Herman Cain and Friends Typify The Moral Rot of Conservatism

Herman Cain and Friends Typify The Moral Rot of Conservatism

Federal authorities have opened an investigation into two Wisconsin-based corporations founded and run by Mark Block, a veteran political operative who ran Herman Cain's unsuccessful presidential campaign.

"They are very interested in Mark and these groups," said a source familiar with the probe. "It is not my sense, right now, that Cain is a target."

In recent weeks, FBI agents have been talking to donors and other individuals connected with Prosperity USA and Wisconsin Prosperity Network. Block and Linda Hansen, Cain's deputy chief of staff, were the two primary people running those groups.

No Quarter reported last year that Prosperity USA helped Cain get his fledgling campaign off the ground by originally footing the bill for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas, according to internal records.

Expenses totaling nearly $40,000 are listed in Prosperity USA's internal documents as "due from FOH," a reference to Friends of Herman Cain, the name of his campaign committee.

A number of election law experts have said these payments for campaign events appeared to cross the line.

Prosperity USA also borrowed as much as $150,000 from two unnamed individuals and then gave the bulk of those funds to the Con gress of Racial Equality , a conservative civil rights group, in January 2011. Shortly after that payment was made, Cain - who had just entered the presidential race - was a featured speaker at the group's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Celebration dinner.

Sources said the loans, which don't appear to have been repaid, were obtained under questionable circumstances.

In addition, it does not appear that either organization was granted tax-exempt status, even though contributors were told they could write off their donations. Both groups received substantial support from major conservatives in the state.

Block did not return texts, emails or calls asking for comment on Thursday. He is now working for Cain's Solutions Revolution, a group promoting the former candidate's 9-9-9 tax plan.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling, who is spearheading the probe, also declined to comment, refusing even to acknowledge that there is an investigation.

Last year, several liberal advocacy groups filed complaints with federal election and tax regulators urging them to investigate Block and the two Wisconsin corporations. The Cain campaign responded by saying it had retained two law firms to look into the allegations.

Cain, the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, has never disclosed the results of the internal investigation. He dropped out of the race in early December after being pummeled by allegations of infidelity.

Block was asked last month at a public forum if the Federal Election Commission was investigating the Cain campaign and the questionable donations from Block's private organizations.

"Not to my knowledge," he said.

The question, interestingly, came from Milwaukee attorney Walt Kelly, who was at the center of the last major controversy involving Block.

In 1997, Block was the campaign manager for then-Supreme Court Justice Jon Wilcox in a hotly contested race against Kelly. After the race was over, state regulators accused Block of election-law violations, including coordinating a mass mailing with an outside group.

Block settled his part of the case by agreeing to stay out of Wisconsin politics for three years and to pay a $15,000 fine.

More recently, Block ran the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit cofounded by the conservative Koch brothers that helped organize the tea party movement in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

It was through Americans for Prosperity that Block met Cain and encouraged him to run for national office. Block's role with the Cain campaign became a point of national interest late last year when the campaign released a bizarre online ad featuring the chain-smoking Wisconsin operative.

Records show Block was paid more than $182,000 in total compensation during his year running Cain's failed campaign. He pulled down $84,605 in the final three months of 2011, even though his candidate dropped out of the race in early December.

Hansen, Block's political and business sidekick, received a little less than $88,000 in total compensation in 2011. Like Block, she deposited her biggest paychecks during the final three months of the year, taking in $56,430 during that span.

It's not surprising that they were paid the most at the end of last year.

That's also when the campaign had the most money.

Riding a short-lived wave of publicity and popularity, Cain received $11.3 million in donations between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31. But the GOP candidate spent all of that, plus $500,000 more, over the same period.

Not much of a surprise: conservatives+money+right-wing sugar daddies+violation of campaign finance laws+failure to fail correct statements about where money came from or how it was spent+campaign staffers using campaign money to enrich themselves+the general conservative tendency towards corruption and immoral behavior while also being sanctimonious hypocrites. Just another day. They will wave the flag and quote from the Bible to make it all sound like patriotism.

Conservative Trashes Middle-Class and Blue Collar Workers - Paul Ryan (R-WI) Dreams of Making America Into 17th Century France

Conservative Trashes Middle-Class and Blue Collar Workers - Paul Ryan (R-WI) Dreams of Making America Into 17th Century France

Even as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget would impose trillions of dollars in spending cuts, 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs,[1] it would enact new tax cuts that would provide huge windfalls to households at the top of the income scale.  New analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC) finds that people earning more than $1 million a year would receive $265,000 apiece in new tax cuts, on average, on top of the $129,000 they would receive from the Ryan budget’s extension of President Bush’s tax cuts.[2] 

The new tax cuts at the top would dwarf those for middle-and lower-income families.  After-tax incomes would rise by 12.5 percent among millionaires, but just 1.9 percent for middle-income households (see Figure 1 and footnote 6).

Chairman Ryan claims that his budget would fully offset the cost of his proposed tax cuts by closing tax expenditures (tax credits, deductions, and other preferences) for high-income households.  But his budget contains no specific proposals to do so, and meeting this goal would be all but impossible, given that the Ryan budget rules out reducing the tax expenditure most heavily tilted to high-income households:  the preferential rates for capital gains and dividends.[3]

By combining large budget cuts that disproportionately harm lower-income Americans with large tax cuts that disproportionately help those at the top of the income scale, the Ryan budget would significantly worsen inequality and increase poverty and hardship (and reduce opportunity as well, through deep cuts in programs such as Pell Grants to help low-income students afford college).
Plan Would Cut Top Rate to Lowest Level Since Hoover Administration

The Ryan budget includes a number of specific tax cuts, on top of making the Bush tax cuts permanent.  All of its new tax cuts are both expensive and tilted toward high-income households.  It would cut the top individual tax rate to 25 percent, the lowest level since the Hoover Administration more than 80 years ago.  It would cut the corporate rate to 25 percent and eliminate both the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Affordable Care Act’s increase in the Medicare tax for high-income people.

A new TPC analysis finds that people with incomes above $1 million would receive a $265,000 average annual tax cut just from the new Ryan proposals (i.e., not counting what they would also receive from extension of the Bush tax cuts).  Middle-income taxpayers — those with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 — would receive $1,045, on average.[4]

How did Paul Ryan get elected to Congress? How did someone who hates Americans that work for a living - teachers, carpenters, nurses, store clerks, waitresses, tire changers, taxi drivers, road maintenance crews etc. - get so much power and influence over the lives of people who do actual work. Unlike Ryan's millionaire friends whose wealth comes from the work of others. Ryan, like the rest of the conservative movement is out to protect the unearned wealth of society's leeches at the expense of working Americans.

How Conservatism, Lobbyist and Money Are Destroying Democracy

How Conservatism, Lobbyist and Money Are Destroying Democracy

Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.

Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.

What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.

Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.

What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.

And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.

But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.

And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game. Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future.

Did I mention that ALEC has played a key role in promoting bills that make it hard for the poor and ethnic minorities to vote?

Yet that’s not all; you have to think about the interests of the penal-industrial complex — prison operators, bail-bond companies and more. (The American Bail Coalition has publicly described ALEC as its “life preserver.”) This complex has a financial stake in anything that sends more people into the courts and the prisons, whether it’s exaggerated fear of racial minorities or Arizona’s draconian immigration law, a law that followed an ALEC template almost verbatim.

Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.

Now, ALEC isn’t single-handedly responsible for the corporatization of our political life; its influence is as much a symptom as a cause. But shining a light on ALEC and its supporters — a roster that includes many companies, from AT&T and Coca-Cola to UPS, that have so far managed to avoid being publicly associated with the hard-right agenda — is one good way to highlight what’s going on. And that kind of knowledge is what we need to start taking our country back.

Conservatives say they believe in individual rights. That's just so much propaganda - Mao would be proud of the way conservatives twist less liberty into more freedom. Conservatives and groups such as ALEC are turning the USA into a kind of corporate dystopia that is not hard to find in science fiction novels. People say it can't happen in the USA. It is happening. Not all at once. Just a little piece of crony corporatism here and a dash of conservative authoritarianism there. The Bush administration made unprecedented attacks on our freedoms and conservatives defended those attacks. That says a lot about the radical anti-American conservative agenda.

How Unfortunate That Paul Ryan(R-WI) is an Anti-American Serial Liar and Conman

How Unfortunate That Paul Ryan(R-WI) is an Anti-American Serial Liar and Conman

“Promoting the natural rights and the inherent dignity of the individual must be the central focus of all government.”

That’s what Congressman Paul Ryan wrote earlier this month in an exclusive commentary for Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. This week, he revealed exactly where his laser-like focus on dignity would lead this nation. He released his budget proposal, as clear a statement of one’s principles and priorities as there is in politics.

Here are the results, and they’re not pretty. Nation readers with young children should probably ask them to leave the room before reading onward.

Mr. Ryan’s focus on dignity… means a cut in food stamps of $133 billion over ten years, even though 76 percent of participating households include a child, senior or disabled person, nearly half of all recipients are children and 40 percent of single mothers use food stamps to help feed their families.  A $13.4 billion cut in one year translates to as many as 8.2 billion meals lost for low-income people, more kids at risk of being underweight or developmentally delayed, worse educational outcomes and more stressed-out parents.

The congressman would also block-grant the program so it would no longer be able to respond to rising need during times like these—in 2010 alone food stamps kept 3.9 million people out of poverty. If you liked the cash assistance for poor families (TANF) block grant—which resulted in a free-fall from 68 of every 100 poor families receiving help to 27 of every 100—then you will absolutely love the Don’t Worry Ryan Will Feed You block grant.

All told, Ryan hands out about $4.4 trillion in tax cuts that primarily benefit the very best off, and pays for it with $4.15 trillion in spending cuts to programs that primarily benefit the poor and middle class.

Mr. Ryan’s focus on dignity… means the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and attacking Medicaid with his block-granting light saber. The repeal results in at least 33 million people losing their healthcare, and the Don’t Worry Ryan Will Heal You block grant shifts costs of covering poor people to the states (because their budgets are in such great shape)—cutting federal funding by approximately 20 percent over the next decade and adding “tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured,” according the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). Worth noting too is that two out of every three Medicaid dollars currently goes to care for people in nursing homes, victims of catastrophic accidents and disabled children, according to the Center for American Progress.

“The inherent dignity of all people is the foundational principle of Catholic social teaching because we’re all created in the image of God,” Father Thomas Kelly, a constituent of Representative Ryan’s, told me after a conference call with Half in Ten. “A budget that cuts nutrition programs for poor children and tells working families they must sacrifice even more so the wealthy can have bigger tax cuts offends bedrock Catholic values. It’s hard to square Representative Ryan’s moral rhetoric with the cruel reality of this budget.”

“A budget that diminishes what we provide for the one in six Americans who are struggling with hunger is not a budget befitting a moral country,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “A plan reflective of our national priorities should seek to lift up our neighbors in a time of high unemployment and poverty; instead, this demands the most from those with the least, and flies in the face of the common dignity of all Americans.”

Mr. Ryan’s focus on dignity… means that the man is in desperate need of LASIK surgery. Better hurry, before he’s forced to rely on his proposed Don’t Worry Ryan Will Give You A Voucher healthcare system for seniors.

Ryan is like most modern conservatives. If given their way, for all their dire warnings about America becoming socialist, Ryan's conservative America will look a lot like the poverty ridden, food deprived Soviet Union of the 1960s. We'll have mothers, children and the disabled looking through trash cans for food. All this while corporate America is already making per-recession level profits - if they are being taxed or regulated too much you sure cannot tell by the bottom line. If Ryan and his immoral elite conservative pals want to punish work and reward wealth there is a way for them to do that, they can move somewhere and start their own 16th century monarchy.

Reproductive Rights Are Civil Rights

Reproductive Rights Are Civil Rights

That requires that we look to history and the Constitution. I found myself doing that a few weeks back, sitting in the DC living room of Pamela Bridgewater, talking about slavery as the TV news followed the debate over whether the State of Virginia should force a woman to spread her legs and endure a plastic wand shoved into her vagina. Pamela has a lot of titles that, properly, ought to compel me to refer to her now as Professor Bridgewater—legal scholar, teacher at American University, reproductive rights activist, sex radical—but she is my friend and sister, and we were two women sitting around talking, so I shall alternate between the familiar and the formal.

“What a spectacle,” Pamela exclaimed, “Virginia, the birthplace of the slave breeding industry in America, is debating state-sanctioned rape. Imagine the woman who says No to this as a prerequisite for abortion. Will she be strapped down, her ankles shackled to stir-ups?”

“I suspect,” said I, “that partisans would say, ‘If she doesn’t agree, she is free to leave.’?”

“Right, which means she is coerced into childbearing or coerced into taking other measures to terminate her pregnancy, which may or may not be safe. Or she relents and says Yes, and that’s by coercion, too.”

“Scratch at modern life and there’s a little slave era just below the surface, so we’re right back to your argument.”

Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

More at the link. In the crazed minds of conservatives a clump of cells and corporations are people entitled to full rights as citizens, while women are not.

Mindless Conservative Puppet of the Week - Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) For Big Oil, But Against Government For and By the People

Mindless Conservative Puppet of the Week - Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) For Big Oil, But Against Government For and By the People

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) has launched a new ad asking Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) to end subsidies for big oil. Brown has received $152,100 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $8,500 from Chevron, Conoco Phillips, and Exxon in the two weeks before his May 17 vote against S. 940, which would have killed some oil industry subsidies. The advertisement portrays a Brown-lookalike in his campaign gear of a Carhardt jacket, leaving oily marks as he wanders through Boston:

    Scott Brown said he’s one of us. But there’s a growing stain on his record. Senator Brown’s taken over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars from big oil. And while Americans have been struggling at the pump, Senator Brown voted to keep giving oil companies billions in special government handouts. Sticking us with the bill, and a really big mess. Tell Senator Brown to vote to end tax breaks for Big Oil.

A new Public Policy Polling survey, conducted on behalf of LCV, finds that that 71 percent of those polled in Massachusetts think that tax breaks for oil companies should be eliminated, with only 18 percent in support of maintaining them.

Funny how politics and government works. We the people try to think about our future. If we know we're going to run out of bread or milk we make plans to deal with that. brown is taking big oil money to make sure the USA does not plan ahead. Brown wants a weaker, dependent USA. A USA crippled by short term thinking. many Americans think government does not work or cannot solve problems. Well, corrupt cronies like little Scottie Brown are in Washington to make sure government does not work for the people.

Decent Moral Americans Just Say No To Sen. Scott Brown a Serial Liar Without Honor

Decent Moral Americans Just Say No To Sen. Scott Brown a Serial Liar Without Honor

A major theme in Republican complaints about the $862 billion stimulus program is that it didn't deliver enough jobs. Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts took that view to an extreme, claiming that it didn't create any new jobs. Here's what he said during a Feb. 4, 2010, news conference, shortly after he was sworn in.

“The last stimulus bill didn’t create one new job, and in some states the money that was actually released hasn’t even been used yet,” Brown said.

ABC's Jonathan Karl immediately followed up. “It didn’t create one new job?” Karl asked.

“That’s correct. We lost another 85,000 jobs again, give or take, last month,” Brown responded.  “And in Massachusetts, it hasn’t created one new job and throughout the country as well. It may have retained some, but it hasn’t created any new jobs."

There are two ways to analyze this question -- looking at jobs created directly by the stimulus, and looking at jobs created in the broader economy since the stimulus bill took effect.

We'll look first at jobs funded directly by the stimulus.

According to Recovery.gov -- the Obama administration's Web site that tracks the stimulus effort -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created or saved 634,042 jobs between Feb. 17, 2009, and Sept. 30, 2009, and it funded 595,263 jobs between Oct. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2009. The data come from reports filed by the primary recipient of stimulus funds such as state and local governments and private-sector companies.

These numbers aren't perfect. They meld bits and pieces of part-time jobs into "full-time equivalent" jobs, and the two periods use different criteria for job counting, due to a change dictated by the Office of Management and Budget in December 2009. (For the earlier of the two periods cited above, the number refers to jobs created or saved; for the later of the two periods, it refers to the number of jobs funded by the stimulus without reference to whether that funding created or saved a job.) Also, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded in November 2009 that "there are a range of significant reporting and quality issues that need to be addressed" in this reporting system.

So these statistics may overstate the actual number of jobs created. But not by enough to make Brown's zero-jobs claim accurate.

So there's strong evidence that the stimulus has created lots of jobs directly through federal spending. What about the economy as a whole?

Economists have been estimating the impact of the stimulus on jobs by comparing two numbers: current employment statistics and an estimate of what those employment numbers would have looked like had there been no stimulus.

In a report released on Jan. 13, 2010, the president's Council of Economic Advisers estimated that between 1.77 million jobs and 2.07 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus through the fourth quarter of 2009.

Separately, the council's report cited four independent analyses of the same question. These estimates were by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as well by three private-sector economic-analysis firms. Here's what those groups found:

• CBO: Between 800,000 jobs (low estimate) and 2.4 million jobs (high estimate) saved or created.

• IHS/Global Insight: 1.25 million jobs saved or created.

• Macroeconomic Advisers: 1.06 million jobs saved or created.

• Moody's economy.com: 1.59 million jobs saved or created.

A couple of caveats: These estimates are based on economic models that vary somewhat from study to study, and not everyone buys the idea that it's possible to measure how the economy would have fared in the absence of a stimulus.

Indeed, some economists, including many conservatives, believe that the multiplier effect from the stimulus is small or nonexistent. "Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy," writes economist Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "No new purchasing power is created; it is merely transferred from one part of the economy to another. ... Removing water from one end of a swimming pool and pouring it in the other end will not raise the overall water level -- no matter how large the bucket. Similarly, borrowing money from one part of the economy and redistributing to another part of the economy will not create new growth -- no matter how big the stimulus bill."

We acknowledge that there's some dispute on this question. Still, the independent estimates we've seen have credibility, and they all agree that at least 1 million jobs have been created or saved. That, in combination with the hundreds of thousands of jobs cited on recovery.gov as being funded directly by the stimulus, contradicts Brown's assertion that the bill "didn’t create one new job."

But if Brown had chosen his words more carefully, he could have scored better on the Truth-O-Meter.

He's right that the economy as a whole has been losing jobs almost every single month since January 2008. According to a chart prepared by the Obama White House, there has been positive job growth in only one month during that period -- November 2009. (In his news conference comment, Brown actually underestimated the net job losses in December 2009, which was the most recent month for which data was available before he spoke; it was about 150,000, rather than 85,000.)

So if Brown had said that the national economy hasn't seen any net gain in jobs since the stimulus bill was passed, he would have earned himself a True.

But that's not what Brown said. He said the stimulus bill "didn’t create one new job" and, when asked to clarify, he said it "hasn’t created any new jobs." It's perfectly reasonable to question whether the $862 billion was well spent and whether it is good economic policy. But that money has clearly resulted in tens of thousands of jobs that wouldn't exist otherwise. It's preposterous to claim that no new jobs came out of it. We find his claim Pants on Fire!

The stimulus both created and saved jobs. Brown and his fellow conservatives with their anti-regulation and do not enforce regulation policies caused the economy to crash. Now like many conservative cowards he is trying to shift blame. The worse one can say about Obama and Democrats is they are not repairing the house conservatives burned down fast enough. Why does brown lie so often. because he has no character or honor. he cannot win talking facts. So like his hero George Bush he simply lies all the time about everything. Brown is an empty suit. he has no ideas and no leadership skills. he has never accomplished anything. never come up with a great idea. he is incapable of inspiring or living up to our Jeffersonian ideals. Brown is a cynical opportunist who only cares about one thing - Scott Brown and how much money and power he can get by way of public office. Want government to work better/ Want government for the people instead of special interests like Brown's friends the Ant-American Koch brothers. Than get rid of brown in 2012.

Conservatives hemorrhaged jobs and President Obama brought us back from the brink, but little Scotty brown doesn't have the integrity or maturity to admit that.

Women Have Never Liked Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback(R) So Now He Is Getting Revenge By Making All Women Only Three-fifths of a Person

Women Have Never Liked Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback(R) So Now He Is Getting Revenge By Making All Women Only Three-fifths of a Person

Women posted on Facebook to target Gov. Sam Brownback's support of an anti-abortion bill.
In protest of the governor’s support for a far-reaching anti-abortion bill, Kansas women have taken to GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s Facebook page to criticize his position. The postings mocked Brownback’s seemingly excessive interest in his neighbors’ reproductive and sexual health lives by addressing him as a women’s health expert:

    He’s vowed to sign into law the onerous “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” – a bill he freely admits that he has not read – that would permit doctors to withhold information from patients, force women to hear the fetal heartbeat prior to an abortion procedure, and contains the absolutely bananas provision that would require doctors to lie to women by telling them that abortions would increase the risk of breast cancer.

By Thursday, all of the comments from the “sarcasm bombing” had been scrubbed from Brownback’s Facebook wall, though RH Reality Check grabbed a couple of screenshots of the page:

Virginia Republicans faced similar backlash this week when residents of the state bombarded the Facebook pages of Republicans state Sen. Ryan McDougle — who sponsored the recently passed ultrasound bill — and Del. David Albo (R) with sarcastic posts “detailing anatomical happenings, asking questions and thanking Virginia Senate Republican caucus chairman Ryan McDougle for his concern of women’s health and rights.”

Will Gov Brownback be submitting urine samples every week so every American will know if he is taking Viagra. Will Kansas conservatives be setting up live video cams in their homes so the rest of America can watch and judge whether their personal sexual behavior is appropriate. Funny how much the world conservatives envision for the USA looks a lot like the old communists USSR.

How Do You Know If a Political Movement is Immoral - It Lies All The Time, Conservatives Invent $1 Abortion Myth

How Do You Know If a Political Movement is Immoral - It Lies All The Time, Conservatives Invent $1 Abortion Myth

Right-wing media are pointing to final regulations implementing health care reform legislation to revive long discredited myths about abortion coverage.

In early March 2012, the federal Department of Health and Human Services finalized a number of regulations implementing portions of the Affordable Care Act. One of the regulations implemented a provision requiring that insurance companies that choose to provide coverage for abortion through the health care exchanges ensure that federal money is not used to provide abortions. The regulations further require insurers to collect an additional abortion coverage fee from plan enrollees who choose a plan that covers abortion.

After the rules were announced, The Fox Nation excerpted a LifeNews.com piece under the false headline: "$1 Abortions in Obamacare." And Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that the regulation "establishes state health care exchanges under Obamacare including an abortion premium mandate. You now, because of this implementation of the rule, you now will be forced to pay a dollar a month to cover abortion on your insurance policy." Limbaugh also claimed that the fee "is coming out of your pocket, one way or the other."

None of this is true. There are no "$1 abortions" in the Affordable Care Act. There are also no requirements that everyone pay a fee for abortion coverage; indeed, people always have the choice of picking a plan that doesn't cover abortion at all.

The Falsehood That Everyone "Will Be Forced To Pay A Dollar A Month To Cover Abortion On Your Insurance Policy"

Limbaugh's claim that "you now will be forced to pay a dollar a month to cover abortion on your insurance policy," is simply not true.

The reason that the surcharge for abortion coverage exists at all is to make sure that federal money is not spent on abortion. Federal law bans the use of any federal funds for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the woman is in danger. The Affordable Care Act maintains that ban. Plans that cover abortion must charge enrollees an additional fee for abortion and keep those funds separate to ensure that no federal money is paid for abortion.

Moreover, people do not even have to choose a plan that covers abortion. The Affordable Care Act specifically says that in any health care exchanges that are established, there must be "at least one ... plan that does not provide coverage" for abortions. Therefore, a person who receives insurance through the exchanges can choose either a plan that covers abortion or one that does not. If the person chooses a plan that does not cover abortion, he or she does not pay a surcharge for abortion. Again, the regulations do nothing to change this provision.

Right-Wing Invents "$1 Abortions"

With respect to the right-wing media's claim about the impact of the Affordable Care Act on how much abortions cost, the Affordable Care Act does not set a price for abortions. Section 1303 of the Affordable Care Act states that insurance plans can cover abortions in cases of rape and incest and in cases where the life of the pregnant woman is in danger.

If an insurance plan chooses to cover abortion in other situations as well, it must charge an additional fee for this coverage. The Health and Human Services secretary determines the cost of this fee based "an average actuarial basis" for the entire population covered. But the cost of this fee may not take into account any cost savings that result from abortions, such as those resulting from a decrease in "prenatal care, delivery, or postnatal care." No matter what the actuarial estimates are, the fee shall not be "less than $1 per enrollee, per month." The regulations do nothing to change this provision.

In other words, private insurance companies that choose to cover abortions must overestimate the costs of abortion (since they are not allowed to take into account any cost reductions that result from abortion coverage). If this overestimate turns out to be less than $1 per month per enrollee, insurers still must charge enrollees $1 per month.

Conservatism is like all of history's nightmarish political movements, they wrap themselves in patriotism and values, which they use like a Trojan horse, to force their anti-freedom, anti-women, anti-children, anti-rationalism, anti-science, anti-morality agenda on the general public.

Immorality on the March - This is How Conservatives Define Capitalism. Those Who Disagree are Socialists

Immorality on the March - This is How Conservatives Define Capitalism. Those Who Disagree are Socialists, Goldman Sachs Insider Resigns, Reveals ‘Toxic’ Culture In Which Managers Called Clients ‘Muppets’

Last year, Goldman Sachs faced a significant amount of heat when internal emails — in which, bankers described a financial product they sold to clients as a “shitty deal” — became public. Goldman trader Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre became the face of a bank that cared more about its own internal trading profits than serving the needs of its clients, as shown by an email of his stating that he didn’t even understand the “monstrosities” he was peddling.

In today’s New York Times, Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith confirmed this characterization of the bank, writing that he resigned from Goldman due to its “toxic and destructive” environment which included managing directors referring to their own clients as “muppets”:

    Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

    To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money…It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail….These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?”

As Charles Elson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware, explained, “You make a much bigger buck on a transaction than on the long-term relationship…You have profiteers as opposed to advisers.” Goldman Sachs, of course, disputes Smith’s characterization of the bank, saying, “We disagree with the views expressed. … We will only be successful if our clients are successful.”

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has previously said that his firm is “doing God’s work.” However, it seems that the bank’s actual modus operandi is more akin to the description used by a former JP Morgan banker who lost faith in his industry: “I don’t say this lightly, but the consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose of the banking organization.”

Yet when moderate patriotic Americans attempt to fix the immoral shenanigans of Wall Street, the deeply and irrevocably immoral leaders of the Anti-American conservative movement do everything they can to stop reasonable regulation.

Pennsylvania Conservatives Prop Up Big Business With Crony Corporate Welfare and Give Average Citizens The Shaft

Pennsylvania Conservatives Prop Up Big Business With Crony Corporate Welfare and Give Average Citizens The Shaft

Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed and where the U.S. coal, oil and nuclear industries began, has adopted what may be the most anti-democratic, anti-environmental law in the country, giving gas companies the right to drill anywhere, overturn local zoning laws, seize private property and muzzle physicians from disclosing specific health impacts from drilling fluids on patients.
The draconian new law, known as Act 13, revises the state’s oil and gas statutes, to allow oil companies to drill for natural gas using the controversial process known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking, where large volumes of water and toxic chemicals are pumped into vertical wells with lateral bores to shatter the rock and release the hydrocarbons. The law strips rights from communities and individuals while imposing new statewide drilling rules.

“It’s absolutely crushing of local self-government,” said Ben Price, project director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has helped a handful of local communities—including the city of Pittsburgh—adopt community rights ordinances that elevate the rights of nature and people to block the drilling. “The state has surrendered over 2,000 municipalities to the industry. It’s a complete capitulation of the rights of the people and their right to self-government. They are handing it over to the industry to let them govern us. It is the corporate state. That is how we look at it.”

“Now I know what it feels like to live in Nigeria,” said recently retired Pittsburgh City Council President Doug Shields. “You’re basically a resource colony for multi-national corporations to take your natural resources, take them back to wherever they are at, add value to them, and then sell them back to you.”

Needless to say, Pennsylvania’s top political leadership—Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and Republican-controlled legislature—see Act 13 as a pro-business, clean-energy bill creating jobs, revenue and improving environmental laws surrounding drilling. That the 174-page bill was essentially rammed through the legislature over objections from local officials, environmentalists and a handful of legislators who said it not only turned “300 years of local zoning upside down,” but exposed the state to liability from wells, was irrelevant.

Every day conservatives have a choice between what is best for America and what puts more money in their pockets. They always pick greed over morality. Every day conservatives deprive future generations of freedom, energy and good health. Conservatives call this evil process freedom and patriotism.. Conservatism is in no way about what is good for the nation, it is about the accumulation of money and power, conservatism is the Anti-American freedom and responsibility movement, the movement of drooling hypocrites.

Why America's Wealthy Should Be Paying More Taxes

Why America's Wealthy Should Be Paying More Taxes

Before getting into the best reason, here are some of the usual -- and always good -- reasons. First of all, for every dollar the richest 1% earned in 1980, they've added three more dollars. The poorest 90% have added ONE CENT.

The richest million families have not worked three times (let alone 300 times) harder than the other 99 million families.

The richest 10% own 80% of the stock market, providing billions in "unearned income" that is taxed at less than half the rate of income earned through real work. The richest million families may have actually worked LESS than the other 99 million families.

A number of individuals have had one-year incomes over a billion dollars, enough to pay the salaries of 25,000 teachers or health care workers or emergency responders. It's questionable whether a guy who makes a billion betting on a mortgage collapse is worth even one teacher or health care worker or emergency responder.

Next is the woeful state of tax collections on the people making most of the money. Mitt Romney pays 15%, Warren Buffett 17.4%. The richest 400 Americans, 16.6%. The whole top 1% (a million families) paid less than 23% in 2006.

Average Americans pay more than that. Studies show that when state and local taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and excise taxes are tallied up, low-income people can be paying a higher percentage of taxes than the rich, perhaps up to 40% of their incomes.

Average Americans are also paying more than corporations. For every dollar of workers' payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 16 cents.

Whew. A lot of good reasons for the rich to be paying a lot more in taxes.

But here's the BEST REASON. The super-rich like to believe their own initiative and creativity have been the primary drivers of growth in technology and science and business and medicine. Some innovative business leaders deserve credit for putting the pieces together on specific initiatives. But the pieces themselves were put together over many years by thousands of less conspicuous people. As Elizabeth Warren said, "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody."

Consider just a simple communications device. The pieces were put together by a procession of chemists, physicists, chip designers, programmers, engineers, production-line workers, market analysts, testers, troubleshooters, etc., etc. They, in turn, couldn't have succeeded without another layer of people providing sustenance and medical support and security and administrative assistance and transportation and office maintenance for the technologists. ALL of them contributed to the final product.

You say a lot of them DID get paid? Well, then, something's wrong, because few of the profits over the last 30 years went to this "middle class" of people to keep them financially secure, and to keep them educated in all the new technologies that are replacing their jobs.

The long-term dependency on the supporting members of society is the best reason for the most fortunate among us to care about everyone else. Sadly, research suggests that wealthy people have less empathy for people unlike themselves, because they no longer have reason to associate with them.

This psychological gap between the rich and the rest of us naturally diminishes the incentive for the 1% to support anyone beneath their economic class. Thus less tax revenue and more cutbacks. Cuts in federal spending have been accompanied by an onslaught of social ills, including the highest poverty and homicide and incarceration and obesity and mental illness rates, an increasing child mortality rate, the highest health care costs, low global rankings in math and science scores. We continue to cut the programs that support a stable society.

The most fortunate among us have succeeded because all of America has supported them for 60 years. Yet they've somehow come to believe that they did it all on their own. Nothing could be further from the truth. They should be thanking all the people who contributed to their success.

Thanking them by paying taxes.
Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org),

Conservatives are a literal endless factory of myths. That the wealthy are the producers and the rest of us hard working Americans are the leechers is just one of them. No nation can survive for long - not as a prosperous and culturally enlightened nation - with most of the Gross Domestic Product being redistributed to those who do the least work.

Thank Goodness For The American People, Families and The Common Good That Health care Reform is Constitutional

Thank Goodness For The American People, Families and The Common Good That Health care Reform is Constitutional

What is at stake in the case challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), scheduled for oral argument in the Supreme Court in March? The challengers maintain that the case is about fundamental liberty, specifically our freedom not to be compelled to purchase things we don’t want. But that frame, while undoubtedly appealing to the radical libertarian strain in the Tea Party, is misleading. In fact, the only “liberty” that would be protected by a victory for the challengers is the freedom of insurance companies to discriminate against sick people.

The case is principally focused on the “individual mandate,” the law’s requirement that people who are not insured and can afford health insurance must buy it or pay a tax penalty. The federal government is a government of limited powers, and although Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, the challengers concede, if it can force people to “enter into commerce” in order to regulate them, then its powers are in effect unlimited. The reason Congress has never imposed such a mandate, they maintain, is that the power does not properly exist.

The Supreme Court deems the issue sufficiently serious to schedule an almost unprecedented five and a half hours of oral argument (it usually schedules a single hour). But the argument against the law is remarkably flimsy. Two of the country’s most conservative judges, Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit and Laurence Silberman of the DC Circuit, were unable to find a valid argument against the law and voted to uphold it. Harvard law professor Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, has also said the law is plainly constitutional. It’s always dangerous to predict Supreme Court rulings on controversial cases, but if the Court applies its precedents faithfully, it should be a victory for the administration.

Although the challengers focus their attack on the individual mandate, that provision cannot be separated from the act’s prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher rates based on “pre-existing” medical conditions. No one contests Congress’s constitutional authority to enact that overwhelmingly popular protection from dubious insurance practices. But without the individual mandate, the nondiscrimination protection would be unworkable. People would have a powerful incentive to wait until they get sick before they buy insurance, because they could not be penalized for doing so. Such “free-riding” would defeat insurance’s purpose of spreading risk. As one expert told Congress, health insurance cannot work if people can delay buying it until they are on the way to the hospital. Several states have tried to prohibit discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions, but the reforms have failed everywhere they have been enacted without an individual mandate. (Only in Massachusetts, where the protection is coupled with a mandate, has the reform been sustainable.)

Conservatives are fond of reminding us that society involves not just rights but responsibilities. Yet here, they don’t seem to get it—the right afforded by the ACA will work only if it comes with the responsibility to purchase insurance if you can afford it. In the end, the challenge to “Obamacare” is not conservative at all; it’s radically libertarian.

We’ve seen this kind of libertarian constitutional argument before. In the early twentieth century, after the Industrial Revolution had concentrated economic power in employers’ hands, Congress and the states passed many laws designed to protect workers from exploitation. Time and again, the Supreme Court invalidated these statutes. It deemed the federal laws beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce because they were said to regulate the terms of production, manufacture or mining, all of which were said to precede interstate commerce. And it invalidated state labor laws as infringements on the “freedom of contract” protected by the due process clause.

In the wake of the Depression and the New Deal, however, the Court overruled both lines of precedent. It abandoned altogether the due process notion that economic regulation infringes on “freedom of contract”; it has never since invalidated any law on that ground.

After years of being being hurt in auto accidents by people with no insurance all states mandated insurance or paying into an uninsured motorist fund ( a type of insurance for the lazy and responsible). Health care insurance is not fundamentally different from that. Requiring people to have basic driving skills, knowledge of road rules, and getting a driver's license is also similar. Not letting people have the individual right to kick their dog could be -according to the way conservatives think - an infringement on the rights of animal abusers. Conservationism is a noxious and fundamentally anti-American movement whose goal is to create an authoritarian plutocracy. Always beware of its toxic agenda and laughable reasoning. 

What Will It Take For The Press To Call Out Romney and Conservatives for Lying About Obama and Israel

What liberal media? What Will It Take For The Press To Call Out Romney and Conservatives for Lying About Obama and Israel

Two days ago, Barack Obama went before AIPAC (which is commonly known as "the Israel Lobby" but would be better understood as the Likud lobby, since it advocates not Israel's interests per se but the perspective of the right wing of Israeli politics, but that's a topic for another day), and said, among other things, the following:

    "I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power: A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort that imposes crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency. Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests."

This didn't surprise anyone, because it's the same thing Obama has been saying for a while, in scripted and unscripted remarks alike, in both speeches and interviews. Yet later that day, Mitt Romney went out and said the following:

    "This is a president who has failed to put in place crippling sanctions against Iran. He's also failed to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand, and that it's unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

So here's my question: Just what will it take for reporters to start writing about the question of whether Mitt Romney is, deep within his heart, a liar?

Because he does this kind of thing frequently, very frequently. Sometimes the lies he tells are about himself (often when he's trying to explain away things he has said or done in the past if today they displease his party's base, as he's now doing with his prior support for an individual mandate for health insurance), but most often it's Barack Obama he lies about. And I use the word "lie" very purposefully. There are lots of things Romney says about Obama that are distortions, just plain ridiculous, or unfalsifiable but obviously false, as when he often climbs into Obama's head to tell you what Obama really desires, like turning America into a militarily weak, economically crippled shadow of Europe (not the actual Europe, but Europe as conservatives imagine it to be, which is something like Poland circa 1978). But there are other occasions, like this one, where Romney simply lies, plainly and obviously. In this case, there are only two possibilities for Romney's statement: Either he knew what Obama has said on this topic and decided he'd just lie about it, or he didn't know what Obama has said, but decided he'd just make up something about what Obama said regardless of whether it was true. In either case, he was lying.

The "Who is he, really?" question is one that consumes campaign coverage, but in Romney's case the question has been about phoniness, not dishonesty, and the two are very different things. What that means is that when Romney makes a statement like this one, reporters don't run to their laptops to write stories that begin, "Raising new questions about his candor, today Mitt Romney falsely accused President Obama..." The result is that he gets a pass: there's no punishment for lying, because reporters hear the lie and decide that there are other, more important things to write about.

To get a sense of what it's like when reporters are on the lookout for lies, remember what Al Gore went through in 2000. To take just one story, when Gore jokingly told a union audience that as a baby his parents would rock him to sleep to the strains of "Look for the Union Label," everyone in attendance laughed, but reporters shouted "To the Internet!" and discovered that the song wasn't written until Gore was an adult. They then wrote entire stories about the remark, with those "Raising new questions..." ledes, barely entertaining the possibility that Gore was joking. Why not? Because it was Al Gore, and they all knew he was a liar, so obviously if he said something that wasn't literally true it could only have been an intentional falsehood.

That is not yet the presumption when it comes to Mitt Romney. There's another factor at play as well, which is that reporters, for reasons I've never completely understood, consider it a greater sin to lie about yourself, particularly about your personal life, than to lie about your opponent or about policy (I wrote about the different kinds of lies and how the press treats them differently here). Because Romney is lying about his opponent and about a policy matter, reporters just aren't as interested. But at some point, these things begin to pile up, and they really ought to start asking whether this dishonesty is something fundamental in Romney's character that might be worth exploring.

One reason the media will not call conservatives liars is because conservatives have been pretty good at intimidating the press. So much so the media in general, even when they know Romney or Gingrich or Santorum or Ron Paul are lying they report it as conservatives say the earth is flat but others disagree. Some facts are not open to disagreement, they are facts, the earth is not flat no matter how often conservatives claim otherwise.

How Conservatives Threaten Basic Personal Freedom With The Perpetual Culture War

How Conservatives Threaten Basic Personal Freedom With The Perpetual Culture War

The political press takes it as a given that there is a sharp dividing line between the “social issues” propelling the culture wars (abortion, school prayer, gay rights) and matters of substance (the economy, foreign policy, immigration and safety-net programs like unemployment benefits). But as the American conservative movement has veered sharply rightward over the past 30 years, that line is no longer so clean. Today, conservatives have a social argument for every subject of debate – everything has become part of the culture wars.

Viewing tangible matters through a cultural lens is not new. In the 19th century, dime novelist Horatio Alger wrote a series of formulaic books about poor, young, street urchins meeting some wealthy benefactor who teaches them the value of hard work and living a clean life. Once the urchins get on a properly Protestant, chaste path, their fortunes grow and they end up rising to the middle-class. It's a narrative that resonates with the right today.

But the intermingling of social and concrete issues has accelerated in the age of Obama. Many on the right consider Barack Obama alien – consider birtherism, or Dinesh D'Souza's claim that the president is influenced by “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior.” Whereas social issues once served as a distraction from matters of substance, today cultural narratives dominate conservatives' arguments.   

This is not just a matter of academic interest. It's helping to fuel the growing reality-gap between conservatives and liberals – and not just because we continue to see these issues as matters of substantive policy while increasingly they see them as cultural. It's also because people tend to be more defensive about social issues, and less likely to be open to counter-arguments or new information.

In his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don't Believe in Science, Chris Mooney explores years of research into the cognitive and neurobiological features associated with our ideologies. “The way the mind works,” Mooney writes, “suggests that good arguments only win the day when people don't have strong emotional commitments that contradict them.” Scientists, he writes, have long noted that “cold reasoning (rational, unemotional) is very different from hot reasoning (emotional, motivated).”

We are better able to have a cool, unemotional debate about the merits of, say, higher or lower corporate taxes. But cultural beliefs resonate more deeply, especially with conservatives; these beliefs become integrated into their identities, and once fixed, are difficult to dislodge with factual arguments. One area where conservatives and liberal tend to differ, according to Mooney, is “in their need to defend their beliefs, their internal desire to have unwavering convictions that do not and cannot change.” The culture wars are ultimately tribal, and as Mooney notes, conservatives are more likely to “be sure that their group is right, and the other group is wrong – in short, their need for group solidarity and unity, or for having a strong in-group/out-group way of looking at the world.”

So, having turned substantial issues into cultural debates, the right is more deeply invested in their outcomes, and less likely to be swayed by the reality we see around us. That “facts have a liberal bias” has become more than just a quip, and this is part of the reason why.

That is not to say that conservatives have stopped deploying non-cultural arguments – many still do. But consider some of the specific ways that what we think of as debates over concrete matters of public policy have been “culturalized” by the right.

The Economy and the Role of Government

Many conservative policy experts and politicians still make the same substantive arguments they have for years about corporate taxes sending jobs overseas or “entitlements” breaking the budget, but this is the area where the culturalization of formerly non-social issues is most apparent.

Consider one of the most enduring and pernicious untruths in our political economy. As I wrote last summer, most conservatives have come to embrace the view that poverty and inequality don't actually result from tangible economic factors.

    Rather, the poor are where they find themselves as a consequence of some deep-seated cultural flaws that keep them from achieving success. They're held back, the story goes, by what is known alternatively as a “culture of poverty,” or a “culture of dependence.” It's a popular fable for the right, as it absolves the political establishment for public policies that harm the working class and the poor.

It's also thoroughly and demonstrably untrue, flying in the face of decades of serious research findings. Yet it reinforces the in-group/out-group dynamic at the center of the culture wars and raises conservative defenses to factual information.

An excellent example of this is the simple fact that there are now 4.5 unemployed people for every full-time job opening (and 7.5 people looking for a full-time gig if you include those stuck “involuntarily” working part-time jobs), yet it remains a core belief on the right today that the unemployed are simply lazy – a cultural flaw -- and therefore unemployment benefits (which are extremely modest in the United States relative to other wealthy countries) contribute to the problem.

The hottest book in conservative circles right now is Charles Murray's Losing Ground, which calls for dismantling the social safety net based on a cultural analysis of inequality and has been touted by everyone on the right, from raging social-con Rick Santorum to David Brooks, the New York Times' Upper West Side-friendly “center-right” columnist.

As far as taxation, the stand-by claim that taxing the wealthy leads to lower business investment has been overtaken by another cultural narrative – the Randian view of a world made up of a few virile, virtuous “producers,” and the many “parasites” who feed off their labors. It’s the producers who create wealth and make a better world, and they do so by pursuing their own dreams of success. In Ayn Rand’s books, though, moochers and petty, visionless bureaucrats persistently bite at the ankles of her capitalist “supermen,” which has the effect -- unintended, but pernicious nonetheless-- of harming all of society. Therefore, freeing the wealthy from their obligations, freeing the elite from their social contract with the rest of us, is the apex of morality. Rand may have been a staunch atheist, but this argument resembles a religious viewpoint more than it does a matter of simple economics.

Conservatism has produced the two worse economic recessions in the last 35 years. Even a mildly irrational person might pause to wonder where they went wrong. Conservatives not only deny facts, they are in denial about recent history. Many Americans think that if we just have a civil debate we can work these things out. Not true when the conservative side cannot and will not face facts.

Conservative Romney’s plan would increase debt to 96 percent of GDP by 2021

Romney’s plan would increase debt to 96 percent of GDP by 2021

Several independent analyses have shows that the economic plans put forth by the GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum would cause the deficit to explode. Just last month, Romney — who won the Arizona and Michigan primaries this week — unveiled a plan that would increase deficits by $10.7 trillion.

But Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who chairs the House Budget Committee, told Bloomberg TV today that he finds the GOP candidates’ plans “very credible,” before he went on complain about the Obama administration’s budget for increasing deficits too much:

    Very credible. They are talking about entitlement reform. They are putting specifics on the table on Medicare and Social Security reform. The president, knowing that these are the big drivers of our debt, is ducking it. He gave us a budget that increases spending about $1.5 trillion and has a tax increase of $1.9 trillion. So out of the $47 trillion he is planning over the next ten years, he only wants to deliver about $400 billion of deficit reduction– is a scintilla of deficit reduction. It is ignoring the program, punting, ducking the issue. It’s the fourth budget from the president. It is not serious. We need serious leadership, and both of these candidates have put very credible, specific, serious plans on the table.

Ryan then dismissed the Tax Policy Center analysis showing that Romney’s planned 20 percent reduction in tax rates and repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax would increase the debt by $3 trillion, claiming that Romney has “base broadening” that will offset the cost. Romney has made the same claim, but has yet to provide any specifics about what sort of tax provisions he’ll eliminate. Simply put, his plan’s math doesn’t add up.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Romney’s plan would increase debt to 96 percent of GDP by 2021, unless he actually follows through with his offsets, at which point it would go to 86 percent. Santorum’s plan, meanwhile, would bring it to 104 percent of GDP. The Committee’s “realistic baseline” for the debt projects it going to 85 percent of GDP by 2021. So all of the GOP candidate’s plans (except for Ron Paul’s) make the debt projection substantially worse.

Ryan, of course, has plenty of experience with budget-busting economic plans, so perhaps its not surprising that he finds the latest offerings from the GOP candidates so enticing.

At no time when conservative Republicans have held the nations' purse strings have they presented a reasonable or balanced budget. During the Bush years as some may remember Republican John Mccain even said conservatives were spending like "drunken sailors". Conservatives seem to have no concept of math or what is best for America. Conservatism has become the sheath anti-America movement, hiding its radical agenda behind a lot flag waving fake patriotism.