Patriots Expose Another Conservative Lie, Low Wage Jobs Do Not Lead To Management Positions

Patriots Expose Another Conservative Lie, Low Wage Jobs Do Not Lead To Management Positions

Entry-level jobs in the fast food business are far more likely to be dead ends than stepping stones to higher-level work, according to new data from the National Employment Law Project. Less than 9 percent of fast food employees are supervisors, and just 2.2 percent hold managerial, professional, or technical jobs.

The remaining 89.1 percent of fast food workers – 3.6 million Americans – earn a median pay rate of $8.94 per hour.

A 40-hour work week, every single week of the year without time off would therefore earn the median front-line fast food worker $18,595 before taxes – right on the cusp of poverty for a family of three. The think tank Demos, using a more realistic accounting of days off and family expenses, has calculated that anything under $12 per hour is insufficient to support a family. That may explain why a McDonald’s website meant to help workers budget recommends they get a second job and why fast food workers in more than half a dozen major cities are striking to demand a livable wage.

NELP notes that fast food companies defend their treatment of workers by depicting cashier and fry cook jobs as the first step on the path to economic mobility. Indeed, in looking at the overall economy it makes sense to think of entry-level jobs as dues-paying stages on the way to the front office. That’s because a third of employees in the whole economy hold managerial, technical, professional, or workplace supervisory roles. The nearly nine-to-one ratio of worker bees to higher-level employees in fast food doesn’t add up:

And it isn’t just that there are hundreds of frontline workers for every franchise owner, leaving very little room for new entrants to the top level of fast food entrepreneurship. It’s that fast food chains require their franchisees to be quite wealthy before they ever purchase a store. In order to be considered for franchise ownership at Wendy’s, applicants must show a net worth of $5 million. KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King, and Jack in the Box set their minimums at $1.5 million. At the low end, Subway requires net worth of $80,000 for franchisees. That means the hypothetical front-line fast food worker from the example above, who never takes a day off, could be eligible to apply for a Subway franchise after 20 years if she somehow saved more than 20 percent of her earnings every year.

Fast food companies aren’t alone in justifying their low wages and treatment of workers by citing opportunities for advancement that almost none of their employees will ever reach. As the Columbia Journalism Review recently noted, such claims are a key piece of Walmart’s public relations strategy.

 These large coporations do not pay their employees a fair share of the revenue generated by those employees because they pay the excetives huge salaries and pay share holders - which are predominantly also wealthy- large proceeds. McDonalds, Hobby Lobby and Walmart are stealing from employees to make themselves filthy rich.

With Paranoid Conspiracies Dancing In Their Pointed Heads, Conservatives Create Kool Secret Organizations

 With Paranoid Conspiracies Dancing In Their Pointed Heads, Conservatives Create Kool Secret Organizations

Do you have Groundswell fever? I do! “Groundswell” is the secret organization run by cool right-wingers like Ginni Thomas and John Bolton, a group charged with winning the 30-front war on liberalism. Long story short: Mother Jones’ David Corn received another wonderful leak. This one is about a bunch of true-believing far-right clowns, and how hard they are all working at fighting a bunch of people who didn’t even know they were involved in an ideological war against Ginni Thomas.

So, this is a great and delightful scoop, and bless David Corn for reporting it. But let’s get real: While the people involved in this organization probably think that Corn has exposed a vast right-wing conspiracy, what he really exposed is the silliest corner of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Thomas and Bolton are both sort of “important” people, in terms of their familial or professional connections to people with actual power, but neither one of them has actual power or authority. John Bolton is a mustachioed parody of neoconservative foreign policy belligerence. Thomas is a true-believing weirdo. The media figures involved in this group are mostly marginal and widely disrespected even by conservatives. But that doesn’t mean the group is entirely unimportant.

The conservative movement has this recurring tendency to create institutions and organizations based on what they imagine, in their fevered minds, that The Left is doing. They believe liberal bias is an intentional conspiracy to delude Americans by publishing purposefully slanted stories, so most explicitly conservative “journalism” outlets publish purposefully slanted stories where facts are subordinate to political point-scoring. Sometimes they create entirely redundant institutions when this process laps itself. They believed Brookings was super liberal, so they created Heritage. The Left created CAP in response to Heritage, so the Right creates 10,000 useless nonprofits that exist solely to fundraise.

It is also the case that, generally, The Right thinks The Left is already doing whatever they’re doing, but more efficiently and better and also more viciously. As I’ve said before, there really is a right-wing talking points pipeline of sorts, and a great deal of “message coordination” among the various pillars of the movement, including conservative media figures. Because that’s the case, because the Right is sort of decent at message coordination, they imagine that liberals are great at it, and that our commentators all get their marching orders from on high and dutifully repeat them until the world is convinced of lies like “George Bush was a bad president” or “immigrants aren’t all drug-traffickers.”

So when JournoList happened, dumb (and less-dumb) members of the right-wing media machine looked at it and saw evidence of conspiracy, instead of a bunch of like-minded people debating and arguing and desperately begging for links from commentators with higher profiles. Where there was consensus, they saw “coordination.” They thought this because the Right sort of already did all that. And so now it only makes (tragic, hilarious) sense that some of the least intellectually impressive members of the conservative movement have banded together to create their own sad, weird parody of Grover Norquist’s “Wednesday meetings” combined with what they imagined JournoList to be. This is the result: Groundswell. A cracked-mirror imitation of an imaginary conspiracy.

But this group of clowns and idiots has attracted the attention and participation of members of Congress, and the staff of at least one senator.

If every patriotic Americans - that is most people who are not conservatives - stayed home and watched TV, never voted and just bought the crappy products and services conservatives hire wage slaves to produce for them, conservatives would still start secret weirdo organizations with freaks like Ginni Thomas and John Bolton because conservatism uses paranoia as a fuel. If the paranoia went away and REALITY set in, they would have next to nothing to complain get their false outrage fired up.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's Wife Ginni Is a Anti-American Conservative Radical and No One Seems To Care

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's Wife Ginni Is a Anti-American Conservative Radical and No One Seems To Care

Virginia "Ginni" Thomas is no ordinary Supreme Court spouse. Unlike Maureen Scalia, mother of nine, or the late Martin Ginsburg, mild-mannered tax law professor who was good in the kitchen, Thomas came from the world of bare-knuckled partisan politics. Over the years, she has enmeshed herself ever more deeply in the world of political advocacy—all the while creating a heap of conflict of interest concerns surrounding her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Her role in Groundswell [1], the coalition of conservatives waging a "30 front war" against progressives and the GOP establishment that was revealed by Mother Jones on Thursday, revives questions about the propriety of Thomas' activism on issues that have or could become the subject of Supreme Court cases.

Conflict of interest issues were first aired during Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings in 1991 [2], when critics argued that Ginni Thomas' political work might compromise her husband's objectivity. At that time, her political resume included stints as a Capitol Hill aide to a Republican congressman; a staffer at the US Chamber of Commerce, where she fought the Family and Medical Leave Act; and as a political appointee at the Labor Department during the first Bush administration. Thomas didn't leave politics after her husband was confirmed. "I did not give up my First Amendment rights when my husband became a justice of the Supreme Court," she has said in the past. She would later return to the Hill as a staffer to House majority leader Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) and work for the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. But in those jobs, Thomas kept a relatively low profile.

That changed around the same time that the tea party exploded in American politics, and Thomas became an outspoken member of the movement. In late 2009, Thomas founded the political advocacy group Liberty Central, which would later become a fierce player in the opposition to health care form. Detractors pointed out that Liberty Central was a potential vehicle for people with interests before the Supreme Court to make anonymous donations that might influence her husband.

The group was formed with a $500,000 anonymous donation that came as the Supreme Court was considering Citizens United, a case that ultimately resulted in loosening the restrictions on corporate giving to political campaigns. The anonymous donor was later revealed to be Harlan Crow, the Texas real estate developer. Crow was also a friend of Clarence Thomas', and he was later linked to a scandal involving the justice's failure to publicly disclose gifts from t [3]he developer and trips aboard his private jet. (It didn't help that Justice Thomas had also failed to include his wife's $150,000 [4] annual salary from Liberty Central on his financial disclosure forms, which he later had to amend.)

Good old fashioned pay for legal results from the nation's highest court. The kind of deep and unapologetic moral corruption and depraved form of patriotism that has come to define the radical conservative movement. No will do anything about removing the sleazy Justice Thomas from the court because the whining from the radical far Right conservatives will cause ear aches from coast to coast. Conservatives have taken playing poor little victim to new heights in melodrama.

Patriots Love The Benefits Of ObamaCare and Health Care Reform

Patriots Love The Benefits Of ObamaCare and Health Care Reform

Benefits of ObamacareAdvantages Offered By ObamaCare

As one benefit of ObamaCare, if you make less than 400% of the federal poverty level ($93,700 as a family or $46,021 as an individual), you may be eligible to receive subsidies and tax credits toward insurance purchased on your State's Health Insurance Exchange (Online Marketplaces where Americans can purchase insurance starting on October 1st, 2013). Cost assistance will help may low and middle income individuals and families to purchase affordable health insurance. Find out more about Receiving Subsidies, Tax Credits and Cost Assistance on the ObamaCare Health Insurance Exchange.

Because of the new health law, 12.8 million individuals and businesses got back more than $1.1 billion in rebates in 2012 from insurance companies who underspent on medical care.
Benefits of ObamaCare: A Quick Summary of ObamaCare Protections

ObamaCare offers you and your family many protections these protections include.

• No annual limits on healthcare
• Insurance companies can't drop you when your sick
• You can't be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions
• Obamacare has a strong focus on preventive services
• A large improvement to women's health services
• Reforms to the healthcare industry to cut wasteful spending
• Better care and protections for seniors
For a complete list of preventative services covered under the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) click this link.
A Quick Summary of ObamaCare "Essential Health Benefits"

The new ObamaCare health care law states that health plans offered in the individual and small group markets, both inside and outside of the Affordable Insurance Exchanges (Exchanges), offer "essential health benefits". Please note that grandfathered plans may not be required to provide these services. Read more information about ObamaCare "grandfathered plans".

Starting January 1st of 2014, the following "benefits" must be included under all insurance plans:

• Emergency services
• Hospitalizations
• Laboratory services
• Maternity care
• Mental health and substance abuse treatment
• Outpatient, or ambulatory care
• Pediatric care
• Prescription drugs
• Preventive care
• Rehabilitative and habilitative (helping maintain daily functioning) services
• Vision and dental care for children

The following is a full list of protections and benefits available under ObamaCare from Consumer Reports:
Full list of Protections and Benefits Offered By ObamaCare (The Affordable Care Act) - 2010 - 2013
Protections

Whether your health insurance is purchased by you or your employer, the health law has outlawed practices that have left people without health insurance when they need it most. These protections include:

Curbs on canceling policies. Insurers can no longer cancel your policy if you get sick, a practice known as "rescission." They cannot cancel your coverage if you make an honest mistake on your application.

Rapid appeals. Consumers can appeal insurance company decisions to an independent reviewer and receive a response in 72 hours for urgent medical situations.

Ban on lifetime limits. Major or long-term illness can rack up serious medical bills. Health insurance policies used to set lifetime limits on how much they would pay for an individual's medical bills. These are now illegal, meaning people with insurance won't have to get into debt because their coverage runs out.

Annual dollar limits on their way out. Insurance companies can still set limits on how much they pay for an individual's medical expenses each year, but as of September 23, 2012, the law says this limit must be no less than $2 million. In January 2014, limits will be completely eliminated. Exceptions: Insurers can still impose other types of benefit limits like doctor visit limits, prescription limits, or limits on days in the hospital.
Better Benefits

Free preventive care and annual checkups. The law focuses on prevention and primary care to help people stay healthy and to manage chronic medical conditions before they become more complex and costly to treat. New private health plans must cover and eliminate cost-sharing (co-payment, co-insurance, or deductible) for proven preventive measures such as immunizations and cancer screenings. Additional preventive measures for women kicked in August 2012, including free well-woman visits, screening for gestational diabetes, domestic violence screening, breast-feeding supplies, and contraception, all with no cost-sharing. Exceptions: Workplaces run by religious organizations that object to birth control do not have to pay for contraception, but insurers must pick up the cost. Existing plans that haven't changed significantly since passage of the law can continue to charge for preventive care until 2014.

Premium rebates if insurers underspend on care. The health law says that most insurers must spend at least 80 percent (85 percent for insurers covering large employers) of the premiums you pay on medical care and quality improvements. If insurers spend too much on overhead, such as salaries, bonuses, or administrative costs, as opposed to health care, they must issue premium rebates to consumers each summer.

Standard disclosure forms. Starting September 23, 2012, all health plans must use a standardized form to summarize benefits and coverage, including information on co-payments, deductibles, and out-of-pocket limits. Insurers must note any excluded services all in one place. Insurers must also calculate and disclose your typical out-of-pocket costs for two medical scenarios: having a baby and treating type 2 diabetes. Future years will include more coverage examples.

Expanding coverage

The law makes it easier for some uninsured Americans to find more affordable health insurance right now:

Young adults can stay on a parent's plan until age 26. Health plans must let young adults remain as dependents on their parent's policy until they turn 26, regardless of whether they live at home, attend school, or are married. Exception: Some health plans are not required to extend benefits to young adults if they can get coverage at work; this exception goes away in January 2014.

Chipping away at pre-existing condition exclusions. In 2014 insurers will no longer be able to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charge them more for premiums. Meanwhile, the health law offers some temporary help.

Adults with pre-existing conditions who have been without coverage for at least six months may be eligible for subsidized coverage through the temporary Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan in their state.

Children under 19 with pre-existing conditions cannot now be denied coverage by most insurers. Until 2014, however, insurers can charge more for premiums than they charge for someone without such conditions. Exception: Some individual plans can still refuse to cover a child. This exception goes away in January, 2014.

There is a 365 day waiting period for individuals with pre-existing conditions the BCBS terms and the ACA section "SEC. 101. NATIONAL HIGH-RISK POOL PROGRAM" we can verify that there is a 365 day waiting period for coverage of pre-existing conditions upon purchasing insurance (eliminated along with the pool in 2017).

There is also an "Exclusion Rider" policy that essentially says until 2014 you can be denied coverage on a medically underwritten health insurance policy. EX. You have had surgery previously and you need another operation for the same issue. There are other jargon-y worded restrictions (we'll need to study and report).

The PCIP Pre-exisiting Condition Insurance Plan: makes health coverage available to you if you are a U.S. citizen or reside here legally, you have been denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, and you’ve been uninsured for at least six months. 

These plans are expensive and thus will most likely not cover low-income individuals. The Program ends in 2014 when insurance through the exchange will cover pre-existing conditions

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is The Anti-American Conservative Cancer of the Week

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is The Anti-American Conservative Cancer of the Week

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) compared the civil rights of African Americans and other minorities to the rights of animals during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, sparking outrage from lawmakers.

Gohmert made the remarks as the panel considered a bill that could “prevent federal regulatory actions from being implemented.” Currently, the federal government relies on consent decrees to settle lawsuits from advocacy organizations challenging agencies for failing to take regulatory action or missing statutory deadlines. The GOP-backed bill would allow anyone whose rights are affected by the decree to intervene in the settlement, significantly delaying the action.

Democrats offered an amendment, sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), that would have prohibited third parties from intervening in any regulatory action that prevents or is intended to prevent discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or other protected characteristic. Consent decrees had been pivotal to enforcing civil rights laws, Cohen and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) argued, and noted that advocates used the consent decree process to protect minority communities from police misconduct and brutality.

But Gohmert objected to the amendment and insisted that the bill had nothing to do with the civil rights and would primary impact rules and regulations that pertain to fish, wildlife, and the environment. He then proceeded to mock Democrats’ concerns about minorities by joking that they were interested in protecting the liberties of snails and other animals:

    GOHMERT: There is nobody in this chamber who is more appreciative than I am for the gentleman from Tennessee and my friend from Michigan standing up for the rights of race, religion, national religion of the Delta Smelt, the snail darter, various lizards, the lesser prairie chicken, the greater sage grouts and so many other insects who would want someone standing for their religion, their race, their national origin and I think that’s wonderful.

The bill, however, is actually written in general terms and would therefore impact the consent decrees adopted by the Department of Justice and other offices responsible for civil rights, committee staff confirmed to ThinkProgress. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) blasted Gohmert’s comments, noting that “this is not a snail darter’s amendment, it is not an environmental amendment, it is a civil rights amendment, and we’re talking about the civil rights of people — the civil rights of people that have been violated egregiously for generations in this country.”

The amendment failed in a vote of 13 to 16, with Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) joining Democrats in voting for it. The underlining bill passed the Judiciary Committee along party lines. A similar measure passed the House last year and is not expected to advance in the Senate.

If Gohmert is not bright enough to handle legal language, does not subscribe to American ideals of fairness and the common good and has no respect for the American people - well, I guess he is entitled to that. On the other hand tax payers are paying him $179k a year and subsidizing his and his family's health care. So should someone who is lacking in any legislative expertise and obviously hates the people he is supposed to serve, entitled to be paid. perhaps it is time for freaky Lou to do the right thing for Americans who work for a living and resign. Unfortunately no congress critter has ever been impeached for being as stupid and hateful as Louie. It does take voters with very low standards to put someone as perverted as Louie is office.

Fox News Demonizes Food Stamps for Poor, Says Nothing About Unearned Income of Billionaires

Fox News Demonizes Food Stamps for Poor, Says Nothing About Unearned Income of Billionaires

Fox News reported on House Republicans' removal of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) from an agriculture bill by parroting Republican falsehoods about the program. The report hyped Republicans' false accusations that SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, is rife with fraud and has no vetting process without challenging the claims. The segment also ignored what others in the media have reported -- that separating SNAP funding from the farm bill could lead to major cuts in the program.

Last week, House Republicans passed an agriculture bill, commonly known as the farm bill, without including funding for the SNAP program. The move stripped SNAP from the farm bill, where it has been since 1973, according to the New York Times.

During the July 15 edition of Fox News' America Live, correspondent Shannon Bream reported on the removal of SNAP, claiming the vote would not end SNAP and that no one would be cut off due to the House-version of the farm bill. Bream highlighted Republicans' purported opinions on the program: "Republicans say the system is filled with fraud and that claims made by applicants aren't vetted or verified in any way."

In fact, SNAP has a very low instance of fraud. The trafficking rate, when a SNAP benefit is exchanged for cash, is only one cent per dollar, and that's down from 1993 when it was four cents. The chief economist of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Chad Stone, wrote:

    [SNAP] has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program. SNAP error rates (benefit overpayments and underpayments) are at an all-time low; just 3 percent of benefits went to ineligible households or exceeded the allowable benefit for eligible households. Moreover, honest mistakes by recipients, eligibility workers, data entry clerks or computer programmers - not fraud - account for an overwhelming majority of such overpayments.

Rules for SNAP eligibility vary by state, but applicants must verify household income is below a certain standard and that assets do not exceed a given amount.

Ironically, according to the Times, non-SNAP programs contained the farm bill suffer higher fraud and abuse rates than SNAP.

While Bream's claim that the House-passed farm bill does not cut SNAP is technically correct, she ignored what many others in the media have acknowledged -- that, as the Washington Post wrote, "The vote made clear that Republicans intend to make significant reductions in food stamp money." Fox's Trace Gallagher even introduced the segment by referring to a "food fight ... where lawmakers are taking aim at the exploding cost of food stamps."

Fox News has routinely attacked SNAP and other programs in an effort to shame the poor.

Some people are on food assistance for a couple of reasons. One, many of them have jobs at places like McDonalds ( who admit they do not pay a living wage) or Wal-Mart - who does not pay a living wage, so the public actually subsidizes those businesses. Fox and the conservative propaganda machine never complains about the millions and billions of unearned income by the very wealthy. Mitt Romney for example has never worked an honest day in his life - he made hundreds of millions by rent seeking. Some people do not have jobs - there are still more unemployed than there are job openings. Where are many of those jobs/ They're in Asia because of the kind of anything-goes free trade policy that conservatives have been ramming down the country's throat for the last fifty years.

Ted Nugent, Spokesperson For Racism, Hate & The NRA

Ted Nugent, Spokesperson For Racism, Hate & The NRA

The Biggest Anti-American Clowns of the Week: Erick Erickson, Lou Dobbs, Paul Ryan, Ken Cuccinelli and Bryan Fischer

The Biggest Anti-American Clowns of the Week: Erick Erickson, Lou Dobbs, Paul Ryan,  Ken Cuccinelli and Bryan Fischer: The following are just some snips from the full article at the link,

1. Erick Erickson: Self-administered abortions are a real yuck fest.

Shortly after the vote to approve the draconian abortion ban, right-wing blogger Erick Erickson tweeted a link to a wire coathanger supplier, telling “liberals,” and really, the women of Texas, to “Go bookmark this site.” Rather like Geraldo’s jackass comments, this can be an instance of the right wing making the case against itself: Yes, your laws will drive women to desperate life-endangering measures, that is what we have been saying. Perhaps Erickson realized his mistake because he later deleted the tweet. But wait, then he defended his tweet against detractors by saying that before Roe v. Wade “only” 39 women died from self-administered abortions. Oh, only 39. (Not that we accept his accounting.) He also stands by his view that working women are “against nature.” Yeah, that one is still good.

2. Lou Dobbs: Eric Holder is a radical racist. DOJ organized and paid for protests.

Since we revisited Texas, let’s revisit Florida and Trayvon Martin as well, just for the sheer perversity of the reactions to the case. On Monday, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs promoted the conspiracy theory that the Department of Justice organized the protests over the killing of Trayvon Martin. Why is that? Well, because Attorney General Eric Holder is a radical racist. Just like his boss.

Yes, this cabal of black men at the pinnacle of American power used “thousands” of taxpayer dollars to train people to go out and pretend to be mad back when Martin was shot. And they are doing it again, because black people have to be paid to be mad about having their innocent young men gunned down.

3. Paul Ryan: Undocumented immigrants don’t want to be citizens.

Wrongheaded on a number of issues—most famously the federal budget and the path out of deficit spending (now on the back burner)—Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has redeemed himself ever so slightly by at least advocating for immigration reform in the House, the version with a militarized, drone-patrolled Mexican border that the Senate passed in June. He has even used his own Irish-immigrant lineage to argue in its favor. But on Thursday, Ryan made the rather curious claim that undocumented immigrants don’t want a path to citizenship.

“Most people just want to have a legal status so they can work to provide for their families,” he said.

It’s one thing to oppose a path to citizenship, which many Republicans do unabashedly, but quite another to dishonestly project that opposition onto the very people asking for it. In fact, as Think Progress reports [4]:

 Almost 90 percent of undocumented immigrants said they would apply for citizenship if allowed. The vast majority have family members who are U.S. citizens. Moreover, citizenship opens up more job opportunities and wage gains. Granting citizenship would also boost the economy; immigrants would pay more in state and local taxes if they became citizens.

4. Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia Republican and gubernatorial hopeful, has a problem with sodomy.

Woe to consenting heterosexual couples, consenting homosexual couples and people interested in having sex in positions other than the missionary, if Ken Cuccinelli becomes the next governor of Virginia. They’ll all have to wave bye-bye to all that oral and anal sex they are having. Cuccinelli wants to get that good ol’ anti-sodomy law back on the books.

Cloaking the push as an attempt to keep children safe from sexual predators, when everyone knows that he is targeting the LGBT community, Cuccinelli has launched a website [5] in his ongoing effort to reinstate a “Crimes Against Nature” law, which the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

5. Bryan Fischer: Being gay, robbing banks and dealing drugs are all comparable lifestyle choices.

American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is very mad at the Cheneys, especially Dick and Liz. He is not mad at Liz for the same reason other Republicans are mad at Liz, which is that she is dividing the party by running against a fellow Republican for Wyoming Senate. And he is certainly not mad at Liz and Dick for the same reasons progressives are, namely that they are evil incarnate. No, he’s mad because Liz being out and gay has made the whole family go soft on the issue of same-sex marriage.

“That complicates things for a lot of people,” Fischer said on the radio program he hosts. (Fischer and his pal Cuccinelli seem to think constantly, have never ending fantasies, about other people's private consetual behavior. Maybe these two need to check into some kind of clinic for weirdos who are obsessed with other people's sex lives.

I don't understand why Fischer doesn't like Liz Cheney, she loves violating the law, loves to torture people and thinks the president should have all the power and privileged of a dictator - as long as the president is an anti-American conservative anyway. 

 

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) Got His Political Platform Straight From The Taliban

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) Got His Political Platform Straight From The Taliban

In an unusual move, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R), his party’s nominee for governor, launched a new campaign website [3] Wednesday highlighting his efforts [4] to reinstate Virginia’s unconstitutional Crimes Against Nature law. The rule, which makes felons out of even consenting married couples who engage in oral or anal sex in the privacy of their own homes, was struck down [5] by federal courts after Cuccinelli blocked efforts to bring it in line with the Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence v. Texas [6] ruling.

The new site, vachildpredators.com [7], highlights 90 people identified “sexual predators” in Virginia who have been charged under the law [8] since the 2003 ruling, which held that states could not ban private, non-commercial sexual relations between consenting adults. Cuccinelli warns that these offenders “could come off Virginia’s sex offender registry if a Virginia law used to protect children is not upheld,” and identifies the sodomy law as only the “Anti-Child Predators Law.” While it is true that many sex offenders are charged under the Crimes Against Nature law, it is far from the only tool prosecutors have to punish child predators [9].

The law states [8], “If any person carnally knows in any manner any brute animal, or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony…” Cuccinelli claims that the law “is only applied to sodomy committed against minors, against non-consenting adults, or in public,” but fails to mention that what he wants to keep on the books criminalizes the private behavior of consenting grownups.

In fact, Cuccinelli is a major reason [10] that the provisions of this particular law governing non-consensual sex were left vulnerable to court challenge. In 2004, a bipartisan group [11] in the Virginia General Assembly backed a bill [12] that would have brought the law in line with the Supreme Court’s ruling. They proposed to eliminate the Crimes Against Nature law’s provisions dealing with consenting adults in private and leaving in place provisions relating to prostitution, public sex, and those other than consenting adults. Cuccinelli opposed the bill in committee and helped kill it on the Senate floor.

In 2009, he told a newspaper why he supported restrictions on the sexual behavior of consenting adults [13]: “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. … They don’t comport with natural law.” As a result of Cuccinelli’s homophobia, the law’s text remains unchanged a decade after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

While Cuccinelli tries to spin his efforts as “Virginia’s appeal to preserve a child-protection statute,” this amounts to little more than his attempt to restore the state’s unconstitutional ban on oral sex.

Ken and the Taliban are perfectly aligned in their anti-American/anti-democracy agenda. Conservatives think of women as property, so does the Taliban. Ken thinks he should be able to control the private behavior of consenting adults, so does the Taliban, and China. rather than use all his energy trying to turn the USA into a a authoritarian state modeled on Taliban thinking, why doesn't Ken and his ideological comrades just buy a plane ticket to Afghanistan. Ken the conservative movement have conned Virginians out of millions of dollars so we know they can afford the plane tickets.

Sunday is the Day the Corporate Media Help Conservatives Spread Anti-American Propaganda

Sunday is the Day the Corporate Media Help Conservatives Spread Anti-American Propaganda

Conservative White Men Dominate The Broadcast Network Sunday Shows. Making up nearly one of every three guests on This Week, Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday, conservative white men represent a larger portion of guests than any other group.

Conservative White Men Dominate Solo Interviews On The Broadcast Network Sunday Shows. Conservative white men make up 37 percent of all one-on-one interviews on the broadcast shows, much more than any other group. In fact, the proportion of solo interviews conducted with conservative white men is a full 13 percentage points higher than white women and all other non-white groups combined.

Broadcast Networks Continue To Host A Majority Of Republicans And Conservatives Overall. Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday, each hosted more Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and progressives, continuing the trend from the first quarter. In contrast, This Week increased its proportion of Democrats and progressives, surpassing its proportion of Republicans and conservatives for the second quarter.

Panel Balance Still More Likely To Tilt Right Than Left. Despite improvement from all four broadcast networks, Republicans and conservatives are still more likely to outnumber Democrats and progressives when they sit in the same panel discussion segment. Fox News Sunday's notable shift toward a majority of balanced panels is worth pointing out; however, when panels do tilt on that program, they tilt right every single time.

Republican Elected And Administration Officials Again Outnumber Democrats Overall. Fox News Sunday hosted two Republicans for every one Democrat in the second quarter, which is the same as the show's numbers in the first quarter. Both Face the Nation and Meet the Press hosted more Republicans than Democrats, with Face the Nation seeing a 10 point increase in Republicans and an 8 point decrease in Democrats. This Week hosted significantly more Democrats than Republicans, a flip from last quarter.

Except For This Week, Republicans Receive More Time During Solo Interviews Than Democrats Overall. Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday all gave Republicans much more time during their one-on-one interviews than Democrats, with Face the Nation having flipped from the previous quarter. By contrast, This Week shifted to provide Democrats with significantly more time than Republicans in the second quarter.

Ideological Journalists Again More Likely To Be Conserative Than Progressive. Like this year's first quarter, journalists who self-identify ideologically tend to be conservative when hosted by the broadcast Sunday shows. Fox News Sunday is again the worst offender in this category, with nearly half of its hosted journalists being conservative.

Former White House press secretary for George W. Bush, Scott McClellan wrote in his tell-all book that the Bush administration used propaganda to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people. Conservatives, as standard operating procedure, use propaganda constantly. This is why you can have some fun debating a conservative, but ultimately they are fully entrenched in their cognitive dissonance from a fact based world. And of course arguments based on the common good and morality usually fail with conservatives because they are dogmatists, like the Taliban, they're not going to let real morality and the consequences of their radical anti-American views get in the way of their agenda. So it goes with the ever so high minded Sunday talk shows. They're just another opportunity for conservatives and the corporate media to sell America on conservative zealotry.

America Beware of the Next Wave of Poison Political Rebranding - Libertarian Populism

America Beware of the Next Wave of Poison Political Rebranding - Libertarian Populism

Have you heard about “libertarian populism” yet? If not, you will. It will surely be touted all over the airwaves and the opinion pages by the same kind of people who assured you, a few years ago, that Representative Paul Ryan was the very model of a Serious, Honest Conservative. So let me make a helpful public service announcement: It’s bunk.

Some background: These are tough times for members of the conservative intelligentsia — those denizens of think tanks and opinion pages who dream of Republicans once again becoming “the party of ideas.” (Whether they ever were that party is another question.)

For a while, they thought they had found their wonk hero in the person of Mr. Ryan. But the famous Ryan plan turned out to be crude smoke and mirrors, and I suspect that even conservatives privately realize that its author is more huckster than visionary. So what’s the next big idea?

Enter libertarian populism. The idea here is that there exists a pool of disaffected working-class white voters who failed to turn out last year but can be mobilized again with the right kind of conservative economic program — and that this remobilization can restore the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes.

You can see why many on the right find this idea appealing. It suggests that Republicans can regain their former glory without changing much of anything — no need to reach out to nonwhite voters, no need to reconsider their economic ideology. You might also think that this sounds too good to be true — and you’d be right. The notion of libertarian populism is delusional on at least two levels.

First, the notion that white mobilization is all it takes rests heavily on claims by the political analyst Sean Trende that Mitt Romney fell short last year largely because of “missing white voters” — millions of “downscale, rural, Northern whites” who failed to show up at the polls. Conservatives opposed to any major shifts in the G.O.P. position — and, in particular, opponents of immigration reform — quickly seized on Mr. Trende’s analysis as proof that no fundamental change is needed, just better messaging.

But serious political scientists like Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira have now weighed in and concluded that the missing-white-voter story is a myth. Yes, turnout among white voters was lower in 2012 than in 2008; so was turnout among nonwhite voters. Mr. Trende’s analysis basically imagines a world in which white turnout rebounds to 2008 levels but nonwhite turnout doesn’t, and it’s hard to see why that makes sense.

Suppose, however, that we put this debunking on one side and grant that Republicans could do better if they could inspire more enthusiasm among “downscale” whites. What can the party offer that might inspire such enthusiasm?

Well, as far as anyone can tell, at this point libertarian populism — as illustrated, for example, by the policy pronouncements of Senator Rand Paul — consists of advocating the same old policies, while insisting that they’re really good for the working class. Actually, they aren’t. But, in any case, it’s hard to imagine that proclaiming, yet again, the virtues of sound money and low marginal tax rates will change anyone’s mind.

Moreover, if you look at what the modern Republican Party actually stands for in practice, it’s clearly inimical to the interests of those downscale whites the party can supposedly win back. Neither a flat tax nor a return to the gold standard are actually on the table; but cuts in unemployment benefits, food stamps and Medicaid are. (To the extent that there was any substance to the Ryan plan, it mainly involved savage cuts in aid to the poor.) And while many nonwhite Americans depend on these safety-net programs, so do many less-well-off whites — the very voters libertarian populism is supposed to reach.

Specifically, more than 60 percent of those benefiting from unemployment insurance are white. Slightly less than half of food stamp beneficiaries are white, but in swing states the proportion is much higher. For example, in Ohio, 65 percent of households receiving food stamps are white. Nationally, 42 percent of Medicaid recipients are non-Hispanic whites, but, in Ohio, the number is 61 percent.

So when Republicans engineer sharp cuts in unemployment benefits, block the expansion of Medicaid and seek deep cuts in food stamp funding — all of which they have, in fact, done — they may be disproportionately hurting Those People; but they are also inflicting a lot of harm on the struggling Northern white families they are supposedly going to mobilize.

Which brings us back to why libertarian populism is, as I said, bunk. You could, I suppose, argue that destroying the safety net is a libertarian act — maybe freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. But populist it isn’t.

Both Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) want low income whites to believe they'll be better off with even more tax cuts for the wealthy. These conservative-libertarians want moderate income whites to believe conservative economic policies, which caused the Great Recession their will not blow up the economy again if we revert to even less regulation. Don't worry high school educated whites the economy will not tank again, you won't need Social Security or Medicare, and your kids will not need an education because conservatives still want to send your job to Asia. Ryan, Rand and the rest of the libertarian populist crowd want you to believe that America's problem is scary people of color or people who speak Spanish. They do not under any circumstances want you to realize that it is Wall Street bankers, the Koch brothers and the Mitt Romneys who are the biggest threat to being able to take care of yourself and your family.

Conservative Legislators and Courts Are Making Criminal Conduct Legal For Corporations

Conservative Legislators and Courts Are Making Criminal Conduct Legal For Corporations

At least 71 bills introduced in 2013 that make it harder for average Americans to access the civil justice system resemble "models" from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or "ALEC," according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org [3].

ALEC Agenda Tips the Scales of Justice to Help Corporations Win

For decades, ALEC has been a conduit for the oil, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries to push legislation that changes the rules to limit accountability when a corporation’s products or actions cause injury or death -- such as when a Koch Industries pipeline explodes and kills teenagers [4], or when the tobacco or pharmaceutical industries withhold evidence that their products are dangerous. In just the first six months of 2013, seventy-one ALEC bills that advance these "tort reform" goals have been introduced in thirty states (see chart below).

“Each of these bills would weaken the legal rights of everyday people who are wrongfully harmed by a corporation or health care provider,” says Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy, a group that works to protect the civil justice system and fight tort reform. “[The bills] are carefully crafted to provide relief and protections for the industries who wrote them."

A long-standing principle of American law gives a person injured (or whose family member is killed) by the fault of another the right to pursue justice and seek fair compensation in front of a judge and jury. An injury for which a person can sue is known as a "tort." Tort lawsuits are one of the few instances where an average American can stand on equal footing with a global corporation, make their case in front of a citizen jury, and demand justice. On a level playing field, consumers often win -- which is why corporate interests want to rig this centuries-old system to their benefit.

Tort cases are relatively rare -- they make up only six percent of the entire civil court caseload, and are declining -- but they are effective. Tort liability is why U.S. companies have stopped selling dangerous cribs that strangle infants and children's pajamas that catch fire.

The ALEC “tort reform” bills fundamentally alter the tort liability system by making it harder to bring a lawsuit or by limiting a jury's ability to award damages. The bills provide a way for ALEC corporations to escape responsibility for wrongdoing, help ALEC insurance companies limit payouts (and increase profits), and prevent Americans wrongfully injured or killed from receiving just compensation.

ALEC Bills Limit Corporate Accountability, Change Liability Rules

Some ALEC bills limit how much a corporation might have to pay for causing injury.

    The ALEC “Noneconomic Damage Awards Act” (versions of which were introduced in five states in 2013) limits the amount a jury can award to compensate a person for their diminished quality of life as the result of an injury.

    The misleadingly-named "Full and Fair Noneconomic Damages Act" (introduced in two states) limits the amount a corporation might have to pay to compensate a person for their pain and suffering.

    The “Phantom Damages Elimination Act” (introduced in two states) changes the rules so a person who paid health insurance premiums for years would recover less for their medical bills than a person who had no insurance: rather than placing the full cost of paying for medical bills on the wrongdoer, the bill would reduce the amount they must pay if a person's insurance company negotiated a discount.

Other ALEC bills change how liability is apportioned when more than one individual or corporation is at fault.

    Three states introduced versions of the “Comparative Fault Act,” which changes the rules so that “if a company is 49% responsible, they are completely off the hook,” Doroshow says.

    Two states introduced the misleadingly-named “Joint and Several Liability Act,” which actually eliminates the Joint and Several rule that has worked for many years and protects victims in situations where it is difficult to pinpoint which defendant is at fault -- such as when multiple companies may have manufactured lead paint -- or where one of the defendants is insolvent. The bill eliminates the rule that had established that after a jury finds a defendant substantially responsible, they can be required to fully reimburse a person for their injury.

Other ALEC "model legislation" would provide immunity for certain forms of lawsuits.

    Five states introduced the "Emergency Care Immunity Act," which provides immunity to emergency personnel who provide assistance, without compensation, at the scene of an emergency. Providing some legal protections for volunteers in emergency situations may be important, but Doroshow suspects the bill is primarily advanced "for PR purposes" to promote the notion that the tort system is broken.

    Ten states introduced the “Trespasser Responsibility Act,” which would largely absolve landowners from a responsibility to maintain safe premises, and tends to benefit large landowners like railroads, utility companies, and big agriculture. These large corporations would be absolved from their duty to act responsibly, and would be immune if a person accidentally wanders onto their property and are injured by poorly-maintained electrical boxes, dangerous chemicals or farm implements.

ALEC Corporations Reap the Rewards

The Trespasser Responsibility Act was brought to ALEC [5] by Matt Fullenbaum of the American Tort Reform Association and Mark Behrens of Shook Hardy & Bacon, a law firm that has long represented tobacco companies and other industries seeking to avoid tort liability. Behrens is an "advisor" to the ALEC Civil Justice Task Force, as are other Shook Hardy & Bacon attorneys. The head of Shook Hardy & Bacon is Victor Schwartz, the so-called "undisputed king of tort reform [6]" who for many years has chaired the ALEC Civil Justice Task Force.

Others involved with the Civil Justice Task Force include a variety of corporate trade groups that have worked closely with Schwartz and his law firm, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, as well as the American Insurance Industry and others.

“Industries like the tobacco, insurance, oil and chemical industries are pretty detested,” Doroshow says, “and trade groups provide a way for these corporations to hide behind a more neutral-sounding entity that will push their agenda. This makes it harder for the public to learn how these detested industries would benefit from tort reform.”

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/brendan-fischer
[3] http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-02/koch-brothers-flout-law-getting-richer-with-secret-iran-sales.html
[5] http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%7BFB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665%7D/civil_justice_35-day_mailing%20San%20Diego.pdf

Conservatives and libertarians don't just think corporations are human beings, they think they're super privileged human beings. As we all know, if most of us hurt someone or take something from them, we can be prosecuted. Hurting people and stealing are considered immoral acts when done by humans, though conservatives and libertarians don't think that applies when corporations hurt people and steal. This is the tyranny of feudal lords, not freedom. That is why anyone who objects to what ALEC, the Kochs and various conservative-libertarians are doing, is quickly labeled a commie or radical liberal. The people who oppose ALEC and this massive erosion of freedom by the conservative movement, are patriots.

Billionaire Charles Koch on helping the poor: Eliminate minimum wages

America is Being Robbed by the Conservative Nanny State

America is Being Robbed by the Conservative Nanny State

CEOs are legendary for defending their tax paying records, and eager to imply that government is responsible for any of their tax delinquencies. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced, "We pay all the taxes we owe - every single dollar." Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey supported the iPhone maker, saying "It's not Apple's fault that they're seeking to avoid paying taxes. They're not lying, cheating or stealing. They're following the rules that were created by governments. If the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them."

Mackey didn't mention that changing the tax rules is a specialty of big business. As is flouting the tax rules. The following four tales of corporate malfeasance are particularly disturbing.

1. Just 32 companies avoided enough in 2012 taxes to pay the ENTIRE 2013 federal education budget.

In 2012 an Apple executive protested, "We shouldn't be criticized for using Chinese workers. The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need." His comment was somewhat accurate. Half of the companies surveyed by The Chronicle said they couldn't find qualified graduates for positions within their organizations.

Yet one of the major reasons for job-unpreparedness is quietly ignored by the big companies, just as their taxes are. A Pay Up Now analysis of SEC tax filings found that the total 2012 income taxes (federal and foreign) of thirty-two large companies amounted to just 17% of pre-tax worldwide income. The result was the same in 2011. The figures are consistent with a recent analysis of 2010 data by the Government Accountability Office.

The shortfall from the required 35% statutory rate comes to about $72 billion, about the same as the federal education budget for 2013. Apple Corp., the biggest offender by far, avoided more than the combined National Science Foundation and Small Business Administration budgets.

This helps to explain why "the U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need."

2. Bank of America: 82% of Revenue in U.S., $7 billion loss. (But big foreign profits.)

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan once complained that nobody understood "how much good" his employees do. But his company, with a whopping 82% of its 2011-12 revenue in the U.S., declared $7 billion in U.S. losses and $10 billion in foreign profits.

Citigroup is close behind. With 42% of its 2011-12 revenue in North America (almost all U.S.), it declared a $5 billion U.S. loss and a $27 billion foreign profit.

Also scornworthy is Pfizer, which had 40% of its 2011-12 revenues in the U.S., but declared almost $7 billion in U.S. losses to go along with $31 billion in foreign profits. After the SEC questioned Pfizer in 2012 about four straight years of U.S. losses despite large worldwide incomes, the company responded by declaring a fifth straight U.S. loss.

3. Relative to workers' payroll tax, corporate taxes have dropped from $1.00 to 7 cents.

In 1953, as the most productive era in U.S. history was beginning, corporations contributed over a dollar for every 33 cents paid by workers. In 2011, the corporate contribution was about 7 cents for every 33 cents paid by workers.

For those who believe that entitlements are the problem, Urban Institute figures should help them reconsider. The typical two-earner couple making average wages throughout their lifetimes will receive less in Social Security benefits than they paid in. Same for single males. Almost the same for single females.

4. Sales tax on school supplies: 10%. Sales tax on $1,000,000,000,000,000 of financial securities: ZERO.

Estimates of the financial derivatives market vary, from $708 trillion to $1.2 quadrillion to $3 quadrillion to a gazillion. This money is a largely speculative and unproductive figment of the financial fantasy world. But speculative financial activity is so inflationary that the world's total wealth, according to the authors of the Global Wealth Report, has doubled in ten years, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion, and is expected to reach $330 trillion by 2017.

The sales tax on the U.S. portion of a quadrillion dollars of trades? Zero. Only a tiny fee is charged to cover SEC expenses.

"If the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them." Except that the people with the money and the power like the rules just the way they are.
  

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)

All wealth, as president Lincoln once said, is created by labor. That has not stooped the conservative movement and corporate American from stealing that wealth.

Anti-Freedom Wall Street Journal Recommends That Egypt Gets Itself a Pro Free Market Murderer

Anti-Freedom Wall Street Journal Recommends That Egypt Gets Itself a Pro Free Market Murderer

Wall Street Journal says Egypt needs a Pinochet
The Chilean dictator presided over the torture and murder of thousands, yet still the free-market right revers his name

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial entitled “After the Coup in Cairo”. Its final paragraph contained these words:

Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took over power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.

Presumably, this means that those who speak for the Wall Street Journal – the editorial was unsigned – think Egypt should think itself lucky if its ruling generals now preside over a 17-year reign of terror. I also take it the WSJ means us to associate two governments removed by generals – the one led by Salvador Allende in Chile and the one led by Mohamed Morsi in Egypt. Islamist, socialist … elected, legitimate … who cares?

Presumably, the WSJ thinks the Egyptians now have 17 years in which to think themselves lucky when any who dissent are tortured with electricity, raped, thrown from planes or – if they’re really lucky – just shot. That’s what happened in Chile after 1973, causing the deaths of between 1,000 and 3,000 people. Around 30,000 were tortured.

This attitude is one of the most dangerous and anti-American ideologies of the conservative movement, that being able to do business and make a profit is a more basic right than democratic republicanism. 

Thanks to Conservative Economics That Rewards Wealth and Punishes Work US Middle Class is Sliding Toward the Third World

Thanks to Conservative Economics That Rewards Wealth and Punishes Work US Middle Class is Sliding Toward the Third World

A recent article by Les Leopold informed us that our nation is near the bottom of the developed world in median wealth, probably the best gauge for the economic strength of the middle class. The source of the information, the Global Wealth Databook, provides additional evidence of our decline from our once-lofty position as an egalitarian country with opportunities for nearly everyone.

The data is summarized (chart above). Column 4 reveals that the U.S. is near the top of the developed world in average wealth, in good part because of its many millionaires (Col 8). Median wealth per adult, in Column 5, is much lower. As a sign of the distance between America's middle class and its national wealth, Column 6 shows that the ratio of median to mean in the U.S. is lower than in any country except Russia.

The impact of all this is shown in Column 7. Median-level adults in the U.S. get a smaller percentage of their nation's wealth than in any other country except China and India.

To view Column 7 in another way, a middle-class adult in Finland owns $122 for every billion dollars of his or her nation's wealth. In Canada it's $13. In the U.S. it's 60 cents. Only China (40 cents) and India (30 cents) give their middle-class adults less.

America's middle class is sliding out of the developed world and toward third-world status. Column 9 makes it clear. Among all the nations of the world with at least a quarter-million adults, only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon are more unequal in their wealth distribution. Most of the third world countries are, sad to say and hard to believe, fairer to their middle classes than we are.

 Yet the radical anti-American conservative movement is still pushing for trickle-down, screw the middle-class tax and economic policies -  Weirdo Rick Perry and Freaky Ted Cruz Vie for Stupidest Tax Plan

North Carolina Conservatives Celebrate Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling To Bring Back The Confederacy

North Carolina Conservatives Celebrate Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling To Bring Back The Confederacy

Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina is moving forward with a host of bills to roll back voting rights. Republican lawmakers are accelerating a new agenda to eliminate early voting, Sunday voting hours, and same-day registration provisions. GOP leaders also vowed to move quickly to pass a controversial voter ID law that would make it much harder for minorities, seniors, students, and low-income voters to cast their ballots.

The court’s conservative majority decreed last Tuesday that the formula used to identify states with a history of using election law to discriminate against minorities has “no logical relationship to the present day.” Many of the covered jurisdictions celebrated the decision by promptly advancing voting restrictions that disproportionately target minorities and low-income voters. Texas enacted their previously blocked voter ID law mere hours after the ruling.

North Carolina’s newly unfettered attack on voting rights has three main prongs:

    Require ID at the polls. North Carolina’s voter ID bill could pose problems for 1 in 10 voters, according to an analysis by the State Board of Elections. About 613,000 North Carolinians lack the required government-issued ID. Nearly a third of these voters are black, while over half are registered Democrats.
    Penalize college students for voting. Republicans are also pushing a bill to raise taxes on families with college students who choose to vote at school rather than at home, effectively discouraging college students from voting.
    End early voting and same-day registration. Other states that restricted early voting, like Ohio and Florida, needlessly created mammoth lines on Election Day, forcing some voters to wait until 1 a.m. to cast a ballot. The backlash in Florida has been especially strong, prompting Gov. Rick Scott (R) to reverse his own voter suppression laws. In North Carolina, black voters make up 29 percent of early voters and 34 percent of voters who took advantage of same-day voter registration at the polls.

The Republican-dominated legislature and new Republican governor will likely do all they can to speed along these restrictions. However, polls show that North Carolinians overwhelmingly oppose these new voter suppression measures. “Moral Monday” protests are cropping up all over the state to challenge these bills and a slew of other draconian policies targeting the poor, women, minorities, and seniors.

OK my headline is a little off,  conservatives not only have contempt for Americans of color, but hate students and senior citizens as well. One has to wonder why conservatives don't just pack up and move to China, they don't have voting rights there either. A party of the elite decides what is good or bad - just the way conservatives do. There is nothing humanitarian or logical about conservatives and conservatism, it is all about getting and keeping power - again, much like the political elite in China or Saudi  Arabia or Iraq.

Weirdo Conservatives Spread Lies About Supreme Court Decision That Brings Back Jim-Crow Lite

Weirdo Conservatives Spread Lies About Supreme Court Decision That Brings Back Jim-Crow Lite

Right-wing media are offering multiple false reassurances to those outraged at the Supreme Court's attack on voting rights in Shelby County v. Holder, while failing to report on the progress of one possible fix.

In the aftermath of Shelby County, which held that Congress' extensive 2006 findings of ongoing voter suppression did not justify the Voting Rights Act's formula for determining which jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination must "preclear" their election changes, right-wing media are incorrectly claiming that this decision will not have an adverse effect on voting rights.

Repeating the lie that the preclearance requirement in Section 5 of the VRA - gutted when the Supreme Court invalidated the formula within Section 4 that determines which jurisdictions are subject to it - was insignificant, right wing-media continue to argue that only a "small part" of this historic civil rights law was struck down.

Megyn KellyIn their day-after analysis of Shelby County, the editors of the National Review Online proclaimed the preclearance process to be "worthless," adding "[t]he decision brings an end to the automatic and perpetual punishment of states that are guilty of crimes in decades past. It does nothing else."

On the June 26 edition of America Live, Fox News host Megyn Kelly dismissed the idea that "racism was given the stamp of approval officially by the Supreme Court yesterday." Her guest, NRO contributing editor Andrew McCarthy, repeated the right-wing myth that voter suppression that engages in systematic racial discrimination "has long ago passed to the dustbin of history" and progressives who cannot recognize its demise are demagogues and "race hucksters." From America Live:

But this argument denying the "vital scaffolding" that is Sections 4 and 5 was debunked by the actions of states that immediately reanimated voter suppression measures, previously blocked or deterred as potentially racially discriminatory by preclearance, in the hours after Shelby County was decided.

Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina have announced they will proceed with voter ID and redistricting measures whose racial discrimination could have been scrutinized and stopped by the preclearance mechanism of the VRA. Indeed, Texas is going forward with both a voter ID law and redistricting plan that federal courts have already found to be forms of systematic racial discrimination. Alabama, and Shelby County in particular, may be an even clearer example of how Section 5 has repeatedly and recently deterred voter suppression on the basis of race. From The New Yorker:

    Reading the opinion it's possible to forget that a grand total of three African-Americans senators and two governors have been elected in the past hundred and thirty-six years, only one of them in a Southern state. In arguing that the preclearance section of the V.R.A. was outmoded and based upon aged presumptions about Southern states, the court had to bypass not only history but contemporary reality. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out during oral arguments, Shelby County--the Alabama county that brought the challenge to the Court--had failed preclearance some two hundred and forty times. Given that Section 5 of the V.R.A. allows districts covered by its provisions to move out of coverage by consistently demonstrating that their laws have no discriminatory impact, this decision was something of an end run: places that have consistently failed the litmus tests of discrimination were, in a second, given the status of those where there's been legitimate progress. 

Self-admittedly scared of being called "racist" for their opposition to the preclearance mechanism, right-wing media are offering a litany of hollow reassurances for why Shelby County will not negatively affect voters of color. If right-wing media really want to listen to the concerns of voters of color - a growing demographic that Republicans are desperately seeking to attract - perhaps they should actually report on the one reassurance about the decision they have mentioned that is actually true: Congress can, once again, reauthorize Section 4. So far, right-wing media have been silent on the efforts that were immediately launched to do just that, both on the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle.

This omission is peculiar.

Sections 4 and 5 were reauthorized in 2006 by bipartisan majorities of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House of Representatives, then signed into law by former President George W. Bush. The fact that many of the same congresspersons are now mobilizing to revive this bipartisan effort and save the heart of the Voting Rights Act is surely news.

At the very least, it's a more important story than dredging up demonstrably false claims about preclearance and voter suppression.

The UnAmerican freaks at Fox News and The National Review try very hard to appear to be adults and patriots. In reality, when the facts are presented, these freaky conservatives are left shouting lies because they have lost yet another debate.One of the great things true patriots have learned from history is that when one side constantly resorts to lies and disinformation to win a debate, they have a twisted radical agenda.