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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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.

If We Cut Corporate Taxes Does Is That Good For the State and Jobs? NO! How States Lose $600 Million On A Worthless Corporate Tax Break

If We Cut Corporate Taxes Does Is That Good For the State and Jobs? NO! How States Lose $600 Million On A Worthless Corporate Tax Break

There’s no shortage of corporate tax giveaways at both the federal and state levels. Lawmakers of all stripes love to use the tax code to subsidize companies, either directly or indirectly.

But in some instances, federal tax breaks for corporations undermine state budgets. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities detailed today, one particular tax break will cost states $600 million next year:

    The federal government created this tax break, known as the “domestic production deduction,” in 2004. Since most states base their own tax codes on the federal tax code, the tax break was carried over into many states without specific legislative scrutiny or a vote. Now it is costing not only the federal government but also 25 states a large amount of money. By 2014, it will cost these states over $600 million per year.

    The deduction — enacted as Section 199 of the federal Internal Revenue Code — allows companies to claim a tax deduction based on profits from “qualified production activities,” a sweeping category that goes well beyond manufacturing to include such diverse activities as food production, filmmaking, and utilities — a substantial share of states’ corporate income tax base.

These deductions are largely worthless, and many states have tossed them overboard. But 25 states still leave it intact:

As CBPP noted, “Firms can claim the domestic production deduction for profits from all qualifying domestic activities — meaning activities that occur anywhere within the United States. As a result, a multi-state firm can claim the deduction in a conforming state for production activities in any state, not just the state where the firm is filing.” They also benefit large firms at the expense of small.

State efforts to encourage corporate growth and job creation through the tax code usually encourage a race to the bottom, as corporations play states off each other in order to secure the most preferential treatment, and then feel no hesitation about up and leaving later. Of course, paying corporations to create jobs is only one of the bone-headed ways states try to generate economic activity.

Another conservative myth bites the dust, again. 

Gov. Nikki Haley Appoints Radical Anti-American Proto-Fascist Tim Scott, to Replace Wacko Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)

Gov. Nikki Haley Appoints Radical Anti-American Proto-Fascist Tim Scott, to Replace Wacko Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)

Tim Scott is America’s newest senator today after getting tapped by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) to fill the vacancy left by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). DeMint announced this month that he was leaving the Senate to head up the Heritage Foundation, an arch-conservative think tank in Washington DC.

Though DeMint left big, controversial shoes to fill for Republicans, few conservatives will be disappointed with Scott’s record. Elected to Congress just two years ago in the Tea Party wave, Scott has already garnered headlines for his plan to impeach President Obama, his legislation to cut off union members’ children from food stamps, and his defense of Big Oil.

Here’s a quick look at Scott’s record:

    Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott told a South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”
   
    Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.
   
    Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was nonplussed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”
   
    Defended fairness of giving billions in subsidies to Big Oil. Scott and his Republican allies in Congress voted repeatedly last year to protect more than $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil corporations. When ThinkProgress asked Scott whether it was fair to do that, especially at a time when oil companies are earning tens of billions in profit every quarter, the Tea Party freshman defended the industry: “fair is a relative word,” said Scott.
   
    Helped slash South Carolina’s HIV/AIDS budget. As a state representative, Scott backed a proposal to cut the state’s entire HIV/AIDS budget, despite the fact that South Carolina ranks in the top-third of reported AIDS cases. The cuts were ultimately included in the state’s budget, impacting more than 2,000 HIV-positive South Carolinians who needed help paying for their medication.

 So Scott is against every ideal America stands for: Scott is part of the conservative Taliban and is against separation of church and state, like the European fascists of the 1930s Scott is a social-Darwinist, he likes the ten commandments but hates the teachings of Jesus and the virtue of charity preached by Founders like Benjamin Franklin, Scott hates people simply because they are ill and is happy to withhold medical care. Yep, he is just a Jim Demint clone, an America hating zealot.

5 Lies The Gun Lobby Tells You

MYTH #2: The Second Amendment prohibits strict gun control.  While the Supreme Court ruled in  D.C. v. Heller  that bans on handgun ownership were unconstitutional, the ruling gives the state and federal governments a great deal of latitude to regulate that gun ownership as they choose. As the U.S. Second Court of Appeals  put it in a recent ruling  upholding a New York regulation, “The state’s ability to regulate firearms and, for that matter, conduct, is qualitatively different in public than in the home. Heller reinforces this view. In striking D.C.’s handgun ban, the Court stressed that banning usable handguns in the home is a ‘policy choice‘ that is ‘off the table,’ but that a variety of other regulatory options remain available, including categorical bans on firearm possession in certain public locations.”

 Amazingly people can support the 2nd amendment and some reasonable gun control at the same time.

America Hating Conservative Pundit Matt Drudge And Fox News Push False Attack Against Disaster Relief Bill In Wake Of Hurricane Sandy

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the country.

A vast democratized “new economy” is slowly emerging throughout the United States. The general public, however, knows almost nothing about it because the American press simply does not cover the developing institutions and strategies.

For instance, a sample assessment of coverage between January and November of 2012 by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States , the Wall Street Journal, found ten times more references to caviar than to employee-owned firms, a growing sector of the economy that involves more than $800 billion in assets and 10 million employee-owners — around three million more individuals than are members of unions in the private sector.

Worker ownership — the most common form of which involves ESOPs, or Employee Stock Ownership Plans — was mentioned in a mere five articles. By contrast, over 60 articles referred to equestrian activities like horse racing, and golf clubs appeared in 132 pieces over the same period.

Although 2012 was designated by the United Nations as the International Year of the Cooperative — an institution that now has more than one billion members worldwide — the Journal‘s coverage was similarly thin. More than 120 million Americans are members of co-operatives and cooperative credit unions, 30 million more people than are owners of mutual funds. The Journal, however, devoted some 700 articles to mutual funds between January and October and only 183 to cooperatives. Of these the majority were concerned with high-end New York real estate, with headlines like “Pricey Co-ops Find Buyers.”

The vast number of cooperative businesses on Main Streets across the country were discussed in just 70 articles and a mere 14 gave co-op businesses more than passing mention. Together, the articles only narrowly outnumbered the 13 Journal pieces that mentioned the Dom Pérignon brand of champagne over the same time frame, and were eclipsed by the 40 Journal entries that refer to the French delicacy foie gras.

Another democratized economic institution is the not-for-profit Community Development Corporation (CDC), roughly 4,500 of which operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Such neighborhood corporations create tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space a year. The Journal ran no articles mentioning CDCs in 2012 and only 43 over the past 28 years — less than two a year. Meanwhile, the word château appeared in 30 times as many articles, and luxury apartments received 300 times as much coverage over the same period.

Not surprisingly, the growing “new economy movement” championing democratization of the economy has itself received even less coverage, despite growing citizen involvement on many levels. Over the past year, major national, state and other conferences focusing on worker-owned companies, cooperatives, public banking, nonprofit and public land trusts, and neighborhood corporations were oversubscribed, reflecting the growing interest in these forms. The Journal, however, gave scant coverage to the movement.

Thousands of other creative projects — from green businesses to new forms of combined community-worker efforts — are also underway across the country but receive little coverage. A number are self-consciously understood as attempts to develop working prototypes in state and local “laboratories of democracy” that may be applied at regional and national scale when the right political moment occurs. In Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, a complex of sophisticated worker-owned firms has been developing in desperately poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The model is partially structured along lines of the Mondragón Corporation, a vibrant network of worker-owned cooperatives in northern Spain with more than 80,000 members and billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Since 2010 legislation to set up public banks along the lines of the long-established Bank of North Dakota has been proposed in 20 states. Several cities — including Los Angeles and Kansas City — have passed “responsible banking” ordinances that require banks to reveal their impact on the community and/or require city officials to do business only with banks that are responsive to community needs. But municipally led responsible banking initiatives appear to have received no attention in the Journal, whereas the newspaper published seven articles this year discussing President Obama’s birth certificate.

The limited nature of the coverage can also be seen in particular cases. Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a highly successful consumer co-op with $1.8 billion in sales for 2011, allowing it to share $165 million of its profits with its 4.7 million active members and 11,000 employees. Organic Valley, a Wisconsin-based cooperative dairy, generated more than $700 million in revenue for nearly 1,700 farmer-owners. From January through October 2012, the Journal referred (briefly) to REI in just three articles; Organic Valley rated just one mention. In combination, REI and Organic Valley appear in the Journal only as often as the Cavalier King Charles spaniel, a breed of dog that turned up in four entries in the Journal‘s pages this year.

Further perspective on the coverage is offered in the way in which “hot topics” are presented, and others of greater economic significance played down. Co-ops in the U.S. generate over $500 billion in annual revenues. The global market for smartphones is estimated by Bloomberg Industries at $219 billion — less than half as large. Furthermore, there are 20 million more co-op members than smartphone users in the United States. The Journal, however, published over 1,000 print articles that included the terms “smartphone” or “smartphones” from January through October this year — more than five articles for each piece mentioning co-ops (many of which, as noted, were about upscale Manhattan apartments.)

The print coverage of the Journal was analyzed by the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland through the online database ProQuest. Although the assessment focused on the Journal, the nation’s preeminent source of news for economic and business affairs, a preliminary review suggests that other national media outlets devote a similarly miniscule proportion of space to the exploding “new economy” sector. This highlights the need for greater media exposure regarding important developments toward a more democratic, sustainable and community-based economy.

By Gar Alperovitz and Keane Bhatt.

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative.

The reason the Wall Street Journal or any other major media outlet does not cover co-operative type businesses is because they do not want the average American workers to get any crazy ideas about empowerment. About having more control over their lives. They also do not want the people to start pondering the idea that employee owned businesses generally make better products and provide better services because some bean counting elite CEO is not the one deciding what is good or bad.