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.

Paul Ryan (R-WI) Has The Values Of A Sleazy Conman - Tell Ryan To Tell The Truth About GM's Janesville Plant

Paul Ryan (R-WI) Has The Values Of A Sleazy Conman - Tell Ryan To Tell The Truth About GM's Janesville Plant

The list of falsehoods Paul Ryan told at the Republican National Convention last night isn't short, but there's one, in particular, that seems to be generating the most attention.

    "My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.

    "A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you ... this plant will be here for another hundred years.' That's what he said in 2008.

    "Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that's how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight."

For regular readers, the anecdote may have sounded familiar -- Ryan has incorporated the anecdote into his speeches before, I took it apart two weeks ago.

To their credit, plenty of campaign reporters immediately recognized one of the major flaws in Ryan's attack -- the GM plant in Janesville was shut down before Obama took office. Take a look at that photo included above, and then notice the date on the banner. GM's press release announcing the closing of the plant was issued in June 2008. One of the local papers ran this headline in December 2008, the month before Obama's inauguration: "Hugs, tears as GM workers leave Janesville plant for last time."

Republicans are going to great lengths to argue that Ryan didn't actually mislead the country. They're wrong; Ryan's argument was obviously and deliberately deceptive. The truth matters, and Ryan's version of reality isn't it.

But the closer one looks at Ryan's attack, the more bizarre it appears.

At the surface, there's just no reason to suggest Obama is responsible for a plant closing initiated under Bush. But even beyond the surface-level lie, the ideological disconnect is almost as striking.

President Obama, as you may have heard, rescued the American auto industry in 2009, over Republican objections. In the process, Obama not only saved GM, he rescued plants, workers, and communities.

Ryan, unwilling to respect Americans enough to talk to us like adults, is trying to make a child-like appeal: the plant is closed, Obama is president, ergo blame Obama for the plant closing.

But that's ridiculous. If it weren't for the president's policy, the Janesville plant wouldn't have been the only one closed. Indeed, Ryan's running mate would have allowed all the GM plants to close as part of his "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" policy.

Obama did visit the plant while running for president saying he supported the GM government sponsored bankruptcy so they could reorganize and stay in business. part of GM's decision was to close that plant. Ryan says that Obama uses too much big gov'mint power, so Ryan is being dishonest and hypocritical by saying that Obama should have intervened and micromanaged GM's business decisions. The Janesville plant was making SUV's whose sales had bottomed out during the 2007-2008 financial collapse. I guess Ryan wanted Obama to force people to buy a car model no one wanted as well.

The GOP’s tough-love approach, heavy on the tough. Funny how the GOP version of tough love always means working class Americans making more sacrifices and the wealthy getting yet another tax cut.

The 5 Weirdest Bits in the 2012 GOP Platform. Conservative Republicans may have a simple medical problem, their tin foil hats are on way too tight.

If Anti-American Conservatives James Pethokoukis and Ann Coulter Used Their Math at NASA All Missions Would Crash and Burn

If Anti-American Conservatives James Pethokoukis and Ann Coulter Used Their Math at NASA All Missions Would Crash and Burn

I was late to the excellent MarketWatch story debunking the notion that President Obama’s been on a spending binge; I spent most of Tuesday traveling. But after my “Hardball” segment on it Wednesday, Ann Coulter tweeted: “Joan Walsh says that Marketwatch chart is ‘unbelievable’! Why yes it is, in the sense of being untrue.” That’s when I saw that there was shrill but lame GOP pushback on Rex Nutting’s excellent story, from both Coulter and the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis. I don’t normally reply to Coulter’s right-wing delusions — I haven’t written a column about her in five years – but since I think Nutting’s findings are a crucial corrective to GOP lying, I wasted my Wednesday night trying to understand the GOP attempt to discredit him. You’re welcome.

Coulter admits she relies on Pethokoukis, so let’s go directly to the source. To recap, Nutting crunched Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office numbers to find that under Obama, spending has risen at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, less than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. It jumped 8.1 percent in the last three years of the George W. Bush presidency, and in fiscal year 2009, for which Bush approved the budget, it jumped 17.9 percent. But Bush isn’t the most profligate Republican: Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term.

Pethokoukis quarrels with Nutting’s assigning Bush’s budget to Bush, because “Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it.” Exactly how one president undoes the spending approved by another president under a different Congress goes unexplained. The AEI pundit also argues that we should look at federal spending as a percent of GDP, and he notes that’s gone up under Obama, attempting to prove that Nutting is mistaken – but that’s a useless metric during a recession, which by definition shrinks GDP.

Coulter goes even further (of course). “It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.” (The italics are in the original; they’re where the good writing is supposed to be.) She continues: “That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column.”

Shockingly, Coulter is … wrong. First of all, only about $120 billion of the stimulus was spent in fiscal year 2009 – and Nutting counted it in Obama’s column.

 Why do conservatives lie so often and so blatantly without the slightest regard for values like integrity. because they cannot win arguments if they have to stick to the facts. Bush 43 started his presidency with a federal surplus. he ran up the largest spending spree in US history. Conservative Republicans who ran all three branches of government for 6 of those years made no attempt to pay for their spending. Then they crashed the economy (conservatives and Wall Street  crashed the economy, not Freddie Mac or Fannie May).

Anti-American web site The Weekly Standard, Cherry-Picks BLS Data To Attack Obama's Economic Record

Typical American Worker Would Need 244 Years To Match CEO’s Annual Salary

Today in Race Baiting Smears: Proto-fascist Conservative Lou Dobbs Suggests New Black Panthers Party Is Obama's "Base"

Today in Race Baiting Smears: Proto-fascist Conservative Lou Dobbs Suggests New Black Panthers Party Is Obama's "Base"

On his Fox Business show, Lou Dobbs suggested that the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, constitutes Obama's base. Dobbs quoted criticisms of Obama by the NBPP and then said: "I mean, what is going on here? This president is starting to get, at the very least, friction, if not outright attacks coming from his base."

Fox News political analyst Juan Williams responded by noting that the NBPP is a "fringe-group."

During the segment, Dobbs also falsely claimed that "Holder says [the NBPP] can't be prosecuted for intimidating white voters," a reference to a phony scandal relentlessly hyped by Fox News.

In fact, it was the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, that decided not to prosecute the NBPP criminally for an incident in which an NBPP member carried a nightstick outside a Philadelphia polling place. The Bush administration chose to file a civil case in the matter instead.

The Obama Justice Department pursued the civil case against the defendant who carried the nighstick and obtained an injunction against him. Obama later decided to drop the civil case against the other defendants.

Furthermore, conservatives including to the Republican vice chair of the Civil Rights Commission investigating the case have agreed that the attacks against the Justice Department are meritless.

Moreover, the DOJ's ethics office found that senior career lawyers at the DOJ "did not commit professional misconduct or exercise poor judgment, but rather acted appropriately" in their handling of the NBPP case.

But such facts would get in the way of Dobbs' race baiting.

Conservatives generally hate the Southern Poverty Law Center because they have designated some conservative organizations as hate groups, yet they ignore the fact that the SPLC has designated the "new Black Panthers" as a hate group as well. What is wrong with Mr. Dobbs? he typifies the hateful radical ideology of conservatism. he wraps his wacky ideology in the flag and calls is patriotism. Dobbs is no way represents the freedom and egalitarian ideals spelled out in the liberal tenets of the Constitution.

Spending By Obama Administration At Slowest Pace in Decades

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.

• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.

• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.

• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.

• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.
The big surge in federal spending happened in fiscal 2009, before Obama took office. Since then, spending growth has been relatively flat.

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%.

There has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.

Facts seem to have a bias. A bias against the constant lies and distortions of the anti-American conservative Republican movement.

There Are Many Big Conservative Lies. That Republicans Are For Small Government is One of Them

There Are Many Big Conservative Lies. That Republicans Are For Small Government is One of Them

What do you suppose a country that is only willing to pay (top dollar) for a far flung military empire, domestic policing, prisons and border security look like? If the Republicans get their we\'re way, it looks like we\'re going to find out:

    The House passed a defense budget Friday that exceeds the deal cut by Congress and President Barack Obama last summer, and that would have to be paid for with cash taken from poverty programs, health care and the federal workforce.

    The National Defense Authorization Act permits $642 billion in defense spending next year. The White House has threatened to veto the bill, citing more than 30 changes to the budget it was seeking.

    But the measure also adds $8 billion more than called for in the Budget Control Act that Congress agreed to last summer in exchange for raising the nation\'s debt limit.

    "We increase the spending for defense due to the priorities that we feel are most important and the constitutional requirement we have to provide for the common defense," Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said. "But we will cut in other areas of the budget so that we comply fully with the deficit reduction act."

    Those other areas were spelled out in the broader budget plan passed last week. Written by House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), it would cut more than $80 billion in federal retirement benefits, nearly $50 billion from Medicaid programs and more than $36 billion from programs to feed the poor.

I\'ve always thought of the Military Industrial Complex as welfare for white guys. This would back up that claim:

    Among other unasked for changes, the bill keeps aging aircraft and ships the military wants to phase out, keeps the Army and Marines at larger force levels and orders construction of missile defenses.

They don\'t want it, they don\'t need it, but the Republican donors want the profits and their conservative base voters want the very well paying, extremely high benefits jobs.

They like to say they hate Big Government, but that\'s a lie. They love it. It\'s just that they want to funnel the money to their own constituencies --- and they want to build a police state that will keep everyone else in line in case they decide to do something about it.
It is true that many Democrats back all those programs too. But I think they do have more pressure coming from constituents to spend money on domestic items as well, so they\'re forced to at least pay them lip service and offer token support. It\'s not much, but it\'s where we are these days in terms of choices.

Conservative Republicans give their word and it turns out is was a lie. Kind of reminds me about all those WMD Iraq never had. Or the promise that the Bush tax cuts would pay for themselves by stimulating the economy and create jobs. Anyone seen those jobs? Conservatives are like the crazy uncle everyone ignores on holidays, yet the media and everyone else takes conservatives seriously. Since when did real Americans pay attention to venal crazy people.

Mitt’s favorite new dodge - Romney and the GOP insist the economy is more important than social issues. Why can't we address both?

Top Republican Group: Minority Births Are ‘Not A Good Thing’ Because They ‘Don’t Share American Values’

UPDATED: Will Fox News Correct Its False Report On Elizabeth Warren's Book?.Scott Brown(R-MA) and his friends are telling some desperate lies and peddling extreme distortions. For such a manly man he sure is acting like a sacred little wuss.