Union Busting Republicans

Republicans balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

Wisconsin Power Play

"Wisconsin Power Play" by Paul Krugman

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers — namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning — are exempted from the ban; it’s as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

source: New York Times, 20 February 2011, by Paul Krugman

Republican Racist Agenda

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Thomas Frank - The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule -

Prolifers Condone Extralegal Vigilantism?

The unhinged GOP base condones extralegal vigilantism?

Vigilantism does have deep roots in the USA. Let's see, Emmit Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, The Uni-bomber, Timmothy McVey.......I guess it's just the American way. Forget the laws, forget the court system, just sell military grade weapons and gin-up the bitter gun-toting GOP base.....and insto presto dead doctors in churches all across America.

Shoud we sing "America the Beautiful" or "God Bless America" for our special brand of vigilantism.

Frank Schaeffer Exposes "Pro-Life" Movement's Domestic Terror Role

The GOP's Feigned Outrage

From the editorial pages of Wall Street Journal: Those who followed news coverage of the "tea party" protests last month will recall that one target of the partiers' ire was the TARP bailout of the banking system -- a policy of the Bush administration that President Obama has carried on.

And yet, in a television interview last month, we find no less a representative of the late administration than former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsing the protesters' accusations with what is, for him, considerable enthusiasm. "I thought the tea parties were great," he told Fox News's Sean Hannity. "It's basically a very healthy development."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the Republican Party's few remaining stars, has also cheered the public's willingness to "fight back against Wall Street and Washington insiders."

A Republican who wants to fight Wall Street! A Bush official who thinks protesting Bush policies is "great"! Contemplating these curiosities, we begin to realize how easy it has been for conservatives to swing back into full-throated opposition only months after their cataclysmic defeat. And also to understand why the obituaries for the GOP might be just a tad premature.

After all, there's something about conservatives' ferocious "No" that precisely fits the temper of the times. For all the past year's Democratic victories, the GOP still owns outrage, still has an enormous capacity to summon up offense, to elevate every perceived slight into an unprecedented imposition upon both the hard-working citizen and freedom itself.

What really dazzles the observer, though, is conservatives' fury over things for which they are themselves responsible.

As an example of this habit of mind, consider the essay that Mr. Gingrich published in Human Events last week. "The current liberal bloodlust over interrogations," he wrote, referring to the Nancy Pelosi-CIA flap, is merely "the Left's attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents." And yet, in a different essay he published on the very same day (this one in the Washington Times), Mr. Gingrich regretted that, in all the years of Republican rule, "there was a strategic failure to root out the left and the special interests of the left."

Mr. Gingrich's side failed to "root out" and destroy their opponents; now he imagines that this is what is being done to his team.

Psychotherapists might call this "projection," and something similar pervades the essay the remarkable Mr. Gingrich published only two days later in the Washington Post. Here the former speaker can be found calling for a populist revolt in the "great tradition of political movements rising against arrogant, corrupt elites."

A healthy sentiment, to be sure, except for the fact that "elites" are exactly what decades of conservative rule gave us by unleashing the banks, smashing the unions, and funneling the economy's gains into the hands of the rich.

Then there are the "lobbyists" whom Mr. Gingrich accuses of running state governments here and there. By this he means "lobbyists for the various unions" who get their way "through bureaucracies seeking to impose the values of a militant left."

Even so, rule by lobbyists is a subject Mr. Gingrich should know well. It was while he was House speaker, for example, that his No. 3, Tom DeLay, launched the famous "K Street Strategy," which sought to make Gucci Gulch the exclusive preserve of the Republican Party.

It was Mr. Gingrich's own beloved House freshmen of 1994, the last bunch of conservative populists to come down the pike, who made the Republican Revolution into a fundraising bonanza. And it was public outrage over the conspicuous purchase of government favors by the moneyed that led to the Democratic triumphs of 2006 and 2008.

Turning to the government of New York state, Mr. Gingrich declares that it has "impoverished the Upstate region to the point where it is a vast zone of no jobs and no opportunities." Oddly, Mr. Gingrich appears to believe that deindustrialization is the direct result of governance by a political machine in Albany.

In fact, deindustrialization also occurred all across the Midwest. As it ground on through the Reagan years and the '90s, it was the investor class who called the shots, not the hirelings of organized labor.

And as our factories and steel mills were shuttered an army of politicians and management theorists assured us that the waning of industrial America was the next stage in human development, the coming of the glorious age of information. The most ecstatic and even otherworldly of these was, of course, Newt Gingrich.

In his much-discussed speech last Thursday, Mr. Cheney intoned, "We hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative." And so we do: A form of protest that persistently misses the point, a type of populism that only empowers the elite, and a brand of idealism that cohabits comfortably with corruption. (source: The Wall Street Journal)

Muzzling GOP Chairman Michael Steele

According to the Washington Post: "After two weeks of public drubbing over comments that included criticism of radio host Rush Limbaugh and a reference to abortion as a matter of "individual choice," Steele is taking steps to address some of the concerns about his early gaffes. He has called a halt to his television appearances and curtailed national media interviews."

(source: Washington Post "Steele's Focus Turns to Nuts and Bolts" by Perry Bacon Jr.)

GOP Wipeout

"We Blew It: A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered," by P.J. O'Rourke, published in the Weekly Standard on 17 November 2008:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Continue reading "We Blew It" here.

GOP Death Match

This is great! I just like to microwave some popcorn and watch the GOP Death Match.

ALL of the "rumors" and "gossip" about Sarah Palin comes from WITHIN the GOP. ALL of it. The Dems and other assorted Obama supporters are just gleefully celebrating President Obama.

We KNEW from the get-go that Sarah Palin was an intellectual fly-weight, so it's not news that the GOP is confirming her lack of knowledge beyond hunting moose and field dressing caribu. Like I've said before, the GOP seems to be in love with the stupidest person in the room to represent them. "C" students from Jr. Colleges and the bottom of the class at the Naval Academy and 57 million bone heads will pull the lever for the "Republican" regardless of their qualifications.....what a bunch of losers.

Y'all overlooked Governor Bobby Jingal who is a Rhodes Scholar. For what! Caribu Barbie. You can dress her up, but you can't take her out.

If Sarah were politically savvy, which I don't doubt (notice how I said savvy, not smart....cause old girl is as dumb as a box of rocks), but she'll lobby for Ted Stevens to "retire" and take over his seat in the Senate. There she can be a pain in the a$$ to Senator McCain.

But, is she were smart (and boy isn't that a stretch), she'd forgo ANY political career and make friends with the Hollywood set to get $PAID$ with her own talk show. She'll get clothing allowances up the wazooo, free travel, 5-star hotels, limos, and all of the bling that a Wasilla Hillbilly can handle. She can garner $$$ for speaking engagements and make more money in one month than she'll EVER make as a mayor, governor, senator or vice president.

If she decides to go the Hollywood route, then she can be just a quirky and dumb as she wants to be. She could make a fortune and stay real.
Drop politics and go for the gold.

Right Wing Crack-up

While the Dems are doing the Obama dance, the Republicans are cracking-up. In the New York Times, article "Unease in the Conservative Commentariat" by Patricia Cohen states: Today, President Bush’s policies and the collapse of Wall Street have led longtime conservatives to conflicting conclusions about where the Republican Party should be headed. And the disillusioned commentary of credentialed conservatives...may be the sound of a movement splintering at its foundation — a movement whose intellectuals have long been uneasy with, for example, the rising power, in the Bush years, of evangelicals, with their categorical faith in creationism and distrust of scientific reason.

Read the links below to witness a few examples of conservative columnists:

Peggy Noonan: "Palin's Failin'"
Kathleen Parker: "Palin Problem"
David Brooks: "The Class War Before Palin"
Christopher Buckley: "Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama"
George Will: "Is McCain Fit for the Presidency?"
Christopher Hitchens: "Vote for Obama: McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace."

Bill Buckley's Son Endorses Obama

Christopher Buckley wrote in the Daily Beast, "Sorry Dad, I'm Voting for Obama."  The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

...As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Bush's Economy

Americans should be admired for their patience and fortitude. In a matter of less than eight years, the misguided policies and ineptitude of their not so great leader have damaged their country's reputation and their pockets, perhaps irreparably.

Who could possibly have imagined that in such a short period a massive Federal budget surplus of $128 billion would be frittered away to be replaced with a $ 357 billion deficit? And who can blame Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota for predicting Bush “will be remembered as the most fiscally irresponsible president in our nation's history”?

Who would have believed when Bush moved into the White House that, eight years later, the mighty dollar would be turned into funny money to the extent that Egyptian landlords are now demanding Euros instead?

Not so long ago, even the most reputed financial seer would have been ridiculed if he or she had divined the fire sale of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual or the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

Bear Stearns managed to survive the crash of 1929, Washington Mutual has been in business since 1889 and Lehman Brothers was founded even earlier in 1847. Is it mere coincidence that three “rock solid” institutions should collapse on Bush's watch?
Bush on the economic collapse:

Bill Kristol's Message to McCain: Fire the Campaign

Bill Kristol's message to McCain, "Fire the Campaign":

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.

He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless — and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.

But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership.

The 2008 campaign is now about something very big — both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller.

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

The hope for McCain and Palin is that they still have pretty good favorable ratings from the voters. The American people have by no means turned decisively against them.

The bad news, of course, is that right now Obama’s approval/disapproval rating is better than McCain’s. Indeed, Obama’s is a bit higher than it was a month ago. That suggests the failure of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama.

So drop them.

Read the entire New York Times article, "Fire the Campaign," by Bill Kristol here.

Bailout Bush

David Brooks: Palin in a Fatal Cancer for the GOP

From Think Progress:  "Speaking at an Atlantic luncheon Monday, New York Times columnist David Brooks said Gov. Sarah Palin “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party” because of her tendency to “scorn ideas entirely,” comparing her to President Bush":

John McCain is a Scary Muther-shut-yo-mouth

Presidential Politics? US Senate to Vote on Bailout Plan

To make Republican Senator John McCain look good, the House Republicans threw their vote to humiliate Nancy Pelosi and push for a Senate vote. That way, Republican John McCain can look like he actually DID something. So, in a highly unusual manoeuvre, Senate leaders agreed last night to vote this evening on the package before the lower house has passed it. Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader received unanimous consent for a vote on the bail-out.

It's the same Republican dirty tricks, and the Democrats as well as the American people keep voting these greedy money changers into office.

The McCain campaign needed to do something before the Vice Presidential Gaff-off on Thrusday.

John McCain says the Economy is Fundamentally Strong

Is John McCain stupid? Perhaps graduating at the extreme bottom of the Naval Academy 894/899 is an indication of Mr. McCain's intellectual ability. McCain's dismal academic record could be held against Obama's tippity top of his class at Harvard. Obama graduated magna cum laude, which for those who are Latin challenged, this is number 1 in his Harvard Law School class. Senator Obama made straight A's all day every day in Law School, while Senator McCain managed to graduate fifth from the bottom of his class. As for Sarah Palin's transcripts and grades from her Jr. College in Idaho, complete silence. If she even had one A on her transcript, the GOP would be touting her intellectual abilities. It's just moose hunting and PTA hockey momming, not one word about Mrs. Palin's intellectual abilities. In a word, Republicans are stupid. Need proof? Look at their academic transcripts.

When Fascism Comes to America, it will be Wrapped in a Flag and Carrying a Cross

Sinclair Lewis declared, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." Republican fascism is alive an well on Wall Street as the feds continue to reward their corporate cronies with tax-funded bailouts. Republican fascism got new life from the GOP Vice Presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin. McCain took the Republican mantle of a socialized financial markets and wrapped his candidacy behind the flag skirt of his bible toting, gun slinging, moose killing, self-proclaimed hockey mom.

As editorialized in the India Daily article by Pijush Lodh:

Hillary Clinton showed for the first time that blatant racism could bring White House within reach of anyone. Republicans learnt and acted fast with their version of Hillary – the Sarah Palin phenomenon.

Sarah Palin is attracting the racists of America who favors color of skin above reality, the bible over common sense, and fascism over the root cause of financial trouble for common Americans.
American democracy faces its biggest challenge. The seeds of a second civil war and perhaps outright secession are in place with racism and nepotism taking center stage of anything.

No democracy can survive without participation of people who understand the best for themselves. America is failing in its biggest challenge – it is a crumbling democracy.

One thing is good – if McCain-Palin ticket wins, they will face the consequence of eight years of totally failed policies of the Republicans. The bad thing is that the Supreme Court will be restructured to protect the racism and Christian right wing agenda for a long time.

Who is responsible for this? Yes, you got it. It is the rural American population that just cannot get over the racism and Christian rights.

Perhaps a much more financial meltdown, perhaps $20 gas price, skyrocketing food prices, and a total collapse is real estate with massive foreclosures will teach Americans a lesson on the after effects of racism.

We have seen this before. Nazi Germany crumbled into ground when Germans chose racism and fascism over common sense. We will see it again in America. The problem lies in the fact not all Germans were racists, not all American have lost common sense, but we all will suffer together as this great super power crumbles into ground because of ignorance and arrogance.

Tom Toles captures the whole Wall Street mess so well. We are such fans of Tom Toles artistry. It's amazing to see how an artist draws pictures that encapsulates the whole bloody scene of the Wall Street financial fiasco. Dan Froomkin has been singing Mr. Toles praises for quite a while.