared in the Philadelphia City Paper. Click here to read more great content from them. 

Charles Murray, a leading right-wing polemicist, has spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, is an act of more equal opportunity opprobrium, arguing that white working class America is in crisis because it has a fucked up and backward culture. And his main example is Philadelphia's Fishtown.

Murray published summaries of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 in the Wall Street Journal and another in the right-wing New Criterion. His argument is a mean and vicious slander against the people of Fishtown and working class people everywhere, detailing the decline of what he calls the “Founding virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion amongst the rabble. It's based on the Philadelphia neighborhood, but Murray uses “Fishtown” as an exemplar to generalize about white Americans with “no academic degree higher than a high school diploma...[and unemployed or working in] a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.”

Murray complains that Fishtown residents are increasingly less moral than people in Belmont, based on the wealthy white Boston suburb full of “successful people in managerial and professional occupations―the elites who are in positions of influence over the nation’s economy, media, intellectual life, and politics.” Which is where Mitt Romney lives―so I suppose he offers a lesson in hypocrisy, avarice and greed, huh? But beyond Murray's poisonous politics, the biggest problem is that his argument is wrong.    READ MORE

Has the Market Rejected the Religious Right's Hateful Social Agenda?

It's clear from advertising that the market does not favor the GOP's social agenda.

February 8, 2012

“Gen X” was popularized as an advertising term. Marketers used the label to describe the young people of the late ‘80s. The focus was on how to sell goods to the MTV generation.

Advertisements at that time, just as one example, started to feature unmarried couples to appeal to this group of consumers. This was a first and in the early ‘90s it was pushing the envelope. It apparently resonated. The advertisers gauged correctly: They successfully sold their products to Americans with the now documented lowest marriage rate in history.

The argument could be made (mainly by those who want to take us back to a mythical innocent time of the supposedly recent past) that it’s advertisers who’ve corrupted our culture and changed what’s socially acceptable through their manipulations. Or, if you have sold your proverbial soul to the gods of unfettered commerce – like the rightwing self-described Culture Warriors, or the (formerly) Moral (former) Majority – advertisements are the market speaking for the greater culture at large. And the greater culture, funny enough, largely disagrees with the right-wing.  READ MORE

2011: The Year The Right-Wing Media's Foreign Policy Argument Fell Apart

Rightwing headline

Since President Obama took office, right-wing media have argued that his foreign policy is making the United States less safe and is bent on attacking Israel. Those attacks have continued in 2011, even as the Obama administration has overseen the death of Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Anwar Al-Awlaki, repeatedly supported Israel, and been praised by Israeli leaders. Read More