Ted Nugent, Spokesperson For Racism, Hate & The NRA

Ted Nugent, Spokesperson For Racism, Hate & The NRA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Proof That Sean Hannity Should Be Deported For Being a Shameless UnAmerican Hypocrite

Sean Hannity is warning that data mining and surveillance are "very clear violation[s] of the Fourth Amendment," a drastic change for the Fox News host, who was a loud defender of National Security Agency surveillance during the Bush administration. Media Matters offers a look at Hannity on NSA surveillance, then and now.

Patriotic Americans should demand that this Orwellian puppet of Roger Ailes and Proto-fascist Rupert Murdoch be stripped of his citizenship ( has anyone seen Hannity's birth certificate) and deported from the country. Sean would love living in his ideological homeland, China.

Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Most of the conversation around the Affordable Care Act’s Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) provision has centered on the requirement that insurers issue consumer rebates when they fall short of spending a certain portion of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses.  This makes sense as rebates are one of the more tangible ways consumers have benefited from the law so far, and it likely contributes to the MLR provision being among the more popular aspects of the health reform law.

However, as we’ve written before, rebates represent only a portion, albeit the most concrete portion, of the MLR rule’s savings to consumers.  The primary role of an MLR threshold is to encourage insurers to spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses (80 percent in the individual and small group market and 85 percent in the large group market).  The MLR rebate requirement operates as a backstop if insurers do not set premiums at a level where they would be paying out the minimally acceptable share of premiums back as benefits.  Only if those thresholds are not met are insurers required to provide rebates to consumers or businesses. (You can read more about the MLR rule here).

Consumers and businesses, therefore, can realize savings in two ways as a result of the MLR requirement: by paying lower premiums than they would have been charged otherwise (as a result of lower administrative costs and profits), or by receiving rebates after the fact. So while insurers paid out considerable amounts for rebates – last year’s rebates totaled $1.1 billion – this is not the whole story for consumers.

Of course, it is hard to know with certainty what premiums would have been if the MLR rules were not in place: we cannot know for sure how insurers would have priced their products or what rates regulators would have allowed (to the extent that they reviewed rates prior to the ACA). It is also difficult to separate out the direct effects of the MLR provision from other aspects of the health reform law, particularly rate review, which works to moderate unreasonable premium increases and thus increase loss ratios.  There are also data limitations. For example, prior to new reporting requirements put in place to enforce the MLR provision, there were not good data sources that break out premiums and claims on a consistent basis for major medical coverage by all types of carriers. In the initial years this data became available (2010 and 2011), there were some issues with the quality of the data, particularly regarding expenses for quality improvement and other new categories of administrative expenses that are reported on the exhibit.

Within these limitations, we constructed an analysis that looks at the basic proportion of premiums that health plans paid out as claims for medical care over the three years since the ACA was passed, both before and after the MLR requirement went into effect for coverage in 2011.  These proportions do not include adjustments for quality improvement expenses, taxes or other factors that are used when determining whether or not rebates need to be paid; they simply represent the total payments for medical care as a proportion of premiums.  This is the traditional way medical loss ratios have been calculated.  Generally, if the proportion is rising, that means insurers are paying out more of each dollar they receive on enrollee health care, which in most cases would mean that enrollees are getting better value for the premiums they pay. We then quantify what the change in the traditional MLR means to enrollees by estimating how much they would have paid in premium if the observed MLR for 2010 (before the MLR requirement went into effect) were held constant for 2011 and 2012.1 This approach addresses the following question: If insurers had targeted the same claims to premium ratio for 2011 and 2012 as they achieved in 2010, would premiums have been higher or lower, and by how much?  In other words, it addresses how much consumers may have saved in lower premiums as a result of the MLR threshold in addition to receiving rebates.

Our analysis uses insurer data filed to state regulators and compiled by Mark Farrah Associates. These data (filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit) suggest that the main beneficiaries of the MLR rule’s upfront premium savings are people who purchase insurance on their own.  The majority of plans sold to small and large businesses were already in compliance with their respective MLR thresholds before the law went into effect, and our analysis shows that traditional MLRs (claims divided by premiums) for group plans have stayed relatively flat over the past three years.  In the individual market, by contrast, fewer than half of plans were in compliance with the ACA’s MLR thresholds in 2010, and the average traditional MLRs in this market have been steadily increasing since the requirement went into effect. This means that individual market insurers are devoting a greater portion of premium dollars to health care claims and less to administrative costs and profits compared to before the ACA’s MLR rule went into effect.

This pattern is consistent with the idea that some insurers needed to improve their MLRs to comply with the new rebate requirements.  We know that the individual market MLR requirements in the ACA are higher than those that were in effect in many states, and there have been numerous reports that insurers worked to reduce their commissions and other administrative expenses to become more efficient.

So how might these changes have affected premiums?  As noted above, one way to address this question is to compute what these consumers would have paid in premiums in 2011 and 2012 had traditional individual market MLRs stayed at 2010 levels (the year before the provision went into effect). Looked at this way, premiums would have been $856 million higher in 2011, and premiums would have been $1.9 billion higher in 2012.

Adding to the premium savings the amount individual market consumers received in rebates yields a total savings of $1.2 billion for 2011. This year, individual market insurers are expecting to issue $241 million in rebates (based on our analysis of early estimates from insurers filed with state insurance departments), bringing the total estimated savings for 2012 to $2.1 billion.

There are some potential limitations to this approach. While the pattern of increasing MLRs over the three years makes sense given the incentives under the ACA and reports of insurer behavior, we do not have comparable data from earlier years to tell us whether or not the 2010 MLR was typical for the pre-ACA period (though the available evidence suggests that it was).2 Also, MLRs in 2011 and 2012 might be overstated because insurers simply underestimated how much health care expenses would rise following the recession, though increasing MLRs still means that consumers have been getting better value for their premium dollars. Finally, rebate amounts for 2012 are based on preliminary estimates filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit to state insurance departments, and actual rebate amounts will be based on insurer filings with the Department of Health and Human Services, which were due June 1.

If insurers’ preliminary estimates hold true, this year’s rebates (at a total of $571 million across all markets) are expected to be about half the amount of last year’s $1.1 billion in insurer rebates. Smaller rebates, however, are not an indication that consumers are now saving less money as a result of the MLR provision, but rather that insurers are coming closer to meeting the ACA’s MLR requirements and that this provision is having its intended effect of consumers getting more value for the money they spend on premiums. In fact, in the individual market, the $241 million consumers are expected to receive in rebates for 2012 represents roughly one tenth of our estimate of the overall savings from the provision in that year. Perhaps ironically, when the MLR provision is working as intended and insurers set premiums to meet the thresholds, consumers save money but are less likely to get a check in the mail as tangible demonstration of those savings.

A bit wonky, insurance lingo combined with statistics, but it clearly shows that ordinary working Americans are already saving money and getting better insurance for their dollar because of the ACA (Affordable care Act) or Obamacare. Perhaps 11% of self insured will probably see their premiums go up a little. Though those people will also be entitled to rebates and tax credits to offset the expense. Of course conservative lie about "rate shock". Conservatives cannot have an honest debate because they lack the common decency required to have such a debate.

Conservative Republicans Are Out To Shaft Women With Working Families Flexibility Act

Conservative Republicans Are Out To Shaft Women With Working Families Flexibility Act

House Republicans are launching their first concerted effort to win back female voters on Tuesday with the Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013, a bill that’s being packaged as a lifeline to working moms across the country.

Unfortunately, the legislation is a particularly cruel hoax—a slick attempt to give employers more power, and hourly workers much less.

At first blush, the idea sounds good. The bill would allow hourly workers to convert overtime pay into time off: in other words, instead of getting paid for extra hours, they could stockpile additional vacation time. The pitch here is that working parents could have more flexibility in their schedule and an enhanced ability to balance work and family. “This week, we’ll pass [Representative] Martha Roby’s bill to help working moms and dads better balance their lives between work and their responsibilities as parents,” House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday.

The GOP is specifically invested in convincing women this bill is for them. The GOP spent $20,000 last week on a digital ad campaign focusing on so-called “mommy blogs,” like Ikeafans.com and MarthaStewart.com, and geo-targeting Democrats in swing districts. “Will Rep. Collin Peterson stand up for working moms?” one iteration of the ad asked.

A fawning National Review profile of Roby, the bill’s sponsor, explains how she wasn’t sure she could handle a run for Congress in 2009 because of concerns about taking care of her children while running for a House seat and potentially becoming a member of Congress—and how those concerns have now inspired her to push this important legislation.

But it’s not too hard to see how pernicious this legislation truly is. “Flexibility” is a word that should make hourly workers check for their wallets—employers hold most of the power in the relationship with hourly workers, which is all the more true if they are not unionized. So “flexibility” to decide if you want to get paid for overtime work, instead of getting fewer hours later on, can quickly become a way for employers to withhold payment for overtime work while also cutting your hours down the road.

Over 160 labor unions and women’s groups sent a letter to members of Congress on Monday, protesting that the Working Families Flexibility Act is “a smoke-and-mirrors bill that offers a pay cut for workers without any guaranteed flexibility or time off to care for their families or themselves.”

Republicans say this isn’t true, and that there are safeguards in the bill that would prevent employers from muscling their employees into surrendering overtime pay. “It is illegal for them to do that. There are enforcement mechanisms in the bill,” Eric Cantor said in February.

But this is where they’re being really tricky—the bill does give workers the right to sue over such intimidation, but denies them the right to use much quicker, and cheaper, administrative remedies through the Department of Labor. It also gives the Department of Labor no additional funds to investigate nor enforce provisions of the act.

So if hourly workers get intimidated into giving up overtime pay in exchange for working even fewer hours down the road, they’re more than welcome to hire a lawyer and sue—a rather improbable outcome given how expensive that might be. Otherwise, tough luck.

There also isn’t quite as much flexibility in the act as it seems. As the National Partnership for Women and Families points out, while the bill does allow hourly workers to turn overtime pay into as much as 160 hours of comp time, it gives them no right to decide when they can use that time—even if there’s a family emergency. That’s still entirely up to employers.

Further hampering workers’ flexibility is that once they bank more than eighty hours in comp time, employers can unilaterally decide to cash out any additional hours. Also, workers who decide later that they need to cash out the comp time they’ve earned can do so—but employers have thirty days to cut the check, which could certainly be a problem for hourly workers on a tight budget.

Reading this for free? Chip in—fight the right with our reader-supported journalism.

Moreover, this isn’t even a new idea. Republicans proposed this same bill ten years ago, prompting the late Molly Ivins to remark “the slick marketing and smoke on this one are a wonder to behold.”

The legislation, simply, is a straightforward boon to big employers. “It pretends to offer time off but actually asks [employees] to work overtime hours without being paid,” Judy Lichtman of the NPWF told reporters on a conference call Monday. She added that it’s simply a “no-cost, no-interest loan to the employer.”

House Democrats will be nearly, if not entirely, unified in opposition. “The Working Families Flexibility Act sounds good, but it is a sham and we are going to call it out for what it is. It would cause more harm than good and we are going to reject it,” Representative Rose DeLauro said yesterday during the same conference call.

Patriots have values, like not shrouding legislation that once again gives American workers the shaft, in propaganda and doublespeak. Shame on conservatives for being back stabbing plastic patriots.

The Patriotic Truth About Middle-Class Taxes and Corporations

The Patriotic Truth About Middle-Class Taxes and Corporations

Transplanting Taxes from Corporations to the Rest of Us
American taxpayers are increasingly picking up the tab for unpaid corporate taxes.

Today, corporate profits are setting all-time records while middle class families continue to struggle financially. These trends are intertwined.

Whether you’ve clicked to send your tax forms to the IRS along the cyber-highway or dropped your return in the old-fashioned blue mailbox, you’ll be paying extra to cover the growing amount of taxes that the nation’s clever corporations are shunting onto individual taxpayers.

Officially, the U.S. corporate tax rate stands at 35 percent, but in practice it’s far lower. Corporations have lots of tricks in their box of tax-avoidance tools.

In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. Last year, thanks to the antics of Pfizer and other examples of overly creative accounting, corporate income taxes accounted for less than a tenth of Uncle Sam’s total revenue.

Consider Pfizer’s track record. The drugmaker increased its offshore profits by $10 billion in 2012, boosting its offshore stash to $73 billion — all of it untaxed by Uncle Sam. Like most pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer registers its patents in a low-tax offshore haven, and then charges a high price for the use of this “intellectual property.” Doing so, it shifts all of its U.S. profits offshore, avoiding U.S. taxes and bloating its overseas bank account.

Pfizer’s tax dodging prowess has earned it a gold medal in the sport, but it has also drawn unwanted attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC wrote to Pfizer last year asking them to explain four years of large losses in their U.S. operations despite reporting about 40 percent of their sales on American soil. Undeterred by the SEC investigation, Pfizer added a fifth year of U.S. losses to the string in 2012.

Imagine for a moment one of the physicians that prescribes Pfizer’s products taking their diploma off their office wall, carefully packing it up, and shipping it to a bank vault in the Cayman Islands. That diploma represents the doctor’s intellectual property. Without it, they would not be able to practice their profession.

After each visit, patients approaching the check-out desk would be given their bill and an envelope to mail their check to a post office box in the Cayman Islands. Faced with confused looks, the receptionist cheerfully explains, “Well, we have to pay for the use of the skills represented by the diploma, which is housed in the Caribbean.”

The corporate offshore tax dodge that shifts $90 billion of tax expenses onto individual taxpayers this Tax Day is just that crazy. Just like having a doctor’s diploma parked in the Cayman Islands does nothing to improve the quality of care, having corporate profits transferred from America to tax haven nations provides no enhanced benefits in terms of product quality or service. In other words, there is no economic value. It only serves to add more to already-overflowing corporate coffers.

In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal government’s bills. Last year, thanks to the antics of Pfizer and other examples of overly creative accounting, corporate income taxes accounted for less than a tenth of Uncle Sam’s total revenue. This dramatic shortfall shows up in two ways — federal budget deficit growth and the growing trend of individual taxpayers paying an increased share of the costs of government.

Only about two in every thousand American businesses are even eligible to play this game, and far fewer actually do. Most business owners are proud to pay taxes they know support schools, good infrastructure, and national security.

If tax-dodging corporations were people, they might say thanks to the responsible taxpayers who are picking up their share of unpaid taxes. But since they aren’t human, allow me to say on their behalf, “Have a Nice Tax Day.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Scott Klinger is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

But conservatives keep claiming that taxes are too high and are preventing economic growth. Unlike the years following the new Deal and up through the 1970s, when corporations were somewhat responsible about the social contract between workers and consumers, now they let the workers have the crumbs and corporate plutocrats take must of the pie. And big institutional investors get a big share too. On the other hand workers are more productive than ever yet their wages are not keeping up with inflation. Our roads, bridges, cities and schools could use some infrastructure improvement, but that is slow in coming because conservatives, who caused the deficit and the recession, say the deficit is more important than rising revenue. 

Republicans Got Their Lessons in Sequester Propaganda From The Soviet Politburo

Republicans Got Their Lessons in Sequester Propaganda From The Soviet Politburo

Barring a miracle of bipartisan cooperation over the next 12 hours, the sequester — a series of across-the-board spending cuts — will kick in tonight.

Part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, the sequester will likely shave 700,000 jobs and 0.6 percent worth of growth off the economy. Its cuts were designed to be so crude and damaging they would incentivize all sides to replace it with more well-thought out deficit reduction.

But thanks to the GOP’s single-minded fixation on spending cuts over tax increases, that effort failed. Republicans spent the last two years treating every debate over the deficit as if it were occurring in a historical vacuum, accusing Obama of failing his own commitment to balance, repeatedly scoffing at new tax revenue, and insisting that “it’s finally time” to “get serious” about cutting spending, even as trillions of dollars in cuts mounted.

In short, the GOP has repeatedly thrown the spending cuts from each previous deal down the memory hole, demanding more and more while claiming that Obama and Democrats have unreasonably wanted to balance those cuts with new revenue.

Between the spring 2011 budget fight, the debt ceiling debacle, and the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the United States has cut almost $1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade, plus saving roughly $200 billion more in lower interest payments.

In fact, at the Wall Street Journal breakfast featured in the video, reporter Lori Montgomery brought up all these previous cuts point blank with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan’s rejoinder encapsulated the entire bizarre kabuki dance: “That was last session. We’re going forward now.” Montgomery and the other reporters literally busted out laughing in response. (Ryan’s logic doesn’t even work on its on terms. The new tax revenues in the fiscal cliff deal were part of the last congressional session as well, but he wants to count those.)

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the budget ledger, the country will raise only $630 billion in new tax revenue over the next decade. That’s the context in which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insists “the tax issue is finished,” even as both he and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) claim to be seeking a “balanced” agreement. As a result, everything from Medicare, to the military, food safety, air traffic control, nutritional support for women and infants, disaster relief, law enforcement, and health research looks likely to get the axe.

This is exactly what the old Soviet Politburo used to do, pretend what they just did or said never happened. They would literally, brazenly rewrite reality and accused anyone who disagreed with the new reality a traitor. Have you read the comments by conservatives on internet forums. They're all either too mentally deranged to be on the internet, too stupid to tie their shoes or the most blissfully uninformed people in history. And of course Faux News is always there to echo the propaganda from the Conservative Ministry of Disinformation.

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.

Conservative Republican Hubris - New Documentary Looks at How Conservatives Squandered Lives and Tax Dollars

Conservative Republican Hubris - New Documentary Looks at How Conservatives Squandered Lives and Tax Dollars

A decade ago, on March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq that would lead to a nine-year war resulting in 4,486 dead American troops, 32,226 service members wounded, and over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians. The tab for the war topped $3 trillion. Bush did succeed in removing Saddam Hussein, but it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and no significant operational ties between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda. That is, the two main assertions used by Bush and his crew to justify the war were not true. Three years after the war began, Michael Isikoff, then an investigative reporter for Newsweek (he's since moved to NBC News), and I published Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War [1], a behind-the-scenes account of how Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants deployed false claims, iffy intelligence, and unsupported hyperbole to win popular backing for the invasion.

Our book—hailed by the New York Times as "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations"—was the first cut at an important topic: how a president had swindled the nation into war with a deliberate effort to hype the threat. The book is now the basis for an MSNBC documentary [2] of the same name that marks the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war. Hosted by Rachel Maddow [3], the film premieres Monday night in her usual time slot (9PM ET/PT). But the documentary goes beyond what Isikoff and I covered in Hubris, presenting new scoops and showing that the complete story of the selling of that war has yet to be told.

One chilling moment in the film comes in an interview with retired General Anthony Zinni, a former commander in chief of US Central Command. In August 2002, the Bush-Cheney administration opened its propaganda campaign for war with a Cheney speech at the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. The veep made a stark declaration: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." No doubt, he proclaimed, Saddam was arming himself with WMD in preparation for attacking the United States.

Zinni was sitting on the stage during the speech, and in the documentary he recalls his reaction:

    It was a shock. It was a total shock. I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program. And that's when I began to believe they're getting serious about this. They wanna go into Iraq.

That Zinni quote should almost end the debate on whether the Bush-Cheney administration purposefully guided the nation into war with misinformation and disinformation.

But there's more. So much more. The film highlights a Pentagon document declassified two years ago. This memo [4] notes that in November 2001—shortly after the 9/11 attacks—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with General Tommy Franks to review plans for the "decapitation" of the Iraqi government. The two men reviewed how a war against Saddam could be triggered; that list included a "dispute over WMD inspections." It's evidence that the administration was seeking a pretense for war.

 Amazing that conservatives Republicans even have the nerve to run for office and while doing so claim they are fit to lead the nation. No voter who cares about America should be casting a vote for one of the most treacherous political movements in history.

Why Does Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Hate Hard Working American Families

Why Does Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Hate Hard Working American Families

President Obama’s State of the Union proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and index it to inflation so that it keeps up with growth in the economy was quickly rebuked by top Republicans like Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who claim the minimum wage will kill jobs and hurt small businesses.

Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R) chose a different reason to oppose the proposal today. A stronger minimum wage, Blackburn said, would negatively affect the ability of young workers to enter the workforce as teenagers, and would prevent them from learning responsibility like she did when she was a teenage retail employee making a seemingly-measly $2.15 an hour in Mississippi:

    BLACKBURN: What we’re hearing from moms and from school teachers is that there needs to be a lower entry level, so that you can get 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds into the process. Chuck, I remember my first job, when I was working in a retail store, down there, growing up in Laurel, Mississippi. I was making like $2.15 an hour. And I was taught how to responsibly handle those customer interactions. And I appreciated that opportunity.



Making $2.15 an hour certainly does sound worse than today’s minimum wage, which federal law mandates must be at least $7.25 an hour. But what Blackburn didn’t realize is that she accidentally undermined her own argument, since the value of the dollar has changed immensely since her teenage years. Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between $12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started.

At that time, the minimum wage was $1.60, equivalent to $10.56 in today’s terms. Today’s minimum wage is equivalent to just $1.10 an hour in 1968 dollars, meaning the teenage Blackburn managed to enter the workforce making almost double the wage she now says is keeping teenagers out of the workforce.

Blackburn is emblematic of the cancerous conservative mindset. She thinks workers are the same thing as Medieval serfs and they should be on their knees in perpetual gratitude that the lords of the manor even let them work.

Gun Truth for Patriots Only

Gun Truth for Patriots Only

By cutting off federal funding for research [1] and stymieing data collection [2] and sharing [3], the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments are full of holes.

Myth #1: They're coming for your guns.
Fact-check: No one knows the exact number of guns in America, but it's clear there's no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you'll rest easy knowing that America's roughly 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.
gun ownership

Sources: Congressional Research Service [4] (PDF), Small Arms Survey [5]

Myth #2: Guns don't kill people—people kill people.
Fact-check: People with more guns tend to kill more people—with guns. The states with the highest gun ownership rates have a gun murder rate 114% higher [6] than those with the lowest gun ownership rates. Also, gun death rates tend to be higher in states with higher rates of gun ownership. Gun death rates are generally lower in states [7] with restrictions such as assault-weapons bans or safe-storage requirements.
ownership vs gun death

Sources: Pediatrics [8], Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [9]

Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Fact-check: Drivers who carry guns are 44% more likely [10] than unarmed drivers to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to follow them aggressively.
• Among Texans convicted of serious crimes, those with concealed-handgun licenses were sentenced for threatening someone with a firearm 4.8 times more [11] than those without.
• In states with Stand Your Ground [12] and other laws making it easier to shoot in self-defense, those policies have been linked to a 7 to 10% increase [13] in homicides.  


Myth #4: More good guys with guns can stop rampaging bad guys.
Fact-check: Mass shootings stopped by armed civilians in the past 30 years: 0 [21]
• Chances that a shooting at an ER involves guns taken from guards: 1 in 5 [22]

Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer.
Fact-check: Owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of homicide [23], suicide [24], and accidental death [25] by gun.
• For every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders [26], 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home.
• 43% of homes [27] with guns and kids have at least one unlocked firearm.
• In one experiment, one third of 8-to-12-year-old boys [28] who found a handgun pulled the trigger.

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.
Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments [29] than by civilians trying to stop a crime [30].
• In one survey, nearly 1% [31] of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% [31] involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater [32] if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Myth #7: Guns make women safer.
Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more [33] women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman's chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times [34] if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times [35] more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.

Myth #8: "Vicious, violent video games" deserve more blame than guns.
Fact-check: So said [36] NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre after Newtown. So what's up with Japan [37]?
      United States     Japan
Per capita spending
on video games     $44     $55
Civilian firearms
per 100 people     88     0.6
Gun homicides
in 2008     11,030     11

Sources: PricewaterhouseCoopers [38], Small Arms Survey [39] (PDF), UN Office on Drugs and Crime [40]

Myth #9: More and more Americans are becoming gun owners.
Fact-check: More guns [41] are being sold, but they're owned by a shrinking portion [42] of the population.
• About 50% [43] of Americans said they had a gun in their homes in 1973. Today, about [44] 45% [45] say they do. Overall, 35% of Americans [45] personally own a gun.
• Around 80% of gun owners are men. On average they own 7.9 guns each [46].

Myth #10: We don't need more gun laws—we just need to enforce the ones we have.
Fact-check: Weak laws and loopholes backed by the gun lobby make it easier to get guns illegally.
• Around 40% [47] of all legal gun sales involve private sellers and don't require background checks. 40% of prison inmates [48] who used guns in their crimes got them this way.
• An investigation found 62% of online gun sellers [49] were willing to sell to buyers who said they couldn't pass a background check.
• 20% of licensed California gun dealers [50] agreed to sell handguns to researchers posing as illegal "straw" buyers.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has not had a permanent director for 6 years [51], due to an NRA-backed requirement [52] that the Senate approve nominees.


Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html?pagewanted=all
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/atf-obama-gun-reform-control-alcohol-tobacco-firearms
[3] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/80518462.html
[4] http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf
[5] http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/publications/by-type/yearbook/small-arms-survey-2006.html
[6] http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/state-level-homicide-victimization-rates-in-the-us-in-relation-to-TNMKd0qUVn
[7] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/
[8] http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/116/3/e370.full
[9] http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=113&cat=2
[10] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16434012
[11] http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/american-public-health-association/when-concealed-handgun-licensees-break-bad-criminal-convictions-of-patzzJ6ljx?articleList=%2Fsearch%3Fquery%3Dfirearms%26dateFacetFrom%3DNOW%252FDAY-5YEARS%26internal_rental_state%3Drentable%26journal_journal_name%5B%5D%3DAmerican%2BJournal%2Bof%2BPublic%2BHealth
[12] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nra-alec-stand-your-ground?page=1
[13] http://econweb.tamu.edu/mhoekstra/castle_doctrine.pdf
[14] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-board-newtown-bushmaster
[15] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-board-members-selleck-nugent
[16] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/nra-mass-shootings-myth
[17] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/nra-membership-numbers
[18] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-life-duty-police-assault-rifle-gun-control
[19] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nra-alec-stand-your-ground
[20] http://www.motherjones.com/special-reports/2012/12/guns-in-america-mass-shootings
[21] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/armed-civilians-do-not-stop-mass-shootings
[22] http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644%2812%2901408-4/abstract
[23] http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/9/1/48.full
[24] http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full
[25] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457502000490
[26] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9715182/
[27] http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.90.4.588
[28] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/107/6/1247.abstract?sid=96fc3066-8fc5-4c58-b518-1940841c762b
[29] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-11
[30] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-15
[31] http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/4/263.full
[32] http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2008.143099
[33] http://www.vpc.org/studies/wmmw2012.pdf
[34] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/
[35] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3456383/
[36] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/12/national-rifle-association-has-video-game-too
[37] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-guns-how-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/
[38] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0316/Top-video-game-markets-in-the-world/United-States
[39] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smallarmssurvey.org%2Ffileadmin%2Fdocs%2FA-Yearbook%2F2007%2Fen%2FSmall-Arms-Survey-2007-Chapter-02-annexe-4-EN.pdf&ei=Zp8JUZrxD8rhigK_iIBw&usg=AFQjCNFYCb3CI6fyWJpCx1qTfVYVdKB_wA&sig2=eeeku-E1n8tpFC6XbBDq6g
[40] http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html
[41] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mass-shootings-investigation
[42] http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/07/21/the-declining-culture-of-guns-and-violence-in-the-united-states/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+themonkeycagefeed+%28The+Monkey+Cage%29
[43] http://publicdata.norc.org/webview/velocity?var1=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5076&op1=%3C%3E&cases2=5&stubs=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V1&var2=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5076&op3=%3C%3E&analysismode=table&v=2&var3=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5076&ao2=and&weights=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5084&cases3=7&V1slice=1972&ao1=and&previousmode=table&study=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfStudy%2F4697&headers=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V648&op2=%3C%3E&mode=table&ao3=and&V4slice=0&tabcontenttype=row&count=2&cases1=4
[44] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postabcpoll_20130113.html
[45] http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/self-reported-gun-ownership-highest-1993.aspx
[46] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2610545/
[47] http://www.nij.gov/pubs-sum/165476.htm
[48] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=940
[49] http://www.fixgunchecks.org/deleteonlineoutlaws
[50] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2937134/
[51] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/12/atf-ill-equipped-enforce-new-gun-laws
[52] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/us/legislative-handcuffs-limit-atfs-ability-to-fight-gun-crime.html?pagewanted=all
[53] http://thenounproject.com/
[54] http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=gun+man+woman&search_group=&orient=&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=konstantynov&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&commercial_ok=&color=&show_color_wheel=1#id=33221842&src=c4c1199215fa517793878a728c5ca0be-1-0