Anti-American Conservative Freaks at Fox News Ignore Fact That IRS Scrutinized All Political Groups

Anti-American Conservative Freaks at Fox News Ignore Fact That IRS Scrutinized All Political Groups

Fox News selectively covered new reports on the IRS' targeting of political groups, raising questions about how the network will handle the new revelations in future reports.

According to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press, the IRS targeted groups seeking tax exempt status by screening for terms that are not unique to tea party and conservative groups. Terms such as "Israel," "progressive" and "occupy" were also used by the agency to further scrutinize certain organizations.

On the June 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier, host Bret Baier failed to mention the memo obtained by the Associated Press and instead suggested that the new information extended targeting to only religious groups, saying, "You can add Jewish and other religious groups to the agency's hit list." Fox's chief political correspondent Carl Cameron pointed out that "other religious groups" were targeted, and acknowledged that "as for those conservative groups that were targeted, they weren't just tea partiers and they included other type of policy groups." However, both Baier and Cameron neglected to mention that the words associated with left-leaning groups like "occupy" or "progressive" were also used in targeting.

On Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight, Dobbs also reported on new revelations in the IRS story but did not comment on the the Associated Press memo or the fact that left-leaning groups were also subject to improper scrutiny.

The Fox affiliated FoxNation.com also included an Associated Press story about the IRS' overreach, but focused on a conference call IRS commissioner Danny Werfel held with reporters in which he did not specify which terms were on the list of targeted words.

What day was it that evil became part of journalism. That was something that Fox News, which is nothing more than a fax machine for conservative propaganda, decided that journalism was to be. It is simple, you ut a lot of people in business attire, make them look like they might pass for respectable journalists, and use them to propel lies, half truths and rumors as news. Evil doesn't wear a red suit, have horns and pointed tail, it looks like the clowns in make-up at Fox News. They wrap their evil in the flag and the Bible, and pass their garbage out as patriotism.

Getting to Know Conservative-Libertarian Jeff Goldstein and Protein Wisdom

Getting to Know Conservative-Libertarian Jeff Goldstein

Jeff Goldstein is a real piece of work, a posterchild for the inferiority complex and resultant over-compensation issues delineated in Adlerian psychology. As is so often the case, the inferiorities he feels are both real and, simply, perceived. There’s nothing wrong with being a Mr. Mom or failed academic, yet Goldstein’s behavior indicates he feels differently — he’s so very touchy about it. On the other hand, there is something wrong with being a chickenhawk coward, a paste-eating cretin, and a talentless hack. Hence his overcompensation in the form of obnoxious aggression (often to the point of violent threats), pseudo-intellectual windbaggery, atrociously banal “short-fictions”.

To the casual observer, Goldstein might seem to be a garden-variety internet wingnut, a suburban douchebag whose sad and petty hatreds, frustrations over stagnated ambitions and innate cowardice lead him to adopt a sort of Walter-Mitty-As-Rambo-As-Whackjob-Blogger schtick, whereby all his fantasies of action and genocidal crusade and manly-man aggression are sated through internet jackassery. Of course if Goldstein really wanted some adventure, he could go to the recruiting office, but — hahahahaha — everyone knows that ain’t gonna happen. And yeah, all of this is common enough on the WingNet, although Goldstein has a curiously ambitious drive to be the biggest jerk of them all, and he very nearly succeeds. Added to this drive and his deep, abiding fear that he might be a weenie is his status as “Literature Wingnut” and the unique salad of sex and violence issues which reside in his otherwise empty brainpan; Goldstein’s a hell of a case study.

His sex and violence issues I’ll deal with first; if by the end you’re not also convinced that Goldstein is certifably crazy and that, therefore, he ought to be straitjacketed and shot-up with elephant tranquilizers, then you should be drubbed to death with a giant dildo.

A Little Penis Fixation

Jeff Goldstein has without a doubt the biggest macho complex at least since George Thorogood’s. Which is why the “chickenhawk” epithet is so injurious to him. (Goldstein is so discombobulated by the Chickenhawk label that he, like Jonah Goldberg, has to rely on Christopher Hitchens’s argument against it; both are too stupid or dishonest to acknowledge that Hitchens was revising himself; and of course none of this prevents Goldstein from turning right around and applying a derivative of the term to Rod Dreher.) Like all the rest of the 82nd Chairborne Brigade, his affected stance is broadly swaggering, hypermasculine, chock-full of bravado and chest-thumping — all of which is not only self-serving, but also a distended reaction inspired by how Goldstein sees the Left: as a collection of wimps. The irony of course is that if Goldstein were really so tough and so confident of his pro-war righteousness as all his rhetoric insists, he’d be in Iraq. But then he, like all chickenhawks, regards such moral logic as unreasonable and impossible. Actually, the very idea of 101st Keyboarders putting, so to speak, their money where their mouth is, is liable to make them terrified to the point of incontinence. And though I’m fairly sure that Goldstein’s barcalounger has more than its share of urine stains, the Left’s perception that Goldstein isn’t heroic material inspires in him a great deal more than that. Goldstein the Chickenhawk is reduced to violently asserting that he too is a macho man!Reduced to soiling himself not in fear but in anger! To asserting that he is more manly than any lefty, to be sure, (despite what his adenoidal, wimpy voice sounds like, which he is always quick to say is the fault of technology, not lack of testosterone!) and it is with monomaniacal fixation on his genitals and those of others that he means to demonstrate his ultimate masculinity. Thus Goldstein-Chickenhawk becomes Goldstein-Cockvulture and his garden-variety wingnut resentment becomes a thematic demonstration of his unique insanity.

This is only about a quarter of a well done post about one of the more evil denizens of the internet and radical Right politics. There are more details, with some graphic language at the link. The language is graphic and unsettling because it is the kind of language that JG uses. Maybe he is a sociopath, a nut, a freak, weirdo, an assclown. The psychological analysis is up for debate. Judging purely by his words, there is no doubt he is evil. This fact based, rational column by the WaPo's Ezra Klein is the reason for one of of Goldstein's latest dives in the the unhinged depths of anger and depravity. I'm just posting part of it so that anyone can see, it is the kind of column that one can agree with, find some disagreement or depending on  one's politics, dismiss it because it does not advance your agenda. It is hardly something to read and turn into Joesph Goebbels over, The scandals are falling apart by Ezra Klein

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them.

1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.

If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.

2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well:

    According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators.

    White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points.

    

    But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate.

So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be.

One assumes that Goldstein belongs to the Benghazi conspiracy theory camp. As is the tradition of evil and it's practitioners, they would much rather rant and deflect the facts, than embrace rationalism and ethics. Goldstein seems to have some loyal followers - judging from his comment section. Throughout history, evil has always had it's appeal.

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Having solved the problem of people not wasting enough time on the internet, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now tackling his first real-world political cause: immigration reform. With a slick new non-profit group funded by tech millionaires, Zuckerberg is rallying Silicon Valley's elite into a political force they hope might one day rival Wall Street. Zuckerberg's political moves are of a piece with his career as a tech mogul: hugely ambitious, painfully awkward, entirely self-interested, and surprisingly successful. And he's just getting started.

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg unveiled the vehicle of his political will: FWD.us, a bipartisan, non-profit political advocacy group that sounds like an iPhone app. FWD.us has attracted big names from both politics and technology, including former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, Romney adviser Dan Senor, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The group hopes to raise $50 million to fund its lobbying for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform, which is currently making its way through Congress.

Why immigration? We need those smart foreign brains: In a Washington Post op-ed announcing FWD.us, Zuckerberg wrote that "in a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country." To that end, FWD.us says on its website it aims to "establish a streamlined process for admitting future workers" and increase the number of H-1B visas that let companies hire high-skilled foreign workers to "continue to promote innovation and meet our workforce needs."

The implicit argument behind FWD.us is that the U.S. doesn't have enough high-skilled domestic workers to meet tech companies' needs. This is a myth, and Zuckerberg and FWD.us are just the latest tech players to promote it. In fact there is no shortage of domestic IT workers, as shown in a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. While there is an unusually low unemployment rate among American tech workers (3%), they haven't enjoyed the large salary increases that would signal a shortage. There is also little evidence that the foreign workers tech companies hire are any better than Americans. The real reason tech companies want to hire more high-skilled immigrants is that they can pay them less than Americans, since immigrants are in a more economically precarious position. More than 80 percent of workers hired under the H-1B program are paid less than their American counterparts, according to the EPI. This kind of outsourcing benefits tech companies while hurting domestic tech workers.

The self-serving motives behind Zuckerberg's immigration reform push can be seen clearly in Facebook's corporate lobbying efforts. As FWD.us promotes high-minded ideals of openness and opportunity, Facebook's lobbying firms have been doing the dirty work of making sure immigration reform means they can freely hire high-skilled immigrants for less money than their American counterparts. Specifically, Facebook has been trying to insert language into the Senate immigration bill to eliminate a requirement that American companies make a "good faith" effort to hire Americans before looking abroad, according to the Washington Post. And Facebook wants to axe rules that would require companies to pay these foreign workers more. Facebook isn't just a fan of outsourcing its high-skilled jobs: Last year we reported that much of Facebook's dirty and unpleasant content moderation was done by outsourced third-world workers making as little as $1 an hour.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy told the Post, "The real goal is to put Zuckerberg and Facebook front and center with the Washington elite … to better extinguish a growing call to regulate how his company does business.”

So FWD.us is just another case of a savvy businessman wielding political clout for his financial benefit. But how FWD.us and Zuckerberg have done this is worth considering as a model of tech industry political activism to come. FWD.us demonstrates a bizarre wedding of Silicon Valley idealism with the tepid realities of interest politics. The two worlds collided last week when news stories went viral revealing that the group had funded ads trashing Obama and praising oil drilling in the Arctic. One ad supporting South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham slammed Obamacare and the president's "wasteful stimulus spending." The liberal blogosphere was shocked: The same Mark Zuckerberg who once feted Obama in Silicon Valley and counts Corey Booker as a bff now sounded like a long lost Koch Brother.

While the ad was funded by Zuckerberg's group, it didn't represent a right-wing turn for the politically ambiguous mogul. It was a tactical strike in his immigration reform campaign. The ad was made by a subsidiary group of FWD.us called Americans For a Conservative Direction. Lindsay Graham is one of the few Republican supporters of the Senate immigration reform bill, and the ad is meant to bolster Graham's conservative bona fides so he can push the largely Democrat-backed immigration bill without seeming like a softy. If that means bad-mouthing Obama, so be it.

After the ad went viral, FWD.us tried to placate angry liberals by pointing out that the group had also created a left-leaning organization, the Council for American Job Growth, to support liberal immigration reform backers. A FWD.us spokesperson told ThinkProgress that "maintaining two separate entities… to support elected officials across the political spectrum—separately—means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audience of their constituents." This is politics, Facebook-style: pandering as personalized as your Facebook Newsfeed! It's also about as craven as Washington gets. Even the Koch brothers lacked the devious ingenuity to back two competing teams, as BuzzFeed's Ben Smith pointed out on Twitter. They only disingenuously funded the Tea Party.

The ad fracas was not even the weirdest moment in FWD.us' brief history. Days before it launched, Politico obtained an enthusiastically creepy memo FWD.us president Joe Green sent to potential supporters that sounded like a dispatch from North Korea's propaganda ministry. While the bloviating of the tech elite sounds just a bit ridiculous in blog posts by venture capitalists pumping a new mobile payment service, it takes a more sinister tone when applied to politics.

Green's memo boasted that "technology executives would use their companies to 'control the avenues of distribution' for a political message in support of their efforts," according to Politico. In case the implications of that statement were unclear, the memo also listed three reasons why the tech industry can become "one of the most powerful voices" in politics:

    1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA.

    2: Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.

    3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment.

We control massive distribution channels is something that would issue from a Facebook lackey's mouth in the most conspiracy-addled daydream of an infowars.com power-user. And yet here is Green, Mark Zuckerberg's old Harvard roommate, essentially promoting technology-enabled subliminal messaging in a confidential memo to the tech elite.

Green said in a statement that his language was "poorly chosen" and gave "a misimpression of the views and aspirations of this organization and those associated with." But he made a very similar pitch Monday in a paid promotional presentation to the assembled geeks and entrepreneurs of the TechCrunch Distrupt conference in New York City:

"This is one of those urgent policy problems that demonstrates how broken Washington D.C. is," he said, "and where we can apply our patented tech community innovation skills."

This framing is important because as tech companies become bigger political players they're likely going to adopt a similar message. Last year, the tech industry spent $132.5 million on lobbying efforts, "placing them among the top lobbying sectors in the Capitol," according to the Washington Post. Many of these companies are taking the same route as Zuckerberg, creating non-profit "stealth PACS" that allow them to wield political influence in the name of some social good without disclosing their donors.

FaceBook has become no more than a captive audience of consumers to be studied by corporate marketeers - users are no more than guinea pigs.  If FaceBook is going to use and exploit their users the least they could do is start paying them.

George W Bush's $250 Million Can of Whitewash. In America, with enough time and money you can convince people you're not evil when you lose $17 trillion dollars of the nation's money and get 20,000 soldiers and marines maimed. Bush was just following the Conservative Road-map for America. He made the rich richer and the middle-class poorer.

Another proud day for the NRA ( National Right to Murder Children Association) 5-Year-Old Get .22 Caliber Birthday Rifle, Shoots and Kills 2-Year-Old Sister

Lessons For Real Patriots From the Sufferin’ Suffragettes

Lessons For Real Patriots From the Sufferin’ Suffragettes

One hundred years ago today was the watershed 1913 women’s suffrage march in Washington, D.C. Plus, Friday is International Women’s Day. It’s therefore the perfect moment to reflect on the strategies and tactics of several generations of amazing women.

We all know that the suffragettes won in the end by securing the vote for U.S. women in 1920. But to stop with that fact is to miss the phenomenal, inspirational, often nail-biting and groundbreaking campaign that preceded their win, as well as the lessons they have for activists today.

Before telephones, before TV, before the web, these women mobilized masses of people in a widespread and colorful campaign. Their successful tactics continue to shape campaigns today, even if many organizers have no idea where those tactics originated. But no, this couldn’t possibly be because of the suffragettes’ gender and the utter lack of historical study on women’s issues until just a few decades ago… hmmm.

First of all, it was huge

Modern history often gives the impression that suffrage was given to women by men under pressure from some small group of marginalized female activists. Of course, there was a committed core organizing crew, but that account is far from what really went down.

In the late 1800s, moderate activists, such as those in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, chose to frame voting rights as a natural extension of what was then considered appropriate for women so as not to alienate potential supporters. Rather than diminishing men’s role, they argued that women needed the vote to fulfill their role as nurturers, holders of morality, keepers of culture, the heart of the household. As mothers and guardians who were considered to be more in touch with morality than men, women were positioned to call out corruption and hold the all-male politicians accountable. “Politics is housekeeping on a grand scale,” Jane Addams said at the time.

The mainstream nature of the wider movement is displayed in lines from a banner carried in the parade before the 1916 Republican National Convention: “For the safety of the Nation / To the Women Give the Vote / For the hand that Rocks the Cradle / Will Never Rock the Boat!” Do you think they really meant that, or was it just brilliant PR outreach? Either way, before SignOn.org, Twitter or Facebook, these women collected more than a million signatures in pen and ink, all through hand-to-hand contact, and displayed them as they marched down Fifth Avenue in New York with 20,000 supporters and an estimated half-million people in the crowd in 1917. That’s quite a petition-delivery!

....To push the vote in New York state in 1912, there was a 12-day, 170 mile “Hike to Albany”; the next year, the suffragist “Army of the Hudson” completed a 225-mile walk from New Jersey to Washington, D.C. These physical stunts were part of the ”new womanhood” that showcased active, fit women in the public sphere to undermine any thoughts of women’s inferiority, physically or politically. At the time, astute writers commented that this kind of public work generated millions of dollars in free publicity for the movement, as well as immense outreach opportunities.

The militant National Women’s Party took this another step further with the first-ever picket of the White House. The “Silent Sentinels” and their banners were present every day from Jan. 10, 1917, to June of 1919 — except on Sundays. More than a thousand women participated over this period. Many were arrested, were refused bail and served time in horrendous conditions of solitary confinement, where they experienced beatings and force-feeding when they went on hunger strikes. Outrage at the treatment of women activists in prison built sympathy for the suffragette cause. Also, the first arrests at the White House were eventually found illegal, which helped ensure the right to protest there to this day.

In the 19th century, political parades and pageants were common in U.S. communities — for local celebrations, temperance marches or presidential campaigns passing through town. Suffragists held parades as early as 1906, beginning in California. This practice reached its peak exactly a century ago with what The New York Times called “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.” This 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession was reported to include nine bands, four mounted brigades, three heralds, about 24 floats and more than 5,000 marchers.

The march concluded at the Department of the Treasury steps with 100 women and children staging a vision of a shining future along with Justice, Liberty, Charity, Peace and Hope personified by women in flowing classical dresses and trumpets blaring. The now-famous image from this march is of a young beautiful woman in white robes on horseback, in a not-so-closeted, militant nod to Joan of Arc. Wow.

Lawyer Inez Boissevain, wearing white cape, seated on white horse at the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade on March 3, 1913, in Washington, D.C. (Wikipedia/George Grantham Bain Collection)Their spectrum of tactics included hotter actions, too. At one point in 1919, President Wilson was burnt in effigy in front of the White House, pitting the petticoats against the bluecoats. Wildly spewing fire extinguishers were unable to prevent the burning of the four-foot-tall cardboard Wilson. (There were about 50 arrests that day.) The suffragettes used flames again when they set “watchfires” outside the New York City opera house while Wilson was speaking there. Activists transcribed his words as he spoke them and then publicly burned the paper in public fires outside — thus condemning the hypocrisy of his words about international freedom while women were denied suffrage at home. These protests kindled more support for the women, who were steadfast, innovative and organized. They left the police looking disorganized and foolish, along with anti-suffrage minions.

Many of the media stunts were timed just right — famously, President-elect Wilson arrived in Washington the day before he was to be inaugurated to empty streets, as the masses in town all were drawn to the Woman Suffrage Procession. Of course, that meant that there were many hostile observers who had come just for the next day’s inauguration — about 100 marchers landed in the hospital — but the riotous swarm and the resulting publicity led to more momentum for the campaign.

It worked on many levels

Generations of American suffragettes were brave, tenacious, dedicated and incredibly talented nonviolent warriors and leaders — from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Alice Paul. Their tactics and strategies have become such an integral part of our nation’s repertoire of civil resistance that we often take them for granted.

Not only were the events innovative, courageous and spectacular, but they were intentionally executed to get attention in the media of the day — newspaper and radio, as well as early motion pictures. Some participants in the 1917 New York march recorded one-minute speeches on early Kinetophone cylinder recordings that were then played to audiences in Vaudeville houses — an ancestor of YouTube, perhaps? Ubiquitous media coverage, whether positive or negative, succeeded in helping educate and convert the public into supporters of women’s suffrage.

This list of suffragette activities and accomplishments could go on and on. For instance, they were not afraid to lobby (which they did for decades, alongside more militant actions), and they didn’t shy from political campaigns, either. They were not only the first to picket the White House, but they were also the first to hold a funeral as both a political event and a memorial in the Capitol building — to Inez Millholland (famous for her role in leading the 1913 parade on the white horse). And, finally, they were well aware that effective activism meant making the personal political; the straw that finally broke the camel’s back and enabled the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting suffrage to America’s women, was the vote cast by a young lawmaker swayed by his mother’s note: “Hurray and vote for suffrage… don’t forget to be a good boy!”

Progress doesn't just happen because you write a blog or even have your own radio program or a propaganda channel dedicated to conservatism like Fox News and CNN. Progress can be frustratingly slow. Never give up, even if you only make a tiny step forward in a year. That is a fight won for the next American and a step further down the road to America living up to it's ideals and not down to the base malevolence of conservatism.

Why Does Glenn Beck Hate American Values and Want To Force All Cable Subscribers To Pay For His Conspiracy Theory Channel

Why Does Glenn Beck Hate American Values and Want To Force All Cable Subscribers To Pay For His Conspiracy Theory Channel

Since Glenn Beck left Fox News in 2011 and founded his own web channel, TheBlaze, the former right-wing sensation has been less prevalent in the mainstream political conversation. Still, Beck has cultivated a substantial audience for his subscription-only programming, and is now using that following to pressure cable networks into carrying his channel.

Beck started promoting GetTheBlaze.com on Monday, asking fans to demonstrate to their television provider that there is wider demand for the libertarian channel. If his channel does get picked up by cable television providers, anyone who pays for cable will subsidize Beck’s channel, regardless of whether or not they watch it. As The New York Times explains, TV channels get small per-subscriber fees, whether or not the subscribers ever watch.

Beck argues that carrying TheBlaze would be no different from supposedly ideological cable channels like MSNBC and Al Jazeera America. But since leaving Fox, Beck’s radical libertarianism has gone even further fringe. In the past few months, Beck has promoted multiple conspiracy theories via the channel he is now trying to push on cable subscribers:

    1. Cop killer Chris Dorner was supported by liberals. As Los Angeles was turned upside down in the manhunt for Chris Dorner in February, the former police officer who killed 4 people, Beck claimed “the American left” was supporting Chris Dorner. His evidence was a Facebook page with “thousands of likes.”

    2. Obama secretly tried to release the “blind sheikh” bomber. Relying on a single anonymous source “close to the Obama administration,” TheBlaze accused President Obama of plotting to secretly release a 1993 World Trade Center bomber. The conspiracy theory quickly took hold in Tea Party circles, even prompting top House Republicans to parrot the false theory.

    3. The Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated the US government. Beck hosted Rep. Michele Backmann (R-MN) to defend her widely denounced anti-Muslim witch hunt. On Beck’s show, Bachmann once again accused Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, of being a Muslim Brotherhood spy, a ludicrous charge vehemently condemned by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Scott Brown (R-MA).

    4. The Petraeus scandal was orchestrated by the White House. Like most of the right-wing blogosphere, Beck was obsessed with a purported cover-up of the Benghazi consulate attack. When CIA Director David Petraeus was caught in an affair with his biographer, Beck claimed the White House deliberately orchestrated the scandal in order to discredit the military and distract from the Benghazi attacks. In Beck’s mind, the White House was also behind last year’s Secret Service prostitution scandal, another supposed attempt to undermine trust in law enforcement.

Beck and his anti-American friends are so self obsessed they really think all cable subscribers should be forced to swallow their cancerous lunacy. If Beck has such a great product why not do the capitalistic thing and make it a premium channel that people can pay for by subscription, like HBO.

What is The Sequester

What is The Sequester

The United States is rapidly approaching March 1, the date on which the automatic spending cuts put in place by the summer 2011 debt ceiling deal will begin taking effect. There is little indication that Congress will avert the cuts as it did in January, as Republican leaders have thus far been unwilling to negotiate with President Obama and Senate Democrats.

Congress is currently on recess until next Monday, leaving just five legislative days until the automatic cuts — known as sequestration — will take effect. Here’s a breakdown of why the sequester was created and what it will mean for programs facing cuts and the nation’s overall economic recovery:

    Why the sequester was created. The sequester was a result of the GOP’s wrangling over the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, when Republican leaders — who had previously passed clean debt increases 19 times under President Bush — demanded spending cuts as the price for averting a costly default. On the brink of default, Congress passed the Budget Control Act, which enacted immediate spending cuts and created a supercommittee tasked with striking a “grand bargain” to reduce the deficit. Republicans walked away from the committee after refusing to consider tax increases on the wealthy, setting sequestration into motion. The sequester, which cuts from both domestic and defense spending, was designed to be painful enough that both sides would negotiate to avert it.

    How to avoid it. The sequester was originally supposed to take effect on January 1, but it was avoided as part of the overall “fiscal cliff” deal that maintained most of the Bush-era tax cuts and enacted spending reductions to offset the first round of automatic cuts. In the past, Republicans offered plans to offset the sequester by cutting more spending, even though deficit reduction efforts have been heavily skewed toward spending cuts to domestic programs already. Democrats have offered multiple proposals that would bring more balance to efforts to reduce the deficit. A plan from the Congressional Progressive Caucus would replace the sequester largely with new revenue, evening the balance of spending cuts and revenue increases in overall deficit reduction efforts. Senate Democrats proposed a plan that reduced the deficit by $110 billion, enough to offset the sequester until next January. Half of the reduction comes from cuts, the other half from tax increases on the wealthy. Republicans, however, have again refused to negotiate over new revenues, even from tax reform that would close corporate loopholes.

    What it will mean. Because its cuts are across-the-board, the sequester will affect most domestic programs. Jobless workers will lose access to unemployment benefits, while safety net programs for women and children and early childhood education programs will face deep cuts. The sequester will cut funding for law enforcement and border security, food safety, airline travel security, Head Start, disaster relief, and health research. Defense programs will also see reductions. These cuts will have broad ramifications for the country’s recovering economy, pushing it down the austere path Europe has followed into second recessions. Independent reports predict that sequestration would reduce economic growth by 0.6 percent over the year while also leading to the loss of 700,000 jobs. The debt limit fight that created the sequester already pummeled the recovery, and allowing these spending cuts to take effect would cause even bigger problems.

Conservatives are hoping that either most Americas are idiots or have terrible short term memories, and are trying to blame Democrats for this childishness. They voted for the sequester, End of story. Now they want a new deal that punished the working poor and middle-class.

Why Does Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) Hate American Values and Working Families

Why Does Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) Hate American Values and Working Families

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), like Republican governors all across the country, aims to implement a regressive tax plan that involves cutting income taxes for the rich while, in his case, maintaining a sales tax hike that primarily hurts the poor. The sales tax increase was supposed to be temporary when it was adopted in 2010, but Brownback now wants to make permanent.

Sales taxes disproportionately impact the poor, who are more likely to spend all or most of their income. According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Brownback’s plan will raise taxes on the poorest Kansans, but still lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue due to huge tax cuts for the rich:

    – The poorest 20 percent of Kansas taxpayers would pay 0.2 percent more of their income in taxes each year, or an average increase of $22.

    – The middle 20 percent of Kansas taxpayers would pay 0.2 percent less of their income in taxes each year, or an average cut of $104.

    – Upper-income families, by contrast, reap the greatest benefit with the richest one percent of Kansans, those with an average income of over a million dollars, saving an average of $6,528 a year.

The plan would cost the state $340 million in revenue, despite hiking taxes the poor. And Kansas already has a regressive tax system, with the poorest residents paying a rate more than twice as high as the richest 1 percent.

 Brownback and other anti-American conservatives feel that millioanires and wealthy coporations have it real tough. So they're just asking people in the bottom 70 % percent of the income range to contribute more. If people - many of whom are making around minimum wage and barely getting by, why those wealthy people and coporations might create some more jobs that do not even pay a living wage. Conservatives in several states are finally getting what they want, America as a giant plantation, the 1950s model of America. Sense they're going to give people a few dollars an hour, you can't technically call it slavery. Since they're gutting education, degrading rivers, blowing the tops off mountains and making health care even harder to get for most Kansas residents - how can they say they believe in progress and prosperity? Prosperity for who, a few wealthy plutocrats who have never done an honest day's work in their lives, because they made their wealth on the backs of labor.

Why Does The Conservative Republican Confederate Yankee Bob Owens Hate American Values

The NRA is Ignorant of American History: The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

(Patrick) Henry then bluntly laid it out:

    "If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."

Due to some possible copyright issues readers will have to finish the rest at the link.

If radical far Right conservatives and the NRA are so right about being against some modest sensible gun regulation, why do they lie so much. That says a lot about their less than American agenda, Nine Conservative Media Myths About Proposals To Strengthen Gun Laws 

You can't argue with evil, NRA Ad Calls Obama an ‘Elitist Hypocrite’ for Having the Secret Service Protect His Daughters

How the Right-Wing's Infamous ALEC Is Attacking Renewable Energy Initiatives

While The North-East Waits For Sandy Relief, Wacky Freedom Hating Republicans Reintroduce Obamacare Repeal

While The North-East Waits For Sandy Relief, Wacky Freedom Hating Republicans Reintroduce Obamacare Repeal

The 112th Congress gaveled to a close on Thursday afternoon without passing a relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy or reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, but Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) isn’t too concerned about finishing what Republicans had left undone. Instead, at 12:00 PM she introduced the very first piece of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which states are now busily implementing.

House Republicans have unsuccessfully voted 33 times in the last two years to eliminate health care reform and wasted at least 88 hours and $50 million, while failing to pass a single piece of job creation legislation in the last session of Congress.

Dozens of Republicans, including 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, ran against Obamacare, yet the party suffered losses every step along the way. The Supreme Court upheld the law, House repeal efforts went nowhere in the Democratically-controlled Senate, and President Obama has pledged to veto any effort to rescind the measure. Even newly reelected Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was compelled to admit in November that Obamacare is now the law of the land (though he later backed away from his own comments and pledged to do everything in his power to undermine it).

But House Republicans are apparently not quite ready to give up the fight. At this rate, they could be on track to becoming even less productive than the least productive Congress in U.S. history.

Michele bachmann and her husband are welfare queens who have probably defrauded the public by failing for Medicare payments for practicing dubious medicare care. They and the family have also sucked down as much in subsidies as they can. Bachmann enjoys government health care benefits along with other House Republicans who make about $179,000 a year. This is the same Michele Bachmann who hoped that the unemployment rate would remain high and said that workers who do not pay federal income tax have no vested interests in the well being of the country. Why hasn't the deeply unAmerican Bachmann and her conman husband been deported to Russia? 

Wackos start trying to use their hate filled trigger happy minds to rationalize not having sensible gun laws, ,New NRA Talking Point: Banning Assault Weapons Is Just Like Racial Discrimination

Why food-stamp bans are perpetuating risky behaviors among America’s most vulnerable

Why food-stamp bans are perpetuating risky behaviors among America’s most vulnerable

Carla walked into my office with despair in her eyes. I was surprised. Carla has been doing well in her four months out of prison; she got off drugs, regained custody of her kids, and even enrolled in a local community college.

Without much prodding she admitted to me that she had retuned to prostitution: “I am putting myself at risk for HIV to get my kids a f---ing happy meal.”

Despite looking high and low for a job, Carla explained, she was still unemployed. Most entry-level jobs felt out of reach with her drug record, but what’s worse, even the state wasn’t willing to throw her a temporary life preserver.

You see, Carla is from one of the 32 states in the country that ban anyone convicted of a drug felony from collecting food stamps. With the release of the Global Burden of Disease Study last week, it bears looking at how we are perpetuating burdens among the most vulnerable Americans with our outdated laws.

If she’d committed rape or murder, Carla could have gotten assistance to feed herself and her children, but because the crime she committed was a drug felony, Carla joined the hundreds of thousands of drug felons who are not eligible. ......Women with children are especially affected. It’s estimated that 70,000 women and their children are banned from obtaining food stamps. This means mothers who are simply trying to feed themselves and their children, and who are trying to get back on their feet after serving their time, are banned from receiving the money to pay for the basics necessary to survive.  Meanwhile, 46 million others, including college graduates and PhDs with far more resources, can receive food aid.

 This is a cultural legacy of America's Puritanical and hypocritical history. White men can get away with stealing millions, beating their wives and still have a relatively comfortable life.

Few of our fellow Americans are scholars, but basic reading comprehension is not too much to ask, Radical Anti-America "news casters" at Fox New - Self-Congratulation Over Benghazi Report Undermined By Report Itself. Conservatives are so desperate and deeply immoral they have to make up scandals when there are none.
The Craziest UnAmerican Republican Legislative Proposals Of 2012. I don't know why Republicans hate America and freedom. They're certainly free to leave if they hate living in a democratic republic so much.

Why Do Republicans Hate America. They're Proponents of Economic Austerity, a Proven Failure as a Means of Economic Recovery

Why Do Republicans Hate America. They're Proponents of Economic Austerity, a Proven Failure as a Means of Economic Recovery

With all the theatrics going on in Washington, you might well have missed the most important political and economic news of the week: an official confirmation from the United Kingdom that austerity policies don’t work.

In making his annual Autumn Statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was forced to admit that his government has failed to meet a series of targets it set for itself back in June of 2010, when it slashed the budgets of various government departments by up to thirty per cent. Back then, Osborne said that his austerity policies would cut his country’s budget deficit to zero within four years, enable Britain to begin relieving itself of its public debt, and generate healthy economic growth. None of these things have happened. Britain’s deficit remains stubbornly high, its people have been suffering through a double-dip recession, and many observers now expect the country to lose its “AAA” credit rating.

One of the frustrations of economics is that it is hard to carry out scientific experiments and prove things beyond reasonable doubt. But not in this case. Thanks to Osborne’s stubborn refusal to change course—“Turning back would be a disaster,” he told Parliament—what has been happening in Britain amounts to a “natural experiment” to test the efficacy of austerity economics. For the sixty-odd million inhabitants of the U.K., living through it hasn’t been a pleasant experience—no university institutional-review board would have allowed this kind of brutal human experimentation. But from a historical and scientific perspective, it is an invaluable case study.

At every stage of the experiment, critics (myself included) have warned that Osborne’s austerity policies would prove self-defeating. Any decent economics textbook will tell you that, other things being equal, cutting government spending causes the economy’s overall output to fall, tax revenues to decrease, and spending on benefits to increase. Almost invariably, the end result is slower growth (or a recession) and high budget deficits. Osborne, relying on arguments about restoring the confidence of investors and businessmen that his forebears at the U.K. Treasury used during the early nineteen-thirties against Keynes, insisted (and continues to insist) otherwise, but he has been proven wrong.

With Republicans in Congress still intent on pursuing a strategy similar to the failed one adopted by the Brits, this is a story that needs trumpeting. Austerity policies are self-defeating: they cripple growth and reduce tax revenues. The only way to bring down the U.S. government’s deficit in a sustainable manner, and put the nation’s finances on a firmer footing, is to keep the economy growing. Spending cuts and tax increases can also play a role, but they need to be introduced gradually.

Before the last election there, which took place in May, 2010, the U.K.’s economy appeared to be slowly recovering from the deep slump of 2008-09 that followed the housing bust and global financial crisis. Just like the Bush Administration (2008) and the Obama Administration (2009), Gordon Brown’s Labour government had introduced a fiscal stimulus to help turn the economy around. G.D.P. was growing at an annual rate of about 2.5 per cent. Once Osborne’s cuts in spending started to be felt, however, things changed dramatically. In the fourth quarter of 2010, growth turned negative and a double-dip recession began. So far, it has lasted two years. While G.D.P. did expand in the third quarter of this year, the Office of Budget Responsibility, an independent economic agency that Osborne set up, has said that it expects another decline in the current quarter. For 2013, the O.B.R. is forecasting G.D.P. growth of just 1.3 per cent. With the economy so weak, the O.B.R. says that the unemployment rate will tick up from eight per cent to 8.2 per cent next year.

That austerity has led to recession is undeniable. Despite the Bank of England slashing interest rates and adopting a policy of quantitative easing, consumer and investment spending have remained depressed. Osborne places much of the blame on continental Europe, Britain’s biggest trading partner, but that’s a lame excuse. It was perfectly clear back in 2010 that Europe was headed for trouble. The proper reaction to a negative external shock is to loosen fiscal policy, not tighten it, much less tighten it violently. But Osborne was determined to go ahead with his grisly exercise in pre-Keynesian economics.

If all the pain he has inflicted had transformed Britain’s fiscal position, his policies could perhaps be defended. But that hasn’t happened. Back in 2009, the O.B.R. predicted that by the end of 2013-2014, the deficit would have fallen to 3.5 per cent of G.D.P. Now, the O.B.R. says that the actual figure will be 6.1 per cent. And since most of its forecasts have proved too optimistic, this might well be another underestimate. Even by Osborne’s preferred measure, which adjusts the headline figure for the state of the economy and doesn’t count capital spending, the deficit won’t be eliminated before 2016-17 at the earliest. The debt-to-G.D.P. ratio, which Osborne originally said would peak at about seventy per cent, has now hit seventy-five per cent, and it is forecast to come close to eighty per cent in 2015-2016. It was supposed to start falling next year. Now, it is set to keep climbing until at least 2017-2018.

A comparison with what has happened on this side of the Atlantic is illuminating. For the purposes of the natural experiment, the U.S. can be thought of as the control. In adopting a fiscal stimulus of gradually declining magnitude over the past four years, the Obama Administration has administered what was, until recently, the standard medicine for a sick economy.

As one would have expected on the basis of the textbooks, the American economy, while hardly racing ahead, has fared considerably better than its British counterpart. Between 2010 and 2012, G.D.P. growth here has averaged about 2.1 per cent. For the U.K., the figure is 0.9 per cent. What may be more surprising—at least to those of you who have been listening to the deficit hawks—is that the United States, while sticking with Keynesian stimulus policies, has also managed to bring down the size of its deficit, relative to G.D.P., almost as rapidly as hairshirt Britain has. Back in 2009, at the depths of the recession, both countries had double-digit deficits. Today, the U.S. deficit stands at about seven per cent of G.D.P., and the British deficit is about five per cent of G.D.P. But with the U.S. growing faster than the U.K,. the gap is set to close. Next year, according to the latest forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office and the O.B.R., the U.S. deficit will be considerably smaller than the U.K. deficit: four per cent of G.D.P. compared to six per cent.

Let’s go over that one more time. Having adopted the policies of Keynes in response to a calamitous recession, the United States has grown more than twice as fast during the past three years as Britain, which adopted the economics of Hoover (and Paul Ryan). Meanwhile, the gaping hole in the two countries’ budgets has declined at roughly the same rate, and next year the U.S. will be in better fiscal shape than its old ally.

This is just so much noise to the cult of conservatism. They're like modern witch doctors, they believe that dancing about howling at the moon is the solution, not rationalism and proven economic policies of the past. It doesn't phase them in the least that they cannot point to any major example of austerity causing a rapid economic recovery.

Conservatives have values? They must be joking. Christian right leader lauds homophobic Ugandan dictator. As the Ugandan Parliament revives its "Kill the Gays" bill, Republican nutbar Tony Perkins offers his support for Yoweri Museveni

Elitist Conservative Corporate Plutocrats talk about shared sacrifice, but the only thing they want to share is your retirement money with their wealthy friends

Elitist Conservative Corporate Plutocrats talk about shared sacrifice, but the only thing they want to share is your retirement money with their wealthy friends

The Obscenely Rich Men Bent on Shredding the Safety Net

New York magazine calls it [3] a “Mass Movement for Millionaires.” The New York Times' Paul Krugman sums up the idea [4]: “Hey, sacrifice is for the little people.”

The Campaign to Fix the Debt [5] is a huge, and growing, coalition of powerful CEOs, politicians and policy makers on a mission to lower taxes for the rich and to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under the cover of concern about the national debt. The group was spawned in July 2012 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, architects of a misguided deficit reduction scheme in Washington back in 2010. By now, the "fixers" have collected a war chest of $43 million. Private equity billionaire Peter G. Peterson, longtime enemy of the social safety net, is a major supporter.

This new Wall Street movement, which includes Republicans and plenty of Democrats, is hitting the airwaves, hosting roundtables, gathering at lavish fundraising fêtes, hiring public relations experts, and traveling around the country to push its agenda. The group aims to seize the moment of the so-called "fiscal cliff" debate to pressure President Obama to concede to House Republicans and continue the Bush income tax cuts for the rich while shredding the social safety net. The group includes Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Honeywell’s David Cote, Aetna’s Mark Bertolini, Delta Airlines’ Richard Anderson, Boeing’s W. James McNerney, and over 100 other influential business honchos and their supporters.

Corporations represented by the fixers have collected massive bailouts from taxpayers and gigantic subsidies from the government, and they enjoy tax loopholes that in many cases bring their tax bills down to zero. Sometimes their creative accountants even manage to get money back from Uncle Sam. For instance, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, Boeing has paid a negative 6.5 percent tax rate for the last decade, even though it was profitable every year from 2002 through 2011.

These CEOs talk about shared sacrifice, but it seems that they don’t intend to share anything but your retirement money with their wealthy friends. As New York mag reports:

    “Most on-the-record comments are a mishmash of platitudes about shared sacrifice and working together for the good of the country. But interviews with a number of organizers and CEO council members point to a massive networking effort among one-percenters — one that relies on strategically exploiting existing business relationships and appealing to patriotic and economic instincts."

As the Fix the Debt gang moves around the country spreading their message, they are starting to attract public protests. On November 27, they were greeted in North Carolina with a rally [6] from NC Progress, which called for an end to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent and told the group to keep its hands off the middle-class wallet. The fixers are often vague about their mission, and they tend to speak in coded language that conceals their actual goals. Let’s have some blunt talk about what the fixers want to do and why they want to do it – talk you're unlikely to hear in mainstream media supported by corporate advertising.

1. “Fix” means cut: When they say “fix” Social Security, they mean cut Social Security. Fixers want to convince the public that a well-managed, hugely popular program that does not add to the deficit (it’s self-funded) is somehow in crisis and requires intervention in the form of various cutting schemes. They seek this because many of the rich do not want to pay taxes for Social Security, and financiers want very much to move toward privitization of retirement accounts so they can collect fees on such accounts.

2. “Reform” means rob. When the say “reform” the tax code, they mean “make taxes even lower for the rich.” The wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes in the United States, which is a major reason there is a large deficit in the first place. When the very wealthy pay lower tax rates than ordinary working people, the result is an increasing redistribution of income upward that puts the U.S. in the top 30 percent in income inequality out of 140 nations, according to the Central Intelligence Agency [7]. We’re a shameful #42. Income inequality is not only unfair, it’s dangerous and makes society unstable.

3.“Bipartisan” means all of the rich. Fix the Debt is a pro-business ideological movement pretending to be a bipartisan group of concerned citizens. But the group is really just a coalition for the greedy, unpatriotic rich. There are plenty of financiers and other 1 percenters in the Democratic Party, and some of them have decided to join forces with their GOP counterparts to work toward a goal that means a great deal to all of them: Making the rich even richer.

4. “Concern” means covet. There was a time, a couple of generations ago, when business leaders would not dare to go public with their desire to increase income inequality and stick it to hard-working Americans. When Owen D. Young, CEO of General Electric in the '20s and '40s, spoke to an audience at Harvard Business School in 1927, he emphasized that the purpose of a corporation was to provide a good life not only to owners, but also to employees. Corporations, he said, were meant to serve the larger goals of the nation:

    “Here in America, we have raised the standard of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that, full equality of economic opportunity? No man is wholly free unless he is both politically and economically free.”

Fast forward to 2012: Jeffrey Immelt, the current CEO of GE, is a member of the Fix the Debt Campaign, which is designed to lower the expectations of hard-working Americans. Goldman Sachs honcho Lloyd Blankfein explained this recently in a CBS interview:

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

5. “Fiscal conservative” means economically confused. Longtime Wall Street executive Steve Rattner, one of Obama’s auto bailout czars, has been using his influence to attract tycoons from the financial industry to the Fix the Debt movement. Over the last year, Rattner has been on a crusade to convince Americans that they should put aside their worries about real crises like unemployment to focus on the deficit. Rattner, like many of his cohorts, poses as a moderate whose thinking is needed to counter the advice of respected economists like Nobel Prize-winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who have long been warning that defict hysteria is not only counterproductive, but based on a lack of understanding of how the economy actually works.

Political economist Thomas Ferguson, who teaches at UMass Boston and is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, described the dubious policies the fixers defend:

    “Talk about the audacity of hope! The people who brought you the Great Recession by pushing deregulation and financial leverage to insane dimensions are back. Now they propose to ‘fix the debt’ by throwing average Americans who generously bailed them out in 2008-09 over the fiscal cliff.

    One trusts that even in our money-driven political system, their transparently self-interested nonsense will be firmly rejected. There is no reason why anyone needs to do anything at all about Social Security for a long time; as even Peter Orszag admits in the fine print. It just isn't a driver of the deficit.

    The U.S. does need to reduce its spending on defense and it certainly needs to aggressively contain medical costs. But you do both of those the old fashioned way. In the case of defense, you stop plunging into wars and attend carefully to what actually is needed to defend America. In the case of medical spending, you end ‘fee for service’ schemes that reward endless tests and procedures and you vigorously pursue anti-trust and regulatory remedies. You don't simply cut Americans off from health care. It's ridiculous that we have ‘single payer’ for ailing banks, but not citizens. If you are worried about the deficit, just let tax rates rise back to the levels of the Clinton era, when growth ran far ahead of today's economy, and tax dividends, carried interest, and capital gains at the rates working Americans pay. And don't, absolutely don't, let American companies escape taxation by stashing their money abroad.”

6. "Strip-mining is not leadership." Fixers present themselves as magnanimous, responsible leaders doing what they believe is best for the country. But that’s a tough sell when you’re advocating policies that mainly benefit…yourself.

The way evil works is to shroud itself in nice sounding platitudes. In this case evil uses fine sounding words about God, country and patriotism. Never mind that what these sleazy plutocrats are selling are the opposite of what Jesus preached, has brought the country the worse recession since 1929 and is more about unhinged nationalism and moral corruption than patriotism.  

Hear That Giant Mumbling Sound, That is The Sound of The Republican Budget For 2013

Hear That Giant Mumbling Sound, That is The Sound of The Republican Budget For 2013 or why do conservatives keep hating America and loving tax cuts for lazy plutocrats

In the ongoing battle of the budget, President Obama has done something very cruel. Declaring that this time he won’t negotiate with himself, he has refused to lay out a proposal reflecting what he thinks Republicans want. Instead, he has demanded that Republicans themselves say, explicitly, what they want. And guess what: They can’t or won’t do it.

No, really. While there has been a lot of bluster from the G.O.P. about how we should reduce the deficit with spending cuts, not tax increases, no leading figures on the Republican side have been able or willing to specify what, exactly, they want to cut.
And there’s a reason for this reticence. The fact is that Republican posturing on the deficit has always been a con game, a play on the innumeracy of voters and reporters. Now Mr. Obama has demanded that the G.O.P. put up or shut up — and the response is an aggrieved mumble.

Here’s where we are right now: As his opening bid in negotiations, Mr. Obama has proposed raising about $1.6 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade, with the majority coming from letting the high-end Bush tax cuts expire and the rest from measures to limit tax deductions. He would also cut spending by about $400 billion, through such measures as giving Medicare the ability to bargain for lower drug prices.

The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.

Republicans have howled in outrage. Senator Orrin Hatch, delivering the G.O.P. reply to the president’s weekly address, denounced the offer as a case of “bait and switch,” bearing no relationship to what Mr. Obama ran on in the election. In fact, however, the offer is more or less the same as Mr. Obama’s original 2013 budget proposal and also closely tracks his campaign literature.

So what are Republicans offering as an alternative? They say they want to rely mainly on spending cuts instead. Which spending cuts? Ah, that’s a mystery. In fact, until late last week, as far as I can tell, no leading Republican had been willing to say anything specific at all about how spending should be cut.

The veil lifted a bit when Senator Mitch McConnell, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, finally mentioned a few things — raising the Medicare eligibility age, increasing Medicare premiums for high-income beneficiaries and changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security. But it’s not clear whether these represent an official negotiating position — and in any case, the arithmetic just doesn’t work.

Start with raising the Medicare age. This is, as I’ve argued in the past, a terrible policy idea. But even aside from that, it’s just not a big money saver, largely because 65- and 66-year-olds have much lower health costs than the average Medicare recipient. When the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the likely fiscal effects of a rise in the eligibility age, it found that it would save only $113 billion over the next decade and have little effect on the longer-run trajectory of Medicare costs.

Increasing premiums for the affluent would yield even less; a 2010 study by the budget office put the 10-year savings at only about $20 billion.

Changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security would save a bit more — by my estimate, about $185 billion over the next decade. But put it all together, and the things Mr. McConnell was talking about would amount to only a bit over $300 billion in budget savings — a fifth of what Mr. Obama proposes in revenue gains.
The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.

And there never was. Republicans claim to be for much smaller government, but as a political matter they have always attacked government spending in the abstract, never coming clean with voters about the reality that big cuts in government spending can happen only if we sharply curtail very popular programs. In fact, less than a month ago the Romney/Ryan campaign was attacking Mr. Obama for, yes, cutting Medicare.

Now Republicans find themselves boxed in. With taxes scheduled to rise on Jan. 1 in the absence of an agreement, they can’t play their usual game of just saying no to tax increases and pretending that they have a deficit reduction plan. And the president, by refusing to help them out by proposing G.O.P.-friendly spending cuts, has deprived them of political cover. If Republicans really want to slash popular programs, they will have to propose those cuts themselves.

So while the fiscal cliff — still a bad name for the looming austerity bomb, but I guess we’re stuck with it — is a bad thing from an economic point of view, it has had at least one salutary political effect. For it has finally laid bare the con that has always been at the core of the G.O.P.’s political strategy.

Republicans want to cut Medicare and Social Security, the two big safety net programs, but they can only hint at their desire to see grandma and grandpa living under a bridge because the American public might catch on that these really are dangerous right-wing ideologues that hate everyone, but their corporate cronies.

What liberal media? CBS Analyst Frank Luntz Praised Conservative Anti-American Radical Paul Ryan(R-WI) While His Firm Received Money From His Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Macy’s CEO to American People: Drop Dead

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

Corporate Welfare Queens Walmart Owners Look to Slash Federal Tax Payments

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