Conservative Libertarians Think Freedom Means Not Having Dominion Over Your Own Body

Conservative Libertarians Think Freedom Means Not Having Dominion Over Your Own Body

The Mercatus Institute, a libertarian-oriented — and Koch brothers-affiliated — think tank based out of George Mason University (a public university, for whatever that’s worth), regularly releases its ranking of American states in terms of “Freedom.” Their definition of “freedom” largely adheres to the standard American libertarian conception of “liberty,” which is to say it is oriented almost entirely around private property ownership and low taxation. As a result, America’s freest state this year turns out to be North Dakota. [2]

North Dakota has also been in the news for another reason recently. What was it, again? Oh, right, it passed the most restrictive antiabortion laws in the country. [3] Including a law specifically aimed at shutting down the state’s lone abortion provider. It passed this lawknowing it was unconstitutional [4].

The data Mercatus used, as far as I can tell, are largely from 2011. But these laws wouldn’t do a thing to change’s North Dakota’s ranking, because Mercatus doesn’t take reproductive rights into account at all. [5] In fact, no issues specifically related to women’s rights are taken into account. Same-sex marriage is included, but not housing employment anti-discrimination rules. They do weigh “‘smoker protection’ in employment,” though. (I think they are in favor of laws barring companies from firing smokers. Isn’t that the government interfering with the employer’s Freedoms?) There is also a list ranking the states in terms offriendliness to Bachelor Parties. [6]

[UPDATE: Mercatus opposes "smoker protection laws" and a state's rank fell if it had them. I apologize for getting that wrong, and assuming the Institute had an inconsistent position. Thank you to Radley Balko [7], whose work I've always sincerely admired, for correcting me and then calling me a hack.

I'd still note that in the report's scoring system [5], "Tobacco Freedom," which is mainly about smoking bans and cigarette taxes, makes up 4.1 percent of a state's "freedom ranking." "Marriage Freedom" is 2.1 percent. Freedom from "Asset Forfeiture" -- a frequently abused [8]police outgrowth of the drug war [9] -- is 0.1 percent, which would seem to indicate that it's included mainly to say that it was included.]

“Economic freedom” is of course their most important freedom, and so it is weighted the heaviest, with fiscal and regulatory matters making up a bit more than two-thirds of each state’s score. Which is how their No. 1 freest state is ranked 39th on the “Civil Liberties” list. Though that list is fairly useless, as their definition of “civil liberties” is “unrelated policies, such as fireworks laws, prostitution laws, and trans-fat bans.” On the list taking into account “incarceration rates, non-drug crime arrests, and drug enforcement,” Freest State North Dakota is at 24. (Second-freest state South Dakota is 48.) And Arizona has climbed to No. 11 on the overall list, because at no point are the rights of immigrants or people whom the police may suspect are immigrants taken into account.

Also fun is their “Right to Work” list [10], where every single state is either tied for first or tied for last. (It should be noted that many libertarians think there’s nothing particularly libertarian about Right to Work laws [11], which are strictly pro-business, not pro-”market.”)

And they made a cartoon.

So this is how the Mercatus Center defines freedom: the right of people with money to keep it all, and for everyone else to fuck off. Almost any Liberty issue that wouldn’t concern a straight, white, male capitalist is wholly ignored.

The Mercatus Center, coincidentally, is run in large part with money from Koch Industries. Charles Koch sits on its board, along with another high-ranking Koch Industries executive. Mercatus is effectively the in-house think tank for the Kochs, providing reports and research that support the ideological aims of the notorious brothers, and their ideological aims usually also support the long-term goal of the Kochs to make as much money for themselves as possible without anyone telling them to “pollute a bit less” or “pay taxes.”

Looking at the list, it’s clear that most Americans have “voted with their feet” and chosen to live primarily in our least free states. Bottoming out the list are California, the second-least free and most populous state, and New York, third in population and dead last in liberty.

I called North Dakota a “fucking shithole” on Twitter earlier, which was unfair of me, because while it is unreasonably, inhospitably freezing cold in much of the state for much of the year (and I say this as someone who grew up one state away) it is, on the whole, a reasonably pretty part of the country full of decent people (unless you are openly gay or transgendered or in need of an abortion obviously). I can more easily figure out why people, indigenous and immigrant, settled there than, say, Phoenix. But there is a reason that fewer people live in all of North Dakota than in Detroit, and there is a reason why the population of North Dakota slowly declined from the 1920s through the end of the 20th century: Not that many people want to live there. People are moving there now because of a natural resources boom (and those always last forever and always create permanent, stable communities, right?) not because North Dakota suddenly became a much nicer place to live, on account of freedom.

New York and California, though, are both super-nice, even though we confiscate more money than North Dakota, and spend it on things like mass transportation (freedom from having to own cars!) and helping people without means get food and healthcare (freedom from dying!). Koch industries co-owner David Koch, for the record, lives in New York City. Though I imagine he and his brother will soon pack up and relocate to sunny, free Grand Forks.

So Conservative-Libertardians think freedom consists about 90% of low taxes, low wages and having their boot on the back of anyone who makes less money. A nation based on that kind of "freedom" is not a democratic republic, it is an authoritarian nightmare.

How Conservatism and Plutocrats Shaped The Economy and Stole The American Dream

How Conservatism and Plutocrats Shaped The Economy and Stole The American Dream

Who Stole the American Dream? (Random House, 2012), by Hedrick Smith, is essential reading for anyone who want to understand America today, or why average Americans are struggling to stay afloat. Smith reveals how pivotal laws and policies were altered while the public wasn’t looking, how Congress often ignores public opinion, why moderate politicians got shoved to the sidelines and how Wall Street often wins politically by hiring over 1,400 former government officials as lobbyists. The following excerpt comes from the prologue, “The Challenge From Within.”

History often has hidden beginnings. There is no blinding flash of light in the sky to mark a turning point, no distinctive mushroom cloud signifying an atomic explosion that will forever alter human destiny. Often a watershed is crossed in some gradual and obscure way so that most people do not realize that an unseen shift has moved them into a new era, reshaping their lives, the lives of their generation, and the lives of their children, too. Only decades later do historians, like detectives, sift through the confusing strands of the past and discover a hitherto unknown pregnant beginning.

One such hidden beginning, with powerful impact on our lives today, occurred in 1971 with “the Powell Memorandum.” The memo, first unearthed by others many years ago, was written by Lewis Powell, then one of America’s most respected and influential corporate attorneys, two months before he was named to the Supreme Court. But it remains a discovery for many people today to learn that the Powell memo sparked a business and corporate rebellion that would forever change the landscape of power in Washington and would influence our policies and economy even now.

The Powell memo was a business manifesto, a call to arms to Corporate America, and it triggered a powerful response. The seismic shift of power that it set in motion marked a fault line in our history. Political revolt had been brewing on the right since the presidential candidacy in 1964 of Senator Barry Goldwater, the anti-union, free market conservative from Arizona, but it was the Powell memo that lit the spark of change. It ignited a long period of sweeping transformations both in Washington’s policies and in the mind-set and practices of American business leaders—transformations that reversed the politics and policies of the postwar era and the “virtuous circle” philosophy that had created the broad prosperity of America’s middle class.

The newly awakened power of business helped propel America into a New Economy and a New Power Game in politics, which largely determine how we live today. Both were strongly tilted in favor of the business, financial, and corporate elites. Trillions were added to the wealth of America’s super-rich at the expense of the middle class, and the country was left with an unhealthy concentration of political and economic power.

This book will take you inside that decades-long story of change and show how we have unwittingly dismantled the political and economic infrastructures that underpinned the great era of middle-class prosperity in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
The Economic Divide - The 1 Percent and the 99 Percent

Today, the gravest challenge and the most corrosive fault line in our society is the gross inequality of income and wealth in America. Not only political liberals but conservative thinkers as well emphasize the danger to American democracy of this great divide. “America is coming apart at the seams—not seams of race or ethnicity, but of class,” writes conservative sociologist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute. Murray voices alarm at what he describes as “the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever known. . . . The divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America.”

Since the era of middle-class prosperity from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, the past three decades have produced the third wave of great private wealth in American history, a new Gilded Age comparable to the era of the robber barons in the 1890s, which led to the financial Panic of 1893 and the trust-busting presidency of Theodore Roosevelt; and to the era of great fortunes in the Roaring Twenties, which ended in the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

In our New Economy, America’s super-rich have accumulated trillions in new wealth, far beyond anything in other nations, while the American middle class has stagnated. What separates the Two Americas is far more than a wealth gap. It is a wealth chasm—“mind-boggling” in its magnitude, says Princeton economist Alan Krueger. Wealth has flowed so massively to the top that during the nation’s growth spurt from 2002 to 2007, America’s super-rich, the top 1 percent (3 million people), reaped two-thirds of the nation’s entire economic gains. The other 99 percent were left with only one-third of the gains to divide among 310 million people. In 2010, the first full year of the economic recovery, the top 1 percent captured 93 percent of the nation’s gains.

Americans, more than people in other countries, accept some inequality as part of our way of life, as inevitable and even desirable—a reward for talent and hard work, an incentive to produce and excel. But wealth begets wealth, especially when reinforced through the influence of money in politics. Then the hyperconcentration of wealth aggravates the political cleavages in our society.

The danger is that if the extremes become too great, the wealth dichotomy tears the social fabric of the country, undermines our ideal of equal opportunity, and puts the whole economy at risk—and more than the economy, our nation itself. A solid majority of Americans say openly that we have reached that point—that our economy is unfairly tilted in favor of the wealthy, that government should take action to make the economy fairer, and that they’re frustrated that Congress continually blocks such action.

What’s more, contrary to political arguments put forward for not taxing the rich, an economy of large personal fortunes does not deliver the best economic performance for the country. In fact, concentrated wealth works against economic growth. Several recent studies have shown that America’s wealth gap is a drag on today’s economy.

This basic truth is why conservatives - Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Glenn Beck, the Koch brothers, Pete Petersen and every other conservative crank spends their wheels so often, so loudly and with such hatred. They have to keep the illusion going that they are the free market capitalists and those who oppose them are anti-Christ Marxists. The radical Right and their corporate collectivism is the real threat to capitalism and freedom, not normal moderate Americans.

A Greener Living For An Urban Family

A Greener Living For An Urban Family Fresh vegetables, herbs, honey and new eggs every day; Jules and his family are living the farm life. It’s also a most unconventional lifestyle given that their home is in the middle of Pasadena, California. The family struggles to be as self-sustainable as they possibly can—their car drives on biogas, solar panels power their television, and each day they have fresh food from their own meticulously well-maintained crops. Jules first began his farming life before moving to Pasadena, when he lived for several years in New Zealand. Jules embarked on his current lifestyle after becoming concerned about how the food industry controlled what he and his family ate. Jules wanted to be more in control and minimize his family’s impact on the environment.

The Republican March In North Dakota To Have Tyrannical Government Control of Women's Bodies

The Republican March In North Dakota To Have Tyrannical Government Control of Women's Bodies

On Tuesday afternoon, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) signed into law three different abortion restrictions — HB 1305, HB 1456, and SB 2305 — that women’s health advocates say will effectively ban abortion in the state. The extreme legislation that has received the most media attention is HB 1456, an unconstitutional “fetal heartbeat” ban that would outlaw abortions after just six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even realize they’re pregnant. But when it comes to the new laws’ concrete effect on the lives of women in North Dakota, a lesser-known piece of legislation may actually pose an even bigger threat to reproductive rights.

North Dakota women will feel the immediate impact of SB 2305, which indirectly targets abortion access by over-regulating abortion providers — a popular anti-choice tactic known as the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP. Abortion opponents push TRAP laws with the ultimate goal of forcing abortion clinics to close their doors.

TRAP laws are cleverly framed in terms of ensuring women’s safety, but they’re actually incredibly effective methods of cutting off access to reproductive care at health clinics. That’s why Tammi Kromenaker, the director of North Dakota’s last remaining abortion clinic, told RH Reality Check that SB 2305 could actually represent the most serious threat to women’s abortion services in the state:

    “We definitely see the TRAP bill as the one that will end abortion in the state,” Tammi Kromenaker, the director of Red River Women’s Clinic (RRWC), told RH Reality Check. RRWC is the only abortion clinic in North Dakota. “The other bills aren’t really a threat right now, but this one could close us.” [...]

    These bills have drawn attention away from the true threat to RRWC: Under the new TRAP bill, abortion providers would be forced to obtain hospital admitting privileges. But at least one of the two local hospitals won’t offer those privileges to the clinic — because the quality of care at RRWC is so high that the clinic doesn’t need them.

    Lawmakers proposed the bill under the guise of “women’s safety,” but Kromenaker points out that her clinic’s safety record is actually better than the average clinic safety records, showing that the “need” for the bill was completely fabricated. “This bill is intended to impose an impossible to meet requirement,” she said. “There is no other goal but to shut us down.”

North Dakota’s new six-week ban will likely be tied up in court for going much too far to undermine the constitutional protections in Roe v. Wade, which guarantees the right to first-trimester abortion services. And an even more radical “personhood” amendment, which could ban all abortions altogether if voters approve it on the 2014 November ballot, will face similar legal challenges if it becomes law. On the other hand, SB 2305 could force the Red River Women’s Clinic to close its doors relatively quickly — just like similar legislation has done to health clinics in other states.

Conservatives have some very creepy ideas about rights, children and women. As long as someone is a possible person, a clump of cells, they're all for the protection of that abstraction - going so far as to have the government make personal health care choices for individuals and their families. On the other hand they actively despise women, hate the idea of helping children with health care or education. And they're happy to use government to make sure that corporations have more power then women or children. Whatever values Republicans have, they're not patriotic American values. 

How Low Can Morally Corrupt Republicans Go, GOP Opposition Researcher Names Drudge As A Propaganda Model

How Low Can Morally Corrupt Republicans Go, GOP Opposition Researcher Names Drudge As A Propaganda Model

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin interviewed Tim Miller, executive director of a new conservative political action committee centered on opposition research, who reminisced about how conservative operatives successfully used blogger Matt Drudge to push debunked or thinly-researched smears against Democrats in 2004, describing it as a "great model" that needs to be updated.

In a March 24 post at Rubin's "Right Turn" blog, Miller described his organization, America Rising, as being dedicated to the "collection, dissemination and deployment of opposition research against Democrats," and uses Drudge's DrudgeReport.com circa 2004 as a model to return to (emphasis added):

    Last week former Mitt Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades and two young Republican sharpshooters, Tim Miller and Joe Pounder, announced they would set up a new organization, America Rising, devoted to the collection, dissemination and deployment of opposition research against Democrats and a counterpart to the hugely successful American Bridge on the left. On Friday I sat down with Miller and Pounder at a Capitol Hill Starbucks to talk about their new venture.

    They plan on instigating nothing less than a revolution in the way the right does and uses oppo research. They are keen on connecting research to communication and every other aspect of campaigns. Pounder tells me, "It must be responsive to the news cycle and polling." Miller jokes that "research has been people sitting in a dungeon or going through trash cans" and then funneling the information up to a press person to send out in a mass e-mail. Miller says, "Now you have to drive the news cycle."

    The Romney campaign was certainly hobbled by the Democrats' opposition machine, which cranked out information on everything from Bain to Cayman bank accounts, funneled it to friendly press outlets and the Obama super PAC, and kept the Romney team on perpetual defense. But the problem is not specific to the Romney campaign. Miller recalls, "We had a great model in 2004 -- research guys who fed to Drudge. Drudge drove the mainstream media." But, he says, "in a lot of ways we haven't done a good job of updating [that model]. Over time we rested on our laurels."

In 2006, ABC News highlighted Drudge's influence on media, particularly in the 2004 election cycle, saying, "Republican operatives keep an open line to Drudge, often using him to attack their opponents...And then the mainstream media often picks it up."

Drudge did help drive stories to Fox News, right-wing radio and other outlets during the 2004 presidential election, but much of the blogger's content -- which included discredited attacks on John Kerry's military service -- was thinly-researched, deceptively edited, or flat-out wrong.

What does it say about your radical political movement that it's single biggest weapon is not truth, not American values, not legal or economic justice, not liberty, not the Constitution, not progress and jobs, but smears from mentally unstable ideologues.

Americans Want a Back-to-Work Alternative to Creepy Paul Ryan's Austerity Scheme

Americans Want a Back-to-Work Alternative to Creepy Paul Ryan's Austerity Scheme

When it comes to budgets, debts and deficits and, most importantly, the future of the US economy, there are two distinct visions competing in Washington.Members of the Congressional Black Caucus speak against proposed tax cuts, December 10, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Both cost a lot of money.

But they seek to steer the United States in radically different directions.

One vision, that of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, spends our federal largesse on tax breaks for the rich and schemes to divert Medicare funds into the accounts of private insurers. It’s classic crony capitalism. But that’s not the worst of it. Because Ryan’s plan comes wrapped in an austerity model for squeezing government spending and investment, it threatens to stall an economy that is only beginning to grow at a rate sufficient to create needed jobs.

On Thursday, the House voted 221-207 for the Ryan budget. The Republican majority was reasonably solidified in support of the proposal, although ten sincere fiscal conservatives opposed a measure that focuses far more of satisfying the demands of Wall Street donors than actual deficit reduction.

Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the Ryan budget. That can and should be read as a rejection of the ugliest face of austerity. But it is not the case that congressional Democrats are united when it comes to presenting an alternative to Ryanism. And that’s a problem because voters don’t just want Congress to reject austerity; polling data makes it clear that they want an alternative that is focused on job creation.

The best alternatives to the Ryan budget have been presented by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The two groups, which have a significant overlap in their membership, saw their proposals rejected by the House on Wednesday. Ryan’s Republican colleagues opposed both plans, as did dozens of cautious Democrats who have yet to recognize the importance of challenging the lie of austerity with a no-holds-barred growth agenda.

The political reality, of course, is that this week’s House votes settle nothing with regard to the budget priorities that will ultimately frame the nation’s future. “Once again, Republicans in the House have passed a budget that the American people do not support, and has no real chance of becoming law,” explained Congressman Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who serves on the Budget Committee. “This is a budget whose math is bogus, but whose consequences are real and serious for our middle class families in Wisconsin. From destroying jobs, to raising taxes on the middle class, to turning Medicare into a voucher system, it makes the wrong decisions and reflects the wrong priorities… But the biggest problem with the GOP budget is that it fails to tackle the greatest threat to our long-term deficit—our need to grow our economy and create jobs. With 12 million Americans still unemployed, and millions more who are underemployed, the best budget we can put forth is one that fosters job growth.”

It will be in the wrangling between the House and Senate, and the broader national debate, that the fiscal and economic priorities of the nation will finally be shaped.

And it is important to recognize that, in that broader national debate, Ryan and the House majority have already lost.

The American people have no taste for austerity.

They want a growth agenda. The new Gallup Poll finds that 72 percent of Americans support spending federal money on a program to “put people to work on urgent infrastructure repairs.” Seventy-two percent of Americans also favor “a federal jobs creation law that would spend government money for a program that would create more than one million new jobs.”

Those positions are antithetical to everything Ryan is proposing.

That’s a growth agenda that is the opposite of austerity.

It is a growth agenda that mirrors what the Congressional Progressive Caucus has proposed with its “Back to Work” budget.

The CPC budget plan balances the budget far more efficiently and effectively than does Ryan’s—as it eschews the pay-to-play giveaways to campaign donors in the insurance, pharmaceutical and financial-services industries—and stimulates job creation. That’s because the CPC proposal rejects austerity in favor of growth. The focus on growth is essential to the CPC plan, which is wholly distinct from other Democratic plans that seek to strike an often incoherent balance between smart investments and Ryan’s austerity.

Believing in conservative austerity, Ryan's austerity or Romney austerity is like believing that flesh eating trolls live under all bridges. It is all based on the fetid fantasies of the conservative bubble, not sound economics. America cannot afford austerity. Democrats have already given them austerity-lite, which is why the economy is growing, but slower than it would if we did away with austerity all-together.

Why Does Conservative Fox News Hate America and Progress

Why Does Conservative Fox News Hate America and Progress

A Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released Tuesday finds that green jobs grew four times faster in 2011* than jobs in other sectors, continuing a trend of rapid growth in the U.S. But Fox News is still pushing the narrative that investing in clean energy is a "boondoggle."

The U.S. added more than 150,000 green jobs in 2011, including more than 100,000 construction jobs and 14,000 manufacturing jobs. In total, the green sector now employs more than 3.4 million workers in the U.S. The following chart shows that green jobs in the private sector increased in nearly every category in 2011:

This is not a new trend: the Brookings Institution previously found that the clean economy added half a million jobs between 2003 and 2010, and that clean tech jobs grew "more than twice as fast as the rest of the economy" during that period.

As the Los Angeles Times noted, the recent growth in green jobs "parallels a surge in public and private money" invested in clean energy in 2011.

Nevertheless, Fox News continues to distort the facts in an effort to portray government investments in clean energy as a waste of money. Fox News' Brit Hume claimed in 2011 that the Obama administration's green investments have "utterly failed to produce meaningful jobs." Last month, the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes claimed on Fox News that "we haven't seen many gains" from these investments. Just this week, Neil Cavuto said on his Fox Business show that Obama's green initiatives have "not had the big tangible jobs bang for the buck that you would think."

Faced with clear evidence that clean energy investments are paying off, will Fox change its tune?

Most of the talking heads at the conservative slanted Fox News make salaries in the 7 figure range ( serial liar and rabid America hater Bill O'Reilly is said to make around 3 million a year - scientists are said to be studying what he does that is worth more than  2 cents an hour). Raking in all this cash one would think Fox News would love America, not hate America, American workers, women, rape victims, the working poor or anyone that stands up for real American values.

Proto-fascist John Hinderaker of PowerLine Should Stop Foisting Economic Lies On a Country He Claims To Love

Proto-fascist John Hinderaker of PowerLine Should Stop Foisting Economic Lies On a Country he Claims To Love

Via Mark Thoma, Hale Stewart is bemused by John Hinderaker of PowerLine. As Stewart notes, Hinderaker begins by asserting that everyone knows that an economic crisis is coming — which apparently means everyone he talks to — then rolls out just about every one of the myths that have been proved wrong again and again by events, from the looming debt crisis to the imminent takeoff of inflation.

What Stewart may not know is that this reign of error goes way back — at least to Hinderaker’s ridiculing of yours truly, back in 2005, for suggesting that we had a huge housing bubble that posed an economic threat. He knew that this was nonsense, because the authors of Dow 36,000 said so. It’s actually kind of a nice symmetry: the man who sneered at warnings about a real crisis is now utterly convinced by claims about a fake crisis.

All of which raises an interesting question: why don’t people like Hinderaker who have been wrong about everything for years and years — demonstrably wrong, in ways that would have lost anyone who believed them a lot of money — ever reconsider? Shouldn’t the thought at least enter their minds that maybe economic analysis is not their strong point? Shouldn’t they at least entertain the notion that they are talking to the wrong “experts”?

So why doesn’t this happen? Part of it, surely, is the Dunning-Kruger effect: the truly incompetent are too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent. Part of it, also, is the Madoff “affinity fraud” effect: people trust someone they perceive as part of their tribe — in this case the tribe of liberal-haters — and are blind to evidence that they are being taken for a ride.

The surprise, I’d say, is just how strong the Dunning-Kruger-Madoff effect has proved in the face of economic crisis. Year after year in which the predictions of their crowd have gone totally astray haven’t shaken their faith at all. They still believe that reading the WSJ editorial page and watching Fox are the way to know what’s going to happen to the economy, and nothing will change their minds.

For those who are  unfamiliar with it, the Dunning-Kruger-Madoff effect is named after a psychological-neuroscience study that looked at the conundrum of how the incompetent fail to see how incompetent they are, precisely because of their incompetence. If you have have family or friends who were killed or maimed in Iraq, Assrocket ( his well deserved internet nickname) is one of the people responsible. he was one of the circle jerk of conservative pundits who tried to sell the nation on that mulch-trillion dollar debacle. He either has the brains of a tree stump or is malevolent to the core. That he thinks of himself as a patriot would be laughable if he were not so pathetic. This is what he wrote about one of, if not the worse president in U.S. history,

"It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another . . ."

Assrocket and other conservative "intellectuals" are the kind of cancerous growth in America that have been and obviously still are, giving patriotism a bad name. 

How Do You Know The Washington Post is a Conservative Rag. Because They Will Not Fire Jennifer Rubin For Libel

How Do You Know The Washington Post is a Conservative Rag. Because They Will Not Fire Jennifer Rubin For Libel

Since the summer of 2010, the right-wing media has been obsessively promoting the absurd non-scandal involving the New Black Panther Party, in which the Obama Justice Department was alleged to have dropped voter intimidation charges against the fringe group owing to racial and political solidarity. One of the primary movers of this farce has been Jennifer Rubin, who authored one of the first reports on the story for The Weekly Standard and continued to write at length about DOJ's alleged perfidy at her Washington Post blog.

This month, the Justice Department's inspector general released the results of their investigation into the New Black Panthers affair and confirmed what everyone already knew to be true: the allegations against DOJ were bunk. Rubin is excitedly waving this report around, claiming it reflects poorly on President Obama's reported Labor Secretary nominee, and determinedly ignoring the parts that show pretty much every word she wrote about the New Black Panther story was rooted in falsehood.

Since the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its report, Rubin has written two Washington Post blog posts touting its findings to attack Perez. In a March 12 post, she wrote: "I won't revisit all the behavior of the Obama Justice Department but a nearly-300 page report has been released by the administration's own inspector general. The IG went out of the way to be even-handed, even when there was substantial evidence of politicization." The next day, she briefly referenced the OIG report's findings on the New Black Panther case, writing:

    The IG declined to find a racial or political motive for dismissing the New Black Panther case but found actions surrounding that action "risked undermining confidence in the non-ideological enforcement of the voting rights laws." In other words, it sure looked partisan.

Rubin's twisted construction of the IG "declin[ing] to find a racial or political motive" is fairly comical, given how invested Rubin was in the existence of those motives. Again, she was one of the main drivers of this story. She wrote a lengthy Weekly Standard article in June 2010 (before J. Christian Adams resigned from DOJ claiming racially charged "corruption" in the case, which blew up the story) alleging that the "Obama Justice Department went to bat for the New Black Panther party -- and then covered it up." As the story slowly fell to pieces, Rubin held firm, insisting the critics were wrong. "The issue is whether a meritorious claim of voter intimidation was dismissed under pressure from left-leaning civil rights groups," she wrote in January 2011, "and whether there is reason to believe there is a sentiment against a color-blind application of civil rights laws."

By March 2011, we knew affirmatively that the allegations of racial preference at DOJ were false. The department's Office of Professional Responsibility investigated the matter and released their findings. According to the report, OPR "found no evidence that the decision to dismiss the case against three of the four defendants was predicated on political considerations," and "no evidence that political considerations were a motivating factor in authorizing the civil action against the four defendants."

Rubin, however, was undeterred. She lashed out at OPR, calling it "as unprofessional as it is biased," and insisted that the report was wrong:

    Frankly, in reporting in my pre-Post days and in subsequent reporting by The Post, there is ample evidence that voting section attorneys objected to enforcing civil rights laws against minority defendants("my people," as Eric Holder infamously put it). Yet the crack team at OPR apparently didn't find any evidence of this. (Do they subscribe to The Post?) [Right Turn, 4/3/2011]

The OIG report, however, not only confirms OPR's finding, it flatly debunks Rubin:

    The OIG received allegations that Division leadership between 2009 and 2012 was hostile to "race neutral" enforcement of the voting rights laws and that the Voting Section would enforce Sections 2 and 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act only in "traditional" circumstances -- namely, to protect minorities as historical victims of discrimination -- and not against minority defendants or to protect White victims. We found insufficient evidence to conclude that Division leadership during this period had such a policy, or that the laws were enforced in a discriminatory manner to achieve that result.
The New Black Panthers case was a gigantic distraction, a manufactured controversy meant to stoke outrage and damage the Obama administration politically. We're only still talking about it because of adetermined effort on the part of conservative media figures, like Rubin, to force it into the news cycle. It's been debunked more times than should have been necessary, and the fact that Rubin is gingerly tip-toeing around the most recent dismantling of the fake story she helped will into existence is perhaps an indication that we're finally nearing the point of putting this nonsense to bed once and for all.

Conservative Republican Rubin has a long and dubious history of trying to convince the reading public that her wacko delusions are facts.

I don't understand why Paul Ryan (R-WI) hates America so much. He has a cushy job ($179k per year) where he doesn't do anything - because he wants to do his part to make sure government doesn't work - Paul Ryan's $5.7 Trillion Magic Trick - yet here he is trying to take money from seniors, the working poor and the middle-class to pay for tax cuts for wealthy moochers who keep complaining about how hard they have it.

If Republicans Really Love America, Hey, How About a Refund, Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

If Republicans Really Love America, Hey, How About a Refund, Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago.

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

“Nearly every government that goes to war underestimates its duration, neglects to tally all the costs, and overestimates the political objectives that will be accomplished by war’s violence,” said Boston University professor of political science and project co-director Neta C. Crawford.

Indeed, the war devastated the Iraqi health care system and allowed militants to hone their skills and export them to neighboring conflicts:

    Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.

    Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Meanwhile, the AP reported this afternoon that “a string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by what appeared to be a coordinated assault by gunmen who battled security forces in the Iraqi capital.” The AP said the attack — which reportedly killed 12 people — “bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’s Iraq arm.”

We probably will not be getting a refund because conservatives are spending it on lobbyist to get more tax cuts for millionaires, make sure that women do not make medical decisions about their own bodies and further deregulating banks so they can continue to steal from working class Americans.

Why Is The Media Echoing The Conservative Deficit Zombies When They Do Not Represent The Views of Real Americans

Why Is The Media Echoing The Conservative Deficit Zombies When They Do Not Represent The Views of Real Americans

Why are so many Washington officials obsessed with budget deficits?  And why are they so willing to entertain big cuts to social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and education, while being reluctant or outright unwilling to increase taxes on the highest income earners?  The answer cannot be that most Americans want these choices. Survey after survey shows that large majorities support asking the wealthiest to pay more in taxes and want to maintain or increase spending on Social Security and federal health and education programs.

A possible answer to where budget hawks get energy and inspiration comes from the first systematic survey social scientists have managed to do of the political attitudes of wealthiest one percent of Americans. Working with a team of scholars from several disciplines, I have conducted a study called the “Survey of Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good.” Most national surveys include only a tiny number of very wealthy citizens, but we used additional data sources to identify a larger sample of wealthy individuals living in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.  Further research would be needed to explore attitudes among the very wealthy living everywhere in the United States.  But our findings are highly suggestive of what would be found in a nationwide study.  For the first time, we are able to pinpoint issues on which the very wealthiest agree or disagree with other Americans.

On Key Budget Questions, the Wealthy Have Distinctive Priorities

The wealthy respondents to our survey expressed great concern about budget deficits:

    Fully 87% called deficits a “very important problem” facing the United States, more than attributed such importance to unemployment, education or anything else on a list of eleven potential national challenges.
    On an open-ended question that asked respondents to name the most important problem facing the country, a hefty 32% of the wealthy mentioned budget deficits or excessive government spending, far more than cited any other problem.
    Only 11% of the wealthy mentioned unemployment or education as America’s top problem.
    Wealthy respondents tilted toward cutting back – rather than expanding – federal government spending on Social Security and health care.

By contrast, in a national survey taken about the same time as our survey, only seven percent of all Americans mentioned deficits or the national debt as the most important problem, while 53% cited jobs and the economy as the top problem.  Average Americans also leaned toward expanding rather than cutting back on major federal outlays for Social Security and health care.

Disagreements on Jobs and Income Supports

Most wealthy respondents to our survey opposed a wide range of job and income policies that majorities of ordinary Americans favor. Our respondents were against setting the minimum wage above the poverty line; providing a decent standard of living for the unemployed; increasing the earned income tax credit; and having government provide jobs for everyone able and willing to work who cannot find private employment.

Likewise, the wealthy opposed – while most Americans favor – providing health insurance financed by tax money; spending “whatever is necessary” to ensure that all children can attend good public schools; making sure that everyone can go to college can do so; and investing more in worker retraining and education to help workers adapt to changes in the economy.

The general American public favors more regulation of big corporations, but our wealthy respondents tend not to favor this idea. Most Americans favor using corporate income taxes “a lot” to get revenue for government programs, but most of the wealthy do not favor this.

Darth Vader's human embodiment Dick Cheney famously said that deficits did not matter, he and his conservative comrades tanked the economy, and Democrats took the wheel of the ship they sunk. Suddenly deficits were the most important thing in the world. What is important is rising more revenue, creating jobs, protecting the environment, educating the next generation, reeducating adults to have the skills for new jobs and getting everyone health. What the wealthy want or want conservatives want is irreverent. Conservatives and the conservative wealthy trashed America. They deserve what they reaped. To be ignored.

Fox News and CNN conservative pundit Erick Erickson : Give A Medal To Store Employee Who Beat Shopper's Child With Belt. How can the USA call itself a merit based society when this assclown makes a six figure salary for being a political analyst.

The Conservative Supreme Court May Strike Down Voting Rights Act, Section 5

The Conservative Supreme Court May Strike Down Voting Rights Act, Section 5. Which has had successes both in terms of civil rights and in improving the economic lives of Southern blacks

With most experts expecting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to be struck down by the Supreme Court in the coming months, can you talk about the future of the civil rights movement in the South?

It doesn’t look good for Section 5. It’s one of those things where almost from the start a piece of legislation was constitutionally innovative and now it may be due for a second look. What Justice Roberts suggested three years ago, that they really ought to rewrite or come up with a new Voting Rights Act that doesn’t use geographic indicators from the 1960s, is something he’s correct to argue.

But what the Court is being asked is whether they will take the relatively radical step of striking down legislation that has existed for decades, was renewed only recently after extensive hearings, and which has accomplished so much. I have no doubts about where my sympathies lie. But I would propose a test to determine whether this act is really needed or not: We should ask, ‘Do you have consensus in affected areas among the black as well as the white community that this kind of federal oversight is no longer needed?’ I doubt very much that those people would agree with what the Court is suggesting. And without that, how can they really say with any credibility, listening overwhelmingly to Southern whites in political power who never agreed that the VRA was ever needed in the first place, that Section 5 is no longer needed? It’s hard for me to see what makes that particular argument so persuasive.

More here, Why We Still Need The Voting Rights Act: Perspectives From Supreme Court Spectators.

Rand Paul(R-TN) Exploits Drones Grandstanding With Fake Fundraising Letter

Rand Paul(R-TN) Exploits Drones Grandstanding With Fake Fundraising Letter

Though foes of drones on the right and left cheered Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster this week, with the tea partier delaying confirmation of CIA director John Brennan for a day, Paul's rant targeted a nonexistent dispute: whether or not Obama administration officials believed they could use drones (or other weapons) to kill American citizens within the borders of the United States without due process. Take away all Paul's hyped-up hysteria—watch out, Jane Fonda!—and he didn't truly disagree with the administration's position that in an extraordinary circumstance, such as an ongoing terrorist attack, the US government can deploy lethal force against evildoers who happen to be American citizens. So why did Paul go ballistic? Here's a clue: The day after he ended one of the longest filibusters in US history, he tried to cash in on his stunt by zapping out a fundamentally inaccurate fundraising email for his 2016 reelection campaign.

The note begins:

    Dear Patriot,

    My 13-hour filibuster yesterday is being called one of the longest in U.S. history.

    I had been trying for more than a week to get a straight answer on whether or not the Obama administration believed it had the authority to use drones to target and kill American citizens on American soil – without due process.

    And after receiving a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder claiming they DO have that authority, I could no longer sit silently at my desk in the U.S. Senate.

    So I stood for thirteen-straight hours to send a message to the Obama administration, I will do everything in my power to fight their attempts to ignore the Constitution!

    Millions of Americans chose to stand with me and put President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Congress in the spotlight...

    And the good news is, it worked!

    Just hours ago, I received a letter from Attorney General Holder declaring the President DOES NOT have the authority to use drones to kill Americans on U.S. soil.

    Patriot, this shows what we can do when stand together and fight.

    So won't you help me continue the fight to protect our Constitutional liberties today?

This is a false account. In his first letter to Paul, Holder noted the obvious: If the United States were under attack from within, the president might have to order the use of lethal military force within the territory of the United States. This is how Holder put it:

    [T]he US government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat…The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.

Consider a Mumbai-style attack on Washington, DC; as the assault is under way perhaps military force—with or without drones—might be used against the perpetrators, which could include terrorists holding American citizenship. In fact, during his filibuster, Paul conceded the point: "Nobody questions if planes are flying towards the Twin Towers whether they can be repulsed by the military. Nobody questions whether a terrorist with a rocket launcher or a grenade launcher is attacking us, whether they can be repelled."

So just as he did on the Senate floor, in this email, Paul is ginning up a quarrel that did not exist. Then the give-me-money note goes on to claim that due to Paul's heroic filibuster, Holder wrote a second note to the senator stating the president cannot use drones to kill Americans on US soil. That's wrong.

On Thursday, Holder sent Paul a curt two-sentence letter:

    It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer to that question is no.

Funny how Paul was an anti-Iraq invasion conservative-libertarian, yet uses the same mentality to juice up his wacko supporters and their endless paranoia. Tomorrow it will be Chinese military hiding  int eh sewers of new York waiting directions to invade America from below. Is there such a thing as a conservative who is not one part wacky and one part evil.

Rand Paul Has Long Way To Go Before He Becomes a Real Patriot

Rand Paul Has  Long Way To Go Before He Becomes a Real Patriot

Lochner v. New York is widely viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. It is taught in law schools, alongside decisions upholding segregation and permitting Japanese detention camps, in order to instruct budding lawyers on how judges should not behave. Even Robert Bork, the failed, right-wing Supreme Court nominee who claimed women “aren’t discriminated against anymore”, called Lochner an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”

Lochner fabricated a so-called right to contract in order to strike down a New York law preventing bakery owners from overworking bakers, but its rationale has implications for any law intended to shield workers from exploitation. In essence, Lochner established that any law that limits any contract between an employer and an employee is constitutionally suspect. If desperation forces someone to agree to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a dollar a day in a factory filled with toxic air, then courts must treat that law with heavy skepticism. Not every workplace law was struck down during the so-called Lochner Era — the justices of that era sometimes valued sexism more than they valued exploiting workers, for example — but Lochner placed any law benefiting workers on constitutionally weak footing. Needless to say, the “right to contract” it invented appears nowhere in the Constitution.

Nevertheless, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) took several minutes out of his lengthy talking filibuster yesterday to praise this “abomination” of a decision on the Senate floor:

    You get to the Lochner case. The Lochner case is in 1905. The majority rules 5-4 that the right to make a contract is part of your due process. Someone cannot deprive you of determining how long your working hours are without due process. So President Obama’s a big opponent to this, but I would ask him — among the other things I’m asking him today — to rethink the Lochner case. . . . I think it’s a wonderful decision.

Watch it:

Although its not entirely clear what exploiting workers has to do with drone strikes, the primary subject of Paul’s filibuster, the senator seemed to think that Lochner was relevant because that case claimed that its fabricated right to contract flowed from the Constitution’s “due process” guarantee.

Paul’s speech also includes a somewhat rambling attempt to claim that Lochner helped “end Jim Crow,” a claim that would cause anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of civil rights history to scratch their head. Lochner was decided in 1905, and, while Paul is correct that the Lochner Era justices very occasionally struck down discriminatory laws, Jim Crow was still very much alive when Lochner was overruled in the 1930s. The Supreme Court decision that did the most to eradicate Jim Crow — Brown v. Board of Education — rested on the Constitution’s guarantee that no person shall be denied the “the equal protection of the laws,” not on some fabricated right to contract. And Brown alone was insufficient to overcome the campaign of “massive resistance” segregationists mounted in defense of Jim Crow.

What finally killed American apartheid was big, centralized government of the kind Paul and his fellow tea partiers love to hate. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 required business owners to contract with minorities — something that would undoubtedly been unconstitutional under Lochner. And, of course, the same Voting Rights Act that is now endangered in the Supreme Court tore down Jim Crown voter exclusions. Sen. Paul, for his part, has incorrectly suggested that the Civil Rights Act violates the Constitution.

Paul’s endorsement of Lochner reflects a disturbing evolution in Tea Party thought. For much of Obama’s first term, Tea Party conservatives rallied behind “tentherism,” the false belief that most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional. Unlike tentherism, which applies only to federal laws, Lochnerism prevents both the federal government and the states from enacting necessary legislation. Although a handful of the most radical federal judges openly embrace Lochnerism or similar reasoning, this particularly virulent misreading of the Constitution was largely absent from elected officials’ rhetoric until Paul’s speech yesterday.

Rand is a like a pig. Sometimes he gets up out of the mud and finds a mushroom. At the end of the day he is still a creature of anti-American muck.

How Republicans Are Using Austerity To Tank The Economy or Why Do Conservatives Hate America

How Republicans Are Using Austerity To Tank The Economy or Why Do Conservatives Hate America

Congress will not avert the dreaded sequester – the government’s latest wheeze to deal with the phony “deficit crisis.” Never mind that the very same deficit is projected to fall under $1 trillion this year for the first time since 2008, according to the CBO. Politicians and the chattering classes rail about the deficit, while in the meantime, Americans can’t find jobs. Our neighbors, friends and fellow citizens have suffered from a persistently high unemployment rate of 8 percent through 2012, and worse, an underemployment situation of around 15 percent. Why doesn’t this very real crisis generate concern? Why all of the fuss about a nonexistent emergency?

Conservatives talk indignantly about government profligacy to justify their deficit obsession. But our large deficits (which peaked some three years ago) can almost always be expected to result from recessions because of what economists call “automatic stabilizers.” These are safeguards that have been in place since the Great Depression – things like unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps and the like. These programs were introduced precisely to avoid the kind of human misery a great many of our citizens experienced during that earlier catastrophe. These income transfers are also the reasons -- not the bailouts to our banks -- why the economy has escaped the kind of freefall experienced in the early 1930s.

A major consequence of this policy choice, which is supported by the vast majority of Americans, is that budget deficits in the US are largely automatic and non-discretionary. So recessions create budget deficits, much as private sector booms reduce deficits.

True, we are not booming by any stretch today. But even against this sluggish backdrop, over the last three years, the deficit has experienced a 30 percent drop as a percentage of GDP. That suggests the patient is slowly recovering, but not fast enough. The current rate of job creation is not only insufficient to replace the jobs lost since the crisis, but can’t even keep up with labor force growth. At the recent pace of job creation, we only fall further behind. Withdrawing the medicine prematurely risks creating a relapse in the economy.

And there is much more to do. We need to use this period of historically low interest rates to borrow so as to improve our productive capacity as an economy going forward. As anybody who wanders around major American cities can see, the country has fallen into disrepair. Just ride in any New York City taxi cab and see how well your back survives the journey. But before we can rebuild our pothole-ridden roads, repair our decaying grids, or deal with energy or climate change, we must challenge and reject all of the nonsense about long-term budget deficits, national bankruptcy or insolvency, and even “fiscal responsibility” that we are hearing from Congress and the chattering classes.

The real fiscal responsibility lies in understanding how we invest in the future with jobs, education and decent roads and bridges. Letting our country fall apart, on the other hand, is the height of irresponsibility.

If the US continues to make headway on the jobs front, it will do even better on the deficit front, which is why any sensible economist will tell you that deficit reduction per se should never be an object of government policy. In a market economy, employment is the main source of income for most of the population. Economic growth creates jobs. Without paying jobs, individuals are unable to pay taxes.  In capitalist, wage-labor societies, therefore, joblessness creates a long list of other kinds of waste that Congress never talks about—the breakup of families, rising alcoholism and drug addiction, higher crime rates, absolute and relative poverty, damage to social status and self-respect, adverse psychological and physical health effects, stress, suicide, crime and other anti-social behavior.

During WWII, the government’s deficit -- which one year reached 25 percent of GDP -- raised government’s public debt ratio above 120 percent, much higher than the ratio expected to be achieved by 2015. Further, in spite of the siren songs warning of the evils of high national public debt, US growth in the postwar period was robust—it was the golden age of US economic growth. And guess what? The debt ratio came down rather rapidly, mostly not due to budget surpluses and debt retirement, but rather due to rapid growth that raised the denominator of the debt ratio.

More here, Pundits Still Getting Sequester and Budget Debates Wrong and here,  The most striking and disconcerting thing about the latest round in the budget war is that the debate within the Republican Party is proceeding on the basis of completely false premises.