Map and field

McCain (R-AZ) and Graham(R-SC) Look Like Anti-American Fools in Unfounded Attacks on Susan Rice Instead of the Terrorists

McCain (R-AZ) and Graham(R-SC) Look Like Anti-American Fools in Unfounded Attacks on Susan Rice Instead of the Terrorists

The Republican gang-up on Susan Rice is a puzzler. Not only does it make no policy sense to blame the U.N. ambassador for any aspect of the killings at Benghazi, Libya, it makes no political sense either.

So far five GOP senators have objected to the idea of President Obama nominating Rice to be the next secretary of state. Two of those senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—are party leaders on foreign policy and frequent visitors to TV news studios. This is what makes the campaign particularly bizarre. Their case against her is not just unusually flimsy and transparently partisan; It also shines a glaring light on their own brazen hypocrisy (something most politicians do all they can to avoid).

First, the facts. The weekend after terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, killing four officials including the ambassador to Libya, Susan Rice went on the talk shows to deliver the administration’s position. The official line at the time was that the attack began as a spontaneous protest—similar to the one that sparked violent demonstrations outside U.S. embassies in Egypt and elsewhere—to an American-made anti-Muslim movie that had gone viral on the Internet. As it turned out, and as she explained in a meeting with senators on Tuesday, Rice was only reciting an unclassified “talking points” sheet prepared by the U.S. intelligence community. Acting CIA Director Michael Morrel, who joined Rice at the meeting, affirmed that those talking points were consistent with classified intelligence reports at the time. He also noted that, to the extent that Rice’s authorized comments differed from the top-secret version (for instance, they left out the finding that a jihadist group was involved in the attack), it was for security reasons.

Was this an intelligence foul-up, worthy of a congressional hearing or two? Possibly. Was there a scandalous cover-up? Doubtful. Whatever an investigation turns up, is all this a valid excuse for denying higher office to the ambassador who went on TV and recited the intelligence community’s talking points? Of course not. More than that, the five senators must know it’s absurd, so trumped-up are their rationales for thinking otherwise.

Here’s what McCain said on Fox News, after the meeting with Rice and Morrel:

We knew in hours of all the details when we got bin Laden, they’re making a movie out of it, and [yet] here we are, ten weeks later [i.e., after the Benghazi attack] finally our ambassador to the United Nations, who appeared on every national Sunday show, is now saying that she gave false information concerning how this tragedy happened.

I don’t know if this is, as Talking Points Memo Editor Josh Marshall put it, the “stupidest thing McCain ever said,” but it’s probably one of the three or four most desperate. First, we knew everything about the raid on Bin Laden’s compound so quickly because (this should be really obvious, senator) the commandos who did it, our own Navy SEALs, were there. They streamed it live. By contrast, the details of a firefight at a remote outpost in Libya are more likely than not to be shrouded in confusion and ambiguity, for a while. Second, giving “false information,” which is legal parlance for “lying,” is an over-the-top characterization of what Rice did. Third (and this really should shut the door on the whole business), when McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election, he forever disqualified himself from commenting on any nominee for any high office—and the media should treat any such comments accordingly.

Sen. Graham has made many foolish remarks in this sorry saga as well, but the jaw-dropper is his comparison, also made after Tuesday’s meeting, between Rice and John Bolton, who was President George W. Bush’s controversial (and ultimately rejected) nominee for U.N. ambassador. As Graham summarized the Bolton fight, “Democrats dug in their heels and said, ‘We’re not going to vote, we’re not going to consider this nomination until we get basic answers to our concerns.’ ” His point, presumably, was that he plans to do the same if Obama nominates Rice for secretary of state.

There are several differences between Bolton and Rice. For instance, Bolton had made highly critical statements about the legitimacy of the United Nations—and even of international law. Many Democrats and a few Republicans thought these were inappropriate sentiments for a U.N. ambassador. The Democrats held up Bolton’s nomination, pending the release of documents concerning precisely those sentiments—not some peripheral matter over which the nominee had no say or control.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.)—who seems to be auditioning for the “third amigo” now that Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) is retiring, leaving McCain and Graham bereft of a traveling companion—says she will try to block the confirmation of any nominee for secretary of state. “My view is we should hold on this until we get sufficient information” on Benghazi, she said. Well, at least she’s honest about her motives.

McCain and Graham both lied to America about WMD and manipulated the nation into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq. They have no credibility. They have never apologized or retracted their lies. Why they have not been tared and feathered and sent to live in exile is the only real mystery. There have been attacks on U.S. embassies during the Bush 43 and Reagan administrations, many of these same conservative hypocrites did not go looking for someone to scapegoat in those Republican administrations, Conservative Republican Freak Whitewashes Bush's History To Bash Obama Over Embassy Attack

Gun Enthusiast Kills 17-Year-Old for Playing Loud Music; Lawyer Says He Acted "Very Responsibly"

Extending Unemployment Insurance Would Create 300,000 Jobs Next Year

Scientific advice in the EU to ensure the sustainability of populations of sharks in oceanic waters

The original news release is in Basque, this is a Google translation,  Scientific advice in the EU to ensure the sustainability of populations of sharks in oceanic waters

Scalloped Hammerhead wallpaper

A committee led by AZTI-Tecnalia will provide scientific advice to policy makers in the European Union fishing, shark fishing is sustainable.

Researchers in the Basque technological center, in addition to the advisory group are: the Spanish Oceanographic Institute (EOI) scientists, the French Research Institute of Operation Sea (IFREMER), the French Research Institute for Development (IRD) and the Fisheries and Marine Research Institute of Portugal (ujob). Within the European Community action plan to protect sharks in the work of the European Commission Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries financing and has a duration of 15 months.

The Sharks are caught in fishing nets, and fishing as well as for other types of fish to catch fish in different fishing grounds. Shark fishing in the oceans has increased significantly in recent years, and, therefore, it is necessary to know their status. To this end, the European Commission called CPOA-Shark Action Plan was established in 2009. The main objective of the Plan is to contribute to the European Union fishing fleet to sustainable shark fisheries, as well as the waters of the community, and internationally. The project will examine specifically to catch tuna fishing activities that have the effect of shark populations, taking into account all types of activities, such as the fishing industry, the coastal fishing craft. With this intention, the world's largest tuna fleets in the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian and the Pacific catches of shark species found. Capturing regional fisheries management organization (CCAA) are managed atunketariek (ICCAT in the Atlantic, Indian and IATTCk IOTC and WCPFCk Eastern and Western Pacific, respectively).

Atlantic, Indian and Pacific populations of sharks at sea level is not suitable for scientific knowledge. So, the plan is to get specialized technical advice on fishing sharks and shark species, their role in the marine ecosystem knowledge. AZTI-Tecnalia specialists and consultants from other schools involved in the fishing industry in a balanced way that will help the animals.

AZTI-Tecnalia is leading this project, "Information has been received from the three largest tuna fleet fishing in ocean-caught shark species, effort, size-distribution of fish, about the biology and ecology. The idea of ??the fishing grounds, the missing data is to identify and respond to the priorities, the evaluation of these populations to ensure sustainable management, "says Hilario Murua, AZTI-Tecnalia biologist and" European Community Action Plan for the protection of Sharks "on the scientific advisory committee is responsible for same. "In the second phase, these vulnerable populations to ensure the sustainability of fishing grounds to propose a framework for investigation and follow-up."
Capture a significant increase in

Shark-fishing industry in the world has increased significantly: in 1980, 600,000 tonnes were caught in 2003 and was caught up by 900,000 tonnes. It was a historical peak in 2007, fell to approximately 800,000, and in 2008, 750,000. This trend is due to increase in demand for shark products, mainly to the edges, but the meat, skin and cartilage as well, especially in the Asian markets.

Small coastal sharks caught by European fleets have traditionally, and the scientific community has sufficient information on these fisheries. However, in recent years has increased exploitation of deep sea sharks in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific and the Indian, and receive detailed information on this is not so. This further adds to this problem: too many sharks are caught atunketariek countries, particularly in Asia, the fishing fleet, which operates in the oceans. The history of these ships have been caught in tuna and swordfish, and sharks are caught more oceanic.

Sharks are particularly vulnerable to over-fishing, mainly because of low reproductive capacity. Therefore, excessive fishing and other human impacts on the species of small capacity.

Plutocracy Alert: Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare

Plutocracy Alert: Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare

A gang of brazen CEOs has joined forces to promote economically disastrous and socially irresponsible austerity policies. Many of those same CEOs were bailed out by the American taxpayer after a Wall Street-driven financial crash. Instead of a thank-you, they are showing their appreciation in the form of a coordinated effort to rob Americans of hard-earned retirements, decent medical care and relief for the poorest.

Using the excuse of a phony, manufactured crisis known as the “fiscal cliff” – which isn’t a crisis at all, as economist James K. Galbraith has succinctly explained [3] -- they are gearing up to pull the wool over the public's eyes by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The CEOs are part of the Fix the Debt campaign run by the Peter Peterson [4]-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to unleash tens of millions pushing for a deficit reduction deal that favors the rich in the lame-duck session and beyond.

You can be sure that many more CEOs in addition to the names on the list below sympathize with plans to shred the social safety net and enjoy windfall tax breaks. But these Scrooges are so bold as to publicly announce their desire to pick the pockets of fellow Americans while simultaneously pigging out at the corporate welfare trough. Multitasking!

A generation ago, an American CEO would think twice about announcing utter disregard not only for his neighbors and employees, but also for the economy, which can’t prosper when income is consistently redistributed upward (see Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality for more on that theme). But in the present culture -- even after the Occupy Wall Street movement – these business barons feel perfectly comfortable trumpeting their desire to get richer at your expense.

Here’s a sample of the Fix the Debt CEO Council Hall of Shame. (Download the complete list at the organization’s Web site [5].)

1. Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO, Goldman, Sachs & Co. Blankfein, infamous for describing his financial activities as “God’s work,” shared his attitude toward society with CBS news recently. He explained his keen desire to see Americans lowering their sights for the future. You really have to watch the interview [6]to get the full flavor of Blankfein’s smug assurance that predation can be sold as concern for the nation’s well-being. In addition to trotting out several myths about Social Security’s design and functions, including the bogus notion that retirement age must be raised [7], he gives a pithy summary of what life is going to be like for the 99 percent:

    “You’re going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people’s expectations of what they’re going to get, the entitlements, and what people think they’re going to get, because you’re not going to get it.”

Not if Lloyd Blankfein has anything to do with it. He calls it managing expectations. Here’s another word: theft.

Since the financial crash, Blankfein’s company, Goldman Sachs, has received tens of billions of dollars in what the Economic Policy Journal describes [8] as “direct and indirect succor from the Fed." In sharp contrast to average Americans, when Goldman needed help in the 2008 crisis, a friendly Federal Reserve let Goldman turn into a commercial bank almost overnight, so it could go to the Fed for help 24/7.

2. Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO, General Electric Company. In 2011, President Obama welcomed outsourcing pioneer Jeffrey Immelt to his White House inner circle as chair of a newly created jobs council – a move that was a sharp slap in the face to American workers. Immelt returned the favor by dumping Obama in favor of Mitt Romney in the recent election.

Obviously, supporting disastrous financial deregulation, dodging taxes and helping to destroy American manufacturing has not satisfied Immelt. He’d like to add insult to injury by making sure that people who have been screwed by the reckless activities of short-sighted corporate titans like himself are left to starve in their golden years and go without medical care. And as for the poor, well, couldn’t they be just a little bit poorer? Immelt thinks that would be swell.

After the 2008 crash, the government gave a giant boost [9]to hard-pressed GE Capital, the company’s financing arm, through the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. GE has also helped itself to enormous taxpayer-funded subsidies, especially in green energy.  And guess how much GE paid in taxes in 2010? Nothing. In fact, using what the New York Times describes [10] as its “innovative accounting practices,” it claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion!

3. Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase & Co. At a recent gathering of the Council on Foreign Relations, Jamie Dimon vented his feelings [11] about a number of things that peeve him, from a federal lawsuit brought against JPMorgan Chase to Obama’s failure to adopt the harmful and misguided Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which, among other things, recommended reducing the tax rate for top earners. Dimon has claimed that his bank did not need the TARP funds bestowed on it by the federal government, but there is no question that today his bank borrows funds more cheaply than smaller banks because of the federal government’s implicit too-big-too-fail guarantee. (Dimon is lying about TARP, and even if he did not need those funds directly JP Morgan would have crashed without the rescue of Wall Street in general)

Dimon is deploying a familiar scare tactic [12]on the topic of the so-called fiscal cliff. He’s claiming that his company will be forced to cut down on hiring and so on if a budget plan is not tailored to enrich the wealthy. During a recent visit to India [13], he issued warnings to CNBC-TV18:

    "I've spoken to CEOs who say, you know, absolutely, we are making decisions to protect ourselves from the ‘fiscal cliff’ and those are like investment decisions and hiring decisions.”

Maybe Dimon’s company would be better served figuring out what happened to the $6 billion that recently went up in smoke in the “London Whale” derivatives fiasco [14].

4. W. James McNerney, Jr., chairman, president and CEO, the Boeing Company. McNerney launched at Procter & Gamble, reached high altitude at GE and shot to the stratosphere by becoming head honcho at Boeing in 2005.

Boeing has been a long-time beneficiary of the government’s Export-Import Bank [15], which has financed sales of many of its planes. McNerney chairs President Obama's Export Council, where he works hard to arrange policies that benefit his company. He spent much of 2011 slugging it out with the National Labor Relations Board over moving assembly plants from Washington to South Carolina, a right-to-work state. That got settled, but now the profitable company is in a fight with engineers who don’t want their pensions chopped nearly in half. Boeing’s excuse? It wants to keep the engineers “competitive.” Union members have reported intimidation [16] from the company’s management as the dispute has intensified.

The Boeing boss is now crying “deficit” and asks for your retirement money. Pretty brassy, considering that the company paid not a single penny in taxes between 2008 and 2011. In fact, Citizens for Tax Justice calculates that Boeing actually got money back [17]from the U.S. government over the past decade, “paying a negative 6.5 percent tax rate, even though it was profitable every year from 2002 through 2011.”

There is more at the link. These 4 pigs at the trough serve as good example of the elites entitlement mentality of our ruling plutocrats. They think of themselves like 16th century kings and dukes, entitled by some special mythical right to have wealth that exceeds that owned by some countries. They did not work for that wealth, they move money around on spread sheets. That money or capital exists because workers create products and services that have value. These arrogant twits are getting a free ride courtesy people who actually work for a living, yet Fox Propaganda Channel and Republicans can them the "producers' and call workers the leaches.

The petty stuff the cult of conservatism believes in

Contrary to "Entitlement Society" Rhetoric, Over Nine-Tenths of Entitlement Benefits(Social Security and Medicare)  Go to Elderly, Disabled, or Working Households

Fox News Abruptly Ends Interview After Guest Calls Out The Network For Hyping Benghazi Scandal

Transferring The Wealth From Workers To Conservative Plutocrats- What Anti-American Grover Norquist Tax Pledge Actually Means

Transferring The Wealth From Workers To Conservative Plutocrats- What Anti-American Grover Norquist Tax Pledge Actually Means

This week, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia did what amazingly few elected Republicans do: He said that he cared more about his country than some “twenty year old pledge.”

He means the Americans For Tax Reform Taxpayer Pledge, which is advocated for and enforced by the most powerful American who has never won an election — Grover Norquist.

Chambliss now joins Senator Tom Coburn as one of the few outspoken Republican critics of a position that has infected nearly all of the GOP. It’s not an empty stand; he now risks a primary challenge funded by Norquist’s allies like the Club for Growth.

For two decades, by implicitly threatening every elected Republican with a career-ending injury, Grover Norquist has dominated the right-wing discourse with his strict belief that taxes should only be cut.

He’s been so successful that we’re having a fierce debate that’s only about raising taxes on income over $250,000 by a mere 3% — even though tax rates in general are at a 30-year low and the richest are paying some of the lowest taxes rates in 80 years.

This is the discussion that we are stuck with after Bush’s failed experiment which resulted in the richest 1% now having a greater collective net worth than the bottom 90%.

Everyone agrees we should leave Bush Tax Cuts for the middle class intact which is understandable considering that we are still in a jobs crisis. But, in exchange for keeping that $2,000 a year, what will middle class families give up? Is it worth working two more years before you get your Social Security or reforming Social Security so that it won’t keep up with inflation? Is it worth cutting education or health care for the most vulnerable?

Call Norquist’s pledge what it is: it’s a pledge to cut Medicare. A pledge to cut Social Security, Medicaid for seniors and the disabled, college loans, food stamps… And, it’s a pledge to raise taxes on your kids. Most of all, Norquist’s pledge is a promise to transfer wealth to the richest.

It is a fascinating sociological phenomenon to watch as conservatives who makes at or below the median household income - currently about $52,000 a year - vote for Republicans who promise them lower taxes, but take more of their income and safety net benefits like Medicare, and redistribute that income to the Mitt Romneys, Koch brothers, Exxon and Bank of America.

Fox Attacks Unions for Bargaining for Better Pay and Benefits for Their Members-Another day on Fox, another day of divide and conquer and attack workers as being overpaid, or unreasonable for wanting to earn a living wage and maybe retire with some dignity before they drop dead.

There is No Reasoning With Republican Freaks Who Have No Values: Conservatives Invent New Bengahzi Conspiracy Theory: Top U.S. Intel Official Is A Liar

There is No Reasoning With Republican Freaks Who Have No Values: Conservatives Invent New Bengahzi Conspiracy Theory: Top U.S. Intel Official Is A Liar

The Republicans’ new focus of attack in the faux “Benghazi-gate” scandal is Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, claiming that he lied about the source of changes to talking points on the Benghazi attack given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

Yesterday, a DNI spokesperson debunked accusations made by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republicans that the White House changed Rice’s Benghazi talking points, saying that it was the intelligence community that made the “substantive” changes to the talking points. Moreover, former CIA head David Petraeus and other top intelligence officials have said there was no politicization of the process and that the talking points were not altered to minimize the role of extremists but to reflect the best intelligence at the time.

McCain appeared to accept the new information but wondered why Clapper and other DNI officials did not provide this information during closed door hearings last week. And now that all their earlier attacks on Rice have fell apart, Republicans and conservative media figures are directing their attacks at Clapper, a George W. Bush appointee:

    – BILL O’REILLY: Now it’s James Clapper, President Obama’s national security guy who is saying, “Oh, it’s me. I sent Rice out there and I took out all the al Qaeda stuff.” I’m not buying it. None of this adds up. … All right so there’s a lot of lying going on here.

    – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’m not buying it because the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said that a week ago in classified testimony that same Clapper said that they had no idea who changed the talking points and now a week later he seems to say he did? That’s kind of strange. I mean I’ve seen amnesia in my day in my clinical days and that one is pretty quick, one week.

    – TUCKER CARLSON: I hate to think that the director of National Intelligence lied, is a liar. But I’m not sure I see an alternate explanation. Apparently, he’s contradicting what he testified to just last week. Is there another explanation for this?”

    – FOX NEWS’ STEVE DOOCY: They did say it is out of the [DNI] office. It’s not him per se, so we’re supposed to believe that a Clapper aide changed what Petraeus had said? That’s very, very curious.

[   ]....The right wing has spent months trying to bring down the Obama administration in politicization the attacks in Benghazi that left four Americans dead and after all of their conspiracy theories and baseless attacks have been debunked, the rabbit hole appears to have led to Clapper and who knows where it will end.

Everyone one of these conservative truth seekers has a record of lying over and over again to the American people, here, here, here and here. They have no credibility, they have no integrity and lack the humility and moral backbone to apologize for their serious lies. If Republicans hate the USA so much maybe its time for them to start packing. They can start the totalitarian theocratic dystopia they have always dreamed of.

Macy’s CEO to American People: Drop Dead

Science for Hire: Why Industry's Deep Pockets May Be Depleting the Last of Our Fisheries

Corporate Welfare Queens Walmart Owners Look to Slash Federal Tax Payments

Bill O'Reilly Says Single Women, Hispanic-Americans, and African-Americans Are Not Part Of Traditional America. Pasty faced Anti-American proto-fascists such as Bill are not part of traditional America.

Lie and Lie Some More. What I Learned at a Republican Think Tank

Lie and Lie Some More. What I Learned at a Republican Think Tank

The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., has always had a special place in my heart. In the late 1980s, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, the right-wing think tank provided me with my first job as a young conservative intellectual. My first assignment was to write a policy brief about presidential war powers. I was removed from the project after I wrote a draft that began with the observation that the U.S. constitution divides war powers between Congress and the president, and gives the most important war powers — the power to declare war and to fund it — to Congress. The higher-ups at Heritage reassigned the paper to a Wall Street Journal staffer, who provided them with what they wanted: a brief arguing that the president has absolute, uncontrollable power in foreign affairs.

One of my next assignments was to write a policy paper justifying a forthcoming bill from the late Sen. Jesse Helms, a belligerent reactionary from North Carolina. When I met with the senator’s staff, I was told to wait because Helms wasn’t sure what he was going to put in the bill. After I failed to turn in the policy brief on time, I received an official reprimand from my supervisor, which I treasured until I lost it during a move. The reprimand said, in effect, that at Heritage we write policy papers first and add the facts later.

Things went downhill. I soon left Heritage and, a few years later, the conservative movement altogether. When several colleagues and I founded the New America Foundation in the late 1990s, I held up Heritage as a model of what a genuine think tank ought not to be.

I am amused to report that my former colleagues at the Heritage Foundation have lost none of their willingness to sacrifice truth to propaganda. The Heritage Foundation has published an “Index of Dependence on Government [3]” by William W. Beach and Patrick Tyrrell which seeks to bolster Mitt Romney’s theme that at least 47 percent of Americans are parasitic, government-dependent “takers” rather than “makers” (hat tip to Thomas B. Edsall [4]):

    Today, more people than ever before depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States reached another milestone in 2010: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes. It is the conjunction of these two trends — higher spending on dependence-creating programs, and an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers who pay for these programs — that concerns those interested in the fate of the American form of government.

What caught me eye in this latest piece of Heritage agitprop was this sentence: The United States reached a milestone in 2012: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes.

This is not just wrong.  It is an error embarrassing enough to shame even a shameless propaganda mill like the Heritage Foundation.

Heritage implies that a majority of Americans paid federal income taxes throughout American history, presumably back to the 1790s. Nothing could be further from the truth. For much of American history, one hundred percent of the population paid no federal income taxes, because there were none. And the federal income tax began to fall on the middle-class masses, not just the upper classes, only in the 1940s.

The first federal income tax in the U.S. was enacted in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. It was abolished afterward, but recreated in 1894. After the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional, because it was not “apportioned among the states” the constitution was amended by the 16th Amendment to give Congress the power to levy income taxation.

But until World War II a majority of Americans did not pay any federal income tax, either because they made too little money to be required to file returns, or because exemptions like the standard deduction eliminated any federal income tax liability. According to the conservative Tax Foundation [5], which has a friendlier relationship with facts than does the Heritage Foundation, as recently as 1940 the percentage of those who filed (a group smaller than the working-age population) who owed federal income taxes was 49.4 percent. In that year, Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie missed the opportunity to sneer at “the 49 percent.”

It was only during World War II, with the institution of the income tax with-holding system, that a majority of Americans became subject to federal income taxation. If it were accurate, the sentence in the Heritage Foundation’s “Index of Dependence on Government” would read: The United States reached a milestone in 2012:  For the first time since World War II, half the population pays no federal income taxes.

But this in itself undermines the recent right-wing talking point that the country is becoming a nation of moochers living off a dwindling number of heroic Ayn-Randian “job creators.”  That is because, until recently, conservative Republicans were leading the campaign to remove low-income Americans from liability for federal income tax.

President Ronald Reagan and his successors have supported an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) as an alternative to a higher minimum wage.  A “negative income tax” of the kind favored by conservative economist Milton Friedman, the EITC reduces or eliminates federal income tax liability for many of the working poor.  If their incomes are too low, the tax credit is “refundable,” which means that the IRS sends them checks.

Another refundable tax credit created with the support of conservatives like Newt Gingrich is the child tax credit. Like the EITC, this tax credit reduces federal income tax liability for millions and is refundable for some.

From all of this it follows that if conservatives like the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Dependence of Government are sincere in their outrage about the growing number of nonpayers of federal income tax, they should praise President Franklin D. Roosevelt for turning the income tax, originally a tax on the economic elite, into a tax on the majority of Americans.  And they should denounce Reagan, Gingrich, the Bushes and others for supporting tax credits that have eliminated millions of low-income Americans from liability for federal income tax payments.

Certainly at this point no American with a few functioning brain cells thinks that Republicans lie all the time is shocking. Mildly shocking is that it is institutionalized into the structure of the conservative movement by one of it's most prominent "think tanks".

The conservatives urban conspiracy theories about Benghazi dies like all such conservative bullsh*t,  Sources: Office of the DNI cut "al Qaeda" reference from Benghazi talking points, and CIA, FBI signed

The 2012 Election Was About The Takers Versus The Workers, The Takers Are Still Winning

The 2012 Election Was About The Takers Versus The Workers, The Takers Are Still Winning. Ten Numbers the Rich Would Like Fudged

1. Only THREE PERCENT of the very rich are entrepreneurs.

According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate. Only 3.6 percent of taxpayers in the top .1% were classified as entrepreneurs based on 2004 tax returns. A 2009 Kauffman Foundation study found that the great majority of entrepreneurs come from middle-class backgrounds, with less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs coming from very rich or very poor backgrounds.photo: withayou via flickr

2. Only FOUR OUT OF 150 countries have more wealth inequality than us.

In a world listing compiled by a reputable research team (which nevertheless prompted double-checking), the U.S. has greater wealth inequality than every measured country in the world except for Namibia, Zimbabwe, Denmark, and Switzerland.

3. An amount equal to ONE-HALF the GDP is held untaxed overseas by rich Americans.

The Tax Justice Network estimated that between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed. With Americans making up 40% of the world's Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, that's $8 to $12 trillion in U.S. money stashed in far-off hiding places.

Based on a historical stock market return of 6%, up to $750 billion of income is lost to the U.S. every year, resulting in a tax loss of about $260 billion.

4. Corporations stopped paying HALF OF THEIR TAXES after the recession.

After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, corporations have paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.

U.S. corporations have shown a pattern of tax reluctance for more than 50 years, despite building their businesses with American research and infrastructure. They've passed the responsibility on to their workers. For every dollar of workers' payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.

5. Just TEN Americans made a total of FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS in one year.

That's enough to pay the salaries of over a million nurses or teachers or emergency responders.

That's enough, according to 2008 estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN's World Food Program, to feed the 870 million people in the world who are lacking sufficient food.

For the free-market advocates who say "they've earned it": Point #1 above makes it clear how the wealthy make their money.

6. Tax deductions for the rich could pay off 100 PERCENT of the deficit.

Another stat that required a double-check. Based on research by the Tax Policy Center, tax deferrals and deductions and other forms of tax expenditures (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes), which largely benefit the rich, are worth about 7.4% of the GDP, or about $1.1 trillion.

Other sources have estimated that about two-thirds of the annual $850 billion in tax expenditures goes to the top quintile of taxpayers.

7. The average single black or Hispanic woman has about $100 IN NET WORTH.

The Insight Center for Community Economic Development reported that median wealth for black and Hispanic women is a little over $100. That's much less than one percent of the median wealth for single white women ($41,500).

Other studies confirm the racially-charged economic inequality in our country. For every dollar of NON-HOME wealth owned by white families, people of color have only one cent.

8. Elderly and disabled food stamp recipients get $4.30 A DAY FOR FOOD.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) has dropped significantly over the past 15 years, serving only about a quarter of the families in poverty, and paying less than $400 per month for a family of three for housing and other necessities. Ninety percent of the available benefits go to the elderly, the disabled, or working households.

Food stamp recipients get $4.30 a day.

9. Young adults have lost TWO-THIRDS OF THEIR NET WORTH since 1984.

21- to 35-year-olds: Your median net worth has dropped 68% since 1984. It's now less than $4,000.

That $4,000 has to pay for student loans that average $27,200. Or, if you're still in school, for $12,700 in credit card debt.

With an unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds of almost 50%, two out of every five recent college graduates are living with their parents. But your favorite company may be hiring. Apple, which makes a profit of $420,000 per employee, can pay you about $12 per hour.

10. The American public paid about FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS to bail out the banks.

That's about the same amount of money made by America's richest 10% in one year. But we all paid for the bailout. And because of it, we lost the opportunity for jobs, mortgage relief, and educational funding.

Bonus for the super-rich: A QUADRILLION DOLLARS in securities trading nets ZERO sales tax revenue for the U.S.

The world derivatives market is estimated to be worth over a quadrillion dollars (a thousand trillion). At least $200 trillion of that is in the United States. In 2011 the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a trading volume of over $1 quadrillion on 3.4 billion annual contracts.

A quadrillion dollars. A sales tax of ONE-TENTH OF A PENNY on a quadrillion dollars could pay off the deficit. But the total sales tax was ZERO.

It's not surprising that the very rich would like to fudge the numbers, as they have the nation.

Who is getting a free ride or almost free? Exxon, the Koch brothers, Mitt Romney, Karl Rove, Microsoft, Sheldon Adelson...the list goes on and on. The total Gross Domestic product could be called the nation's cake. That is the value of all the goods and services produced. The workers make that cake. The very wealthy take the biggest slice and pay the lowest - in terms of percentage of taxes. You know, taxes are the admission price for the civilization that makes it possible for these modern robber barons to amass such great wealth. Wealth that is far out of proportion to what they contribute. Related - Defending the Right to Treat Your Employees Like Dirt.

There are moral responsible millionaires in the USA. They're just out lobbied by the conservative elite.

Petraeus Says U.S. Tried to Avoid Tipping Off Terrorists After Libya Attack. The whole conservative Republican conspiracy theory about Libya is falling apart faster than George Bush's lies about Iraq that got 4000 Americans killed.

Even the Evil and Incompetent Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Admits CIA Approved U.N. Ambassador Rice Talking Points On Libya

Even the Evil and Incompetent Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Admits CIA Approved U.N. Ambassador Rice Talking Points On Libya

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has admitted that the CIA and intelligence community approved U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice’s talking points before she made her much-derided Sept. 16 appearance on several Sunday news shows to discuss the attacks in Benghazi. King, one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration’s response to the attack, came to his conclusion following testimony from former CIA Director David Petraeus.

After leaving the closed-door hearing, King spoke with reporters for several minutes about Petraeus’ statements. Rice’s television appearances were among the topics discussed, leading King to indicate that while Petraeus did not personally write Rice’s talking points, the CIA did approve them:

    Q: Did he say why it was taken out of the talking points that [the attack] was Al Qaeda affiliated?

    KING: He didn’t know.

    Q: He didn’t know? What do you mean he didn’t know?

    KING: They were not involved — it was done, the process was completed and they said, “Ok go with those talking points.” Again it’s interagency — I got the impression that 7, 8, 9 different agencies.

    Q: Did he give you the impression that he was upset it was taken out?

    KING: No.

    Q: You said the CIA said “OK” to the revised report –

    KING: No, well, they said in that, after it goes through the process, they OK’d it to go. Yeah, they said “Okay for it to go.”

Watch King’s statements here:

Rice has been hit by Republicans for weeks for indicating that the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi stemmed from a spontaneous protest related to an anti-Islamic video. However, as Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) has pointed out, the talking points used by Rice were the same unclassified points given to both the administration and Congress by the intelligence community.

Contrary to the current GOP narrative, Petraeus’ testimony made clear that various intelligence sources at of the time of his initial briefing to Congress indicated that a protest arising in response to a similar one in Cairo was the impetus for the attack in Libya. While those initial assessments were later disproved, the Wall Street Journal has previously reported that this change in thinking began too late to alter Rice’s talking points.

Today’s comments by King towards the intelligence community’s assessments also mark a sharp departure from his previous accusations that Rice should have known sooner that the intelligence that was presented to her was incorrect. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have both also recently said that Rice should “have known better” than to make the statements she did during her interviews.

 Republicans, another word for people who have all the honor of rat turds, just can't seem to get traction on inventing scandals or exploiting deaths for political advantage. They lost the election, their conspiracy theories are falling apart, the general public are waking up to the anti-American agenda of the conservative movement. So expect them to continue to act like whiny lying rats with their tails caught in a trap.

Who's to Blame for the Hostess Bankruptcy: Wall Street, Unions, or Carbs? Its sad to lose the jobs - until Hostess is bought by a new company anyway, but why all the crocodile tears over the loss of tasteless bleached flour stuffed with sugar - oh the injustice, no one will ever be able to do that again.

When Right-Wing Republican Taliban Christians Stopped Thinking of Women as People

John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-NC) and Fox News Join In On Shameless Lies About Susan Rice and Libya

John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-NC) and Fox News Join In On Shameless Lies About Susan Rice and Libya

Fox News has seized on what it believes is a new angle to continue making an issue of the Obama administration's response to the Libya terrorist attack. Discussing President Obama's news conference on Wednesday, Fox treated Obama's statement that the White House chose Ambassador Susan Rice to discuss the attack publicly as new and "significant," claiming Obama's admission is "one of the most important parts" of what he said during his press conference.

It's unclear why Fox believes Obama's statement is significant considering Rice's position as a top official in the Obama administration.

In her capacity as one of the United States' top diplomats -- she was nominated by President Obama as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in January 2009 -- Rice is a member of the Obama administration whose job is to speak for the White House on government decisions and policy.

Not only that, but the White House's reasons for why it specifically asked Rice to discuss the situation in Benghazi publicly have been known for at least a month. The Washington Post reported on October 15: "The White House has said that it turned to Rice to make the administration's case on the Benghazi attack because it made sense to have a top diplomat speak to the loss of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens."

On September 16, five days after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Rice appeared on the Sunday talk shows to talk about what the administration knew about the attack. In the interviews, Rice made clear that definitive conclusions would only follow from an administration investigation, which she stressed was under way.

On Wednesday, during his first press conference since being re-elected, Obama addressed Republican criticism of Rice, saying:

    OBAMA: [L]et me say specifically about Susan Rice, she has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace. As I've said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her.

    If Senator [John] McCain and Senator [Lindsay] Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me. And I'm happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.

Discussing his comments on Fox News' America Live, however, host Megyn Kelly and Fox contributor Kirsten Powers expressed surprise at Obama's statement that Rice's appearances on the Sunday talk shows were "at the request of the White House."

Powers claimed the admission was "probably one of the most important parts" of what Obama said, "which is admitting that the White House is the one who told her what to say and that this did come from the White House, which had been mostly been speculated upon."

Kelly went on to say that "the reason she's been taking such incoming fire is because now according to President Obama, he told her to. He's the one who put her in the line of fire."

And yet, a day ago, Kelly told viewers that the reason Rice has been repeatedly criticized is because "she's the one who went on all the Sunday talk shows and told us that everything that happened in Benghazi was linked to this video, which we now know was not the case."

Indeed, Fox has led a sustained campaign against Rice, alleging that she made inaccurate statements about the attack when in fact her remarks were in line with assessments from the intelligence community.

Later on America Live, Kelly again brought up Obama's statement about Rice, asking Fox senior White House correspondent Ed Henry his thoughts about this "explicit admission from the president." Henry replied that "it's significant" but "not surprising -- it just hadn't been said by the president yet perhaps."

He then seemed to undermine the significance of Obama's statement by saying: "But whenever a top official goes on the Sunday talk shows, they're being put out there by the White House."

The public is now well aware of the Benghazi time-line. While some details were slow to emerge - as is usually the case when facts still needed to be sorted out, the only people lying now are anti-American conservatives out to exploit those tragic deaths for political gain. Still more pathetic irony from the uber fake patriots, John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-NC) Supported Condi Rice for Sec. of State After Massive Intelligence Failure. Concerned Americans should contact the Senate Ethics Committee and call for the impeachment or resignations of the sleazy lying senators McCain and Graham. McCain's bitterness at being defeated by president Obama in 2008 seems to be clouding the irreverent old fart's judgement.

The Conservative Republican Plutocrats Don't Understand That Economic Collapse Happens When They Get All the Money

The Conservative Republican Plutocrats Don't Understand That Economic Collapse Happens When They Get All the Money

Let’s face it, if your opponent in Monopoly scoops up Boardwalk, Park Place, North Carolina Avenue, Pacific Avenue, both utilities, and the four railroads – that’s game over.

The other players, all of whom have been relegated to mere consumers instead of property owners, will slowly go bankrupt having to pay higher and higher costs for rent and services, utilities, and transportation. Eventually, one player has all the money and the losers have to clean up the board game and put it away.

But let’s assume the Monopoly game doesn’t end there. Let’s assume the broke players keep rolling the dice and keep going around the board. They essentially keep living their lives desperate and broke, using their credit cards and home lines of credit to stay in the game. Maybe they end up in jail. If they’re lucky, they land on Baltic Avenue and can afford to stay a night in the slums.

Meanwhile, the oligarch who owns everything can no longer collect any income. The other players can’t afford to pay rent, they can’t pay utilities, and they can’t ride on the railroads. Eventually, without consumers spending money, the Monopoly oligarch goes broke, too. His properties and businesses disappear and suddenly everyone is broke!

That’s what Monopoly’s version of economic collapse looks like. And it’s very similar to what global economic collapse in the real world looks like, too.

Now put the Monopoly game board away and consider this: Researchers in Zurich, Switzerland have found [3] that there are roughly 43,000 transnational corporations that dominate the global economy. Of those, there are about 1,300 companies that control 80% of all the global revenues for all the transnational corporations on the planet. Now let’s take it a step further. Of those 1,300 core companies, only 147 companies, which all happen to own each other in some way, control 40% - or nearly half – of all the wealth in the entire transnational corporate network. That means 1% of transnationals own 40% of all the world’s business wealth.

In other words, the global 1% has its own 1%.  

This is similar to a Monopoly situation in which just one player owns 40% of the board. And just like it’s game over for Monopoly, it’s game over for the global economy, too. 

Right now, you can count the number of banks that own half of all the wealth in the U.S. economy on just one hand. There are just five of them [4] and they are the usual suspects: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Their total assets equal 8.5 trillion, which is 56% of our entire economy.

In 2007 we all learned the consequences of disproportionate wealth and power concentrated in the hands of just a few companies. When one company begins to fail, they all begin to fail. And when they all fail, well, that’s what collapse looks like.

That why policymakers labeled the banks “Too Big to Fail” and bailed them out to prevent total collapse. Today, these banks are even bigger. And thanks to globalization, their tentacles are wrapped around the entire world’s economy. It won’t just be the United States imploding the next time these giants fall: it will be much of planet Earth itself. 

This is the danger of raw, unfettered capitalism. This is where the demands of higher and higher quarterly profits take down the economy. Companies begin devouring each other, sucking whatever wealth they can from each other. This was made easier by deregulation policies in the 1980’s and 1990’s that trigged a mergers and acquisitions mania under Reagan, and free trade policies under Clinton that opened up the game board for these transnational corporation to feast on even more industries abroad. 

Out of this, the few strong survive and have enormous power to fix prices for consumers. The inventors of Monopoly were right about what happens when one person owns all the railroads or all the utilities or all the apartment buildings: prices go up.

And to secure even more profits, these companies begin extracting wealth from their own workers, cutting their salaries and benefits. And like broke Monopoly players, real world consumers can’t afford to pay their mortgages, put gas in their car, or buy groceries. In the game-world, the corporate masters win. But in the real world, they eventually lose like the rest of us.

The corporate masters seem to have forgotten they depend on working people for their own survival. And today things have gotten really bad.

This corporatocracy made up of just over 100 transnational corporations are desperately trying to garner more wealth by toppling governments in Europe and demanding wealth-extracting austerity (or what has been referred to in the United States since the 1980’s as “Starve the Beast”).

This was predicted [5] by Bill Clinton’s former Deputy Secretary of Treasury, Roger Altman, back in 2011. He explained that these corporate forces, “oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-out and other major policy changes. Their influence dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, leaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on Earth.”

The violence on display in Greece is a consequence of the Monopoly endgame the world economy is in. No matter how much austerity that nations like Greece, Spain, and Europe endure, these corporate masters will be unsatisfied and they’ll demand even more. They’ll take their harvesting machines to Germany, the U.K., and eventually the United States. In fact, they’ve already begun. Until eventually they’ve destroyed the one thing that keeps their own hearts beating: working people.

That’s when collapse happens.

As the researchers in Zurich have discovered with actual data, we’re all living in a functional oligarchy today with just a handful of corporations – all of which are wealthier and more powerful than most sovereign governments – sucking whatever remaining wealth they can from the rest of us.

And just like how the oil industry is willing to suck the last trillion dollars of oil out of the ground  with no plans about what to do when it’s all gone, these corporate masters are willing to suck the last wealth out of the middle class without any plans of what to do when their consumers disappear.

Everyone needs to wake up to this economic reality before we’re all dragged toward collapse. If not, the mess will be a lot bigger to clean up than just a few scattered dice, thimbles, and a chance card.
See more stories tagged with:

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/thom-hartmann
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/sam-sacks
[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-16/obama-bid-to-end-too-big-to-fail-undercut-as-banks-grow.html
[5] http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12628-monopoly-endgame-for-the-global-economy#axzz1fnNHC8YP
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economic-collapse
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oligarchs
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Conservatives - that includes conservative Democrats and Republicans never really trusted the people and democracy. The conservative plutocrats do not want an economy that benefits the most people most of the time - a well regulated capitalist economy. No, they want the USA to become a land of overlords and a permanent powerless serfdom. They spend more money on lobbyists and buying legislation than they do on taxes. The story is not just about money and geed, it is about money buying power for people with a near psychotic addiction to power. Funny how in the South and parts of the mid-west, we have working class Americans fighting for this vision of the USA and complain that they feel powerless.They the Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Becks of rural and suburban America, plastic imitation populists.

Jon Stewart examines the various "suspicious" theories about David Petraeus' affair and subsequent resignation

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

2012 Election: The USA Stuck To Its American Values and Sent the Republican Plutocrats and Racists to a Brutal Defeat

2012 Election: The USA Stuck To Its American Values and Sent the Plutocrats and Racists to a Brutal Defeat

On Tuesday night Barack Obama – who had led Mitt Romney in most Electoral College projections every single day of this race – won the election that he was supposed to. But that win represented so much more than a victory for a moderate Democrat. We hear that every election is the most important election of our lives -- it's a cliché. This year, it may well prove to be true.

The diverse, creative, younger coalition that propelled the first black president – a guy whose middle name is Hussein – to the presidency, beat back what may well have been the last stand of Ronald Reagan's coalition of plutocrats, white working-class men and religious conservatives. The Republican party, with its deep-pocketed donors and extensive network of supportive media and think-tanks remains viable for the immediate future – thanks in part to some dramatic gerrymandering in 2010 – but the demographic head winds it faces will soon be too powerful to overcome. The GOP's most reliable supporters remain white, married couples who identify themselves as Christians [3], a group that continues its sharp decline in numbers.

Women, especially unmarried women, delivered a sharp blow to those “limited government” conservative men who feel entitled to regulate their reproductive choices and are intent on making them miserable – with waiting periods and vaginal probes and the forced consumption of anti-abortion propaganda – if they make a choice that conflicts with the beliefs of the religious right.

A fifth hard-right justice won't be seated on the Supreme Court for the next four years -- a lost opportunity for the Chamber of Commerce and a potential victory for Roe v Wade, the Voting Rights Act and a slew of other key precedents.

Although it's unlikely that the war is over, the politics of playing on white racial anxiety lost a major battle on Tuesday night as well. The Romney campaign, as my colleague Adele Stan wrote [4], “pushed the boundaries of 'acceptable racism' to extremes.” The dog-whistles from the conservative media went far beyond, yet it wasn't enough to win it for Romney.

Tens of millions of Americans who were priced out of the insurance market won big on Tuesday. Rather than seeing a concerted effort to strangle “Obamacare” in its cradle, the administration's signature achievement will be fully implemented, and hopefully then built upon and improved in the same way Social Security and Medicare were. Millions of poor people will get tax-funded, single-payer healthcare through an expanded Medicaid program and tens of millions more will come to realize that there are no death panels, but there are subsidies for small businesses to provide insurance for their workers, and more subsidies for middle-class families that have been getting squeezed to death by the growing burden of their heal-care costs. Watch the popularity of Obama's health-care reforms rise over the next four years. That will also be a victory over the right's almost religious belief that “the market” can cure all our ills.

Voters and election protection activists scored a very hard-fought win over those who believe that some Americans have a greater right to vote than others. Efforts to suppress the vote among typically Democratic-leaning groups was flagrant and widespread. But Americans waited in the cold on those 6-hour lines, they got the right ID and jumped through whatever hoops they had to. And the lawyers blocked or blunted many of the worst restrictions on our right to vote. Small-d democracy won on Tuesday. Karl Rove, with his plan to use the concocted specter of voter fraud to gain a structural advantage lost.

A unified America was a winner as well. It's likely that most voters didn't grasp just how reactionary the Romney-Ryan agenda really was. They would have turned vast swaths of our already threadbare social safety-net over to the states to administer, making deep cuts in the process. As a result, people living in “blue” and “red” states would have effectively become citizens of different countries. The poor and working class in those red states would have been eligible for far fewer public benefits. The disparities that now exist in funding education, job training and the like would have become far more pronounced. We would have no longer been citizens of the United States who happen to live in Alabama or Vermont; we would become Alabamians and Vermonters, citizens of states with markedly different philosophies of government.

Gays and lesbians emerged victorious on Tuesday. Not only did the first president to come out in support of marriage equality win – one whose administration has worked tirelessly, often below the radar [5], to advance LGBT rights – but Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin will also be seated as the first openly gay senator in the history of the United States. As of this writing, marriage equality passed by a popular vote for the first and second times in history – in Maryland and Maine. A third ballot initiative recognizing marriage equality is ahead in Washington State; a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage is trailing in Minnesota.

After the running the most opaque and mendacious campaign in memory, “post-truth politics” lost on Tuesday. Never again will a candidate think he or she can promise to reveal his or her plans after the election and hope it will fly with the public.

Fat-cat, right-wing donors spent billions for nothing. As Paul Blumenthal notes [6], Casino Magnate Sheldon Adelson went 0-5 in campaigns in which he invested over $50 million. As much as $6 billion was spent in an election that returned the same Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader, and the same man in the Oval Office.

Reality-based analysis, personified by nerdy number-cruncher Nate Silver, landed a devastating blow to a legion of lazy pundits who make their living relaying what their guts are telling them. Who's got “the MoJo” -- who's winning the soccer mom vote or the waitress vote or white working class men – is now an irrelevance, trivia.

Now is not the time to be over confidant. Conservatives are called zombies for a good reason - they are relentless in pursuing their goals of turning America into something like the Confederate states of the old South. Just as the treasonous Confederacy used Bible quotes and fraudulent patriotism to sell their agenda, their modern iteration - The conservative movement - continues to do the same. Republicans will continue to deal in bumper sticker slogans instead of solutions. They'll keep nibbling away at women's rights and thus men's rights as well - when they take way the rights of our sisters, mothers and wives - they're taking away everyone's rights and freedoms.

Small Businesses Grew Twice As Fast Under Clinton Tax Rates

Democratic Senator Calls Out Conservative Republican's ‘Rumpelstiltskin Fairy Tale’ On Taxes

Democratic Senator Calls Out Conservative Republican's ‘Rumpelstiltskin Fairy Tale’ On Taxes

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday, in a move that many in the media deemed conciliatory, said that House Republicans are open to raising more revenue for the federal government, as long as it comes “as a byproduct of growing our economy, energized by a simpler, cleaner, fairer tax code, with fewer loopholes and lower rates for all.”

Believing that lower tax rates will magically raise revenue thanks to a growing economy is a favorite conservative fantasy. (It’s been dubbed believing in the “tax fairy.”) Today, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded to Boehner’s speech by calling it “a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale“:

    Schumer derided the theory that substantial revenues can be raised without increasing the tax burden on the wealthy.

    “Part of his speech he talked about dynamic scoring, this idea if you cut taxes you increase revenues,” Schumer said.

    “It’s about time we debunked that myth, it’s a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, dynamic scoring. You may remember Rumpelstiltskin was the fairy tale figure who turned straw into gold,” he added, making reference to the popular German children’s tale from the 19th century.

Many studies have shown “that tax cuts do not come anywhere close to paying for themselves over the long term.” Greg Mankiw, chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, called those who believe that tax cuts will result in a revenue increase “charlatans and cranks.” “There is no serious research evidence to suggest that” tax cuts pay for themselves, Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin agreed. But Republican leaders still claim that such a thing will happen, all evidence to the contrary.

How can anyone negotiate compromises with a political movement that is ruled by belief in magic. Math has become an enemy of conservatism in the same way that reason and the scientific method have become enemies.

The River of Denial runs deep, Defeated Once Again, Right-Wing Media Wage War...On Voters.

The USA Voted For Real Values and Re-elected President Obama

The USA Voted For Real Values and Re-elected President Obama

President Obama's re-election was never much in doubt, except perhaps briefly when he took a plunge after the first debate and we didn't know where the bottom was. But by the end of the campaign, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium was giving Obama a better-than-99% chance of winning. Nate Silver of the New York Times, more cautious, put the odds Tuesday at about 90-10 in favor of Obama.

Those who point to the popular vote as evidence of a very tight contest, as much of the media did before the election, should consider two things: first, that is not the way the game is played here (unfortunately). If the popular vote determined the presidency, the Obama team would have put more resources into big states like California and New York to ensure that Obama would win the popular vote by a wider margin. Instead, the resources went into swing states, in order to ensure a victory in the electoral college vote. ( this was written before some votes were counted: President Obama won the popular vote and the electoral college)

Second, the country is nowhere near as closely divided as the popular vote indicates. That's because non-voters, who were about 43% of the electorate in 2008, favor Obama by a margin of about 2.5 to one.

Indeed, the resources and political power that Republicans mobilized in an effort to deny millions of Americans their right to vote, and to suppress voter turnout, raise serious questions about their legitimacy as a political party. A legitimate political party does not rely on preventing citizens from voting, in order to prevail at the polls, any more than a legitimate government relies on repressing freedom of speech or assembly in order to remain in power.

How did Obama win?

In this election, as in almost every presidential election for decades, the biggest block of swing voters has been white working-class voters (however defined: for example, without college education). No Democratic candidate has won a majority of white voters for decades, since the Republicans adopted their "southern strategy" in the wake of historic civil rights legislation, and became the "white people's party". (In fact, Obama did better among white voters in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004 – his racial identity was not a handicap because most voters who wouldn't vote for an African American don't vote for Democrats.) But in this contest, Obama had to win enough of the white working-class voters in battleground states to win the election, while winning about 95% of African-American voters and a large majority of Latino voters.

This he did primarily by making a populist appeal to working-class voters, more populist than any major party presidential nominee in decades. In the last debate, which was supposedly about foreign policy, Obama repeatedly referred to Romney as someone who wants to make sure that rich people "don't play by the same set of rules" as everyone else. Throughout the campaign, his team attacked Romney for being a rich, unscrupulous politician who didn't care about working people.

Of course, it helped that Romney fit the stereotype – a rich corporate raider, a private equity fund CEO, who said he "like[s] being able to fire people", and paid less of his income in taxes than millions of working Americans. His infamous secretly-recorded remark dismissing 47% of Americans as moochers – "my job is not to worry about those people" – was a gift from God, and became one of the Obama campaign's most effective TV ads.

But for those who have followed Obama's political career, his re-election was always extremely likely – and indeed, it would hardly have been in jeopardy if he had actually debated in the first debate. We knew that he would be as populist as he needed to be in order to win. Even with 23 million people still unemployed or underemployed (as Romney repeated endlessly), it's not that hard to convince a lot of working-class voters that Romney and his party don't have their interests at heart – if you are willing to make the kind of economic populist appeal that Obama ultimately made.

The downside risk, for a candidate, is the potential loss of rich campaign contributors and media; but Obama was willing to take these risks in order to win. This was a historic difference from previous presidential campaigns: Democratic candidates such as Michael Dukakis and Al Gore flirted briefly with economic populist appeals, but backed off in the face of media pressure.

The media are a huge factor in most elections in the US, and outside of Fox News and the rightwing press, most of the major news outlets were more sympathetic to Obama than to Romney. They still helped Romney quite a bit, however, especially with swing voters, with poor reporting on key economic issues. Most Americans didn't know that the federal stimulus had created an estimated 3m jobs; in fact, they didn't even distinguish the stimulus from the unpopular federal bank bailout. They didn't understand the benefits that people would derive from Obama's healthcare legislation. They didn't know that they'd had their taxes cut under Obama. And millions believed the hype that federal deficit spending and the US public debt were major problems. (For the record, the US currently pays less than 1% of GDP in net interest annually on the federal debt – less than it has paid during the past 60 years.)

The confusion on economic issues was probably the most important influence on swing voters, who supported Romney against their own economic interests, thinking that the economy might improve if he were elected. For this, and other misunderstandings, we can thank the major media, although we should also include the public relations blunders made by the Obama team. Perhaps the biggest strategic error was President Obama's refusal to go after Romney's proposal to cut social security, thereby losing the majority of senior citizens' votes (a big vote in swing states like Virginia and Florida), which he could potentially have won by defending America's most popular anti-poverty program.

Obama's silence on social security is a bad omen for the future of his second administration, when – facing almost immediately the "fiscal cliff" – political, media, and business leaders will be pressing for a "grand bargain" on budget issues that will screw the vast majority of Americans. It will take a lot of grassroots pressure to prevent the worst outcomes: likewise, to get us out of Afghanistan and to prevent another disastrous war, this time with Iran. Obama's foreign policy has been mostly atrocious and the never-ending "war on terror" continues to expand, while most Americans' living standards have been declining.

It's going to be an uphill fight for progress, but it could have been a lot worse.

Like an increasing number of Americans I'm not sure what conservatives like Romney stand for. They chant 'small government" like a mantra, but when you look at the details what they mean is gutting social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, doing away with food inspections, gutting safety standards for water so industry can dumb as much toxins as they like ( that is also how conservative Republicans define freedom - just let business give America the shaft in the name of increasing the wealth of people who are already wealthier than 90% of the population). Conservatives deserve to lose every office they were running for. They wave the flag a lot, but have seized to stand for patriotism, and instead stand for hateful unhinged nationalism.

A Letter to Conservatives