Justifying Appeasement to Ensure Feudalism

No, Mr. President: Slashing spending that will destroy the middle class is NOT "what the American people deserve."

But it is yet more proof as if anyone needed it that we are on our own. Certainly the White House is not our ally.

Last night, after weeks of long and difficult negotiations over our national budget, leaders of both parties came together to avert a government shutdown, cut spending, and invest in our future.

This is good news for the American people. It means that small businesses can get the loans they need, our families can get the mortgages they applied for, folks can visit our national parks and museums, and hundreds of thousands of Americans will get their paychecks on time – including our brave men and women in uniform.

This is an agreement to invest in our country’s future while making the largest annual spending cut in our history. Like any compromise, this required everyone to give ground on issues that were important to them. I certainly did. Some of the cuts we agreed to will be painful – programs people rely on will be cut back; needed infrastructure projects will be delayed. And I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances. But we also prevented this important debate from being overtaken by politics and unrelated disagreements on social issues. And beginning to live within our means is the only way to protect the investments that will help America compete for new jobs – investments in our kids’ education and student loans; in clean energy and life-saving medical research.

Reducing spending while still investing in the future is just common sense. That’s what families do in tough times. They sacrifice where they can, even if it’s hard, to afford what’s really important.

A few months ago, I was able to sign a tax cut for American families because both parties worked through their differences and found common ground. Now, the same cooperation has made it possible for us to move forward with the biggest annual spending cut in history. And it’s my sincere hope that we can continue to come together as we face the many difficult challenges that lie ahead – from creating jobs and growing our economy to educating our children and reducing our long-term deficits.

That’s our responsibility. That’s what the American people expect us to do. And it’s what the American people deserve.

The Crime Wikileaks Publicized

No, not exposed or revealed, because it was already public knowledge.

Greg Mitchell at The Nation:

Today (April 5) marks the first anniversary of the day WikiLeaks started to become a household name in the U.S. -- when Julian Assange released the video he had titled Collateral Murder. It showed a 2007 incident in Baghdad when a U.S. Apache copter crew gunned down more than a dozen Iraqis, most likely civilians, on the streets below, including two Reuters staffers. After a flurry of publicity, the episode soon faded from the media, although three major WikiLeaks releases followed last year, all allegedly coming via Private Bradley Manning, now sitting in near-solitary confinement in the brig at Quantico.

But largely thanks to one soldier who was in the thick of things on that day in 2007, the incident is far from over.

He is Ethan McCord, who spoke out after the release of the video to testify that he was on the scene that day and helped rescue two badly injured children (who were riding in a van driven by their father who had tried to helped the wounded only to be killed himself) and carry them to a vehicle that took them to a hospital.

Now he is featured in a film short that will debut in three weeks at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here is a link to the film's site which includes background, a trailer, and a director's statement in which he reveals he is now working on a feature length film and hopes to talk with the triggerman.

My colleague Kevin Gosztola talked to McCord last week. McCord says that he has turned over all photos from that day and they will air soon. Here is the audio and transcript. One key quote from McCord: The video was released on April 5th of 2010. However, the entire incident was written about in a book by David Finkel called The Good Soldiers. So, they’re stating that this was classified, but it was already released back in 2009 through a book so how is it classified if it’s already for released? I mean, word for word this video is described in the book The Good Soldiers so yet we’re going to charge Bradley Manning for releasing classified information. Shouldn’t we also be charging David Finkel for writing this book detailing the entire engagement in his book in 2009?

Finally, below, here is an excerpt from my The Age of WikiLeaks book—recounting a remarkable interview McCord gave nearly one year ago.

One of the most remarkable interviews relating to this whole episode came to light on April 20, 2010, when Kim Zetter at Wired revealed that she had located and interviewed one of the soldiers in the video.

SNIP

(McCord) “Personally, I believe the first attack on the group standing by the wall was appropriate, was warranted by the rules of engagement. They did have weapons there. However, I don’t feel that the attack on the van was necessary…. And where the soldier said [in the video], ‘Well, you shouldn’t take your kids to battle.’ Well, in all actuality, we brought the battle to your kids.

“I think that the bigger picture is what are we doing there? We’ve been there for so long now and it seems like nothing is being accomplished whatsoever, except for we’re making more people hate us.

“I don’t say that Wikileaks did a bad thing, because they didn’t…. I think it is good that they’re putting this stuff out there. I don’t think that people really want to see this, though, because this is war.… It’s very disturbing.”

Read the whole thing.

The Poor Aren't Lazy; They're Barred From Wealth

I was raised middle-class, but my parents were Depression babies who knew what it is like to wear hand-me-downs and eat meat at most once a week. In our house, using profanity did not earn anywhere near the opproprium that disparaging the poor did.

In my life, I have never missed a meal or lacked a decent home. I have also never seen anyone work harder than poor people do. It's a rule of thumb: the harder, more difficult, more disgusting, and more essential the work, the less money people get for doing it.

Think about it: garbage men, farmworkers, janitors, ditch diggers, patient aids in hospitals and nursing homes, fry cooks and restaurant wait-staff, retail cashiers, clerks and receptionists, call-center workers, fast-food counter-people, hotel maids, factory line workers, grocery baggers. Hard, nasty, thankless work that pays next to nothing.

If you think any of those jobs are easy, or not worth more money, you obviously haven't done it or tried to live on minimum wage.

Anat Shenker-Osorio at the Christian Science Monitor:

Americans are in deep denial about our wealth inequality. In the US, the richest fifth have 84 percent of the wealth – and most of us don’t consider this to be a problem. In fact, we don’t even guess at the distribution close to correctly. In a recent poll by Duke’s Dan Ariely and Harvard’s Michael Norton, respondents thought that lucky fifth has more like 59 percent of all US wealth and favor them owning just 32 percent of it.

But our blindness to the amount of inequality and its effects on our society isn’t pure ignorance or apathy. It’s at least partly a function of how we talk about the issue. We say things like “the wealth gap” and “bridge the gulf” – phrases that obscure some basic truths about inequality.

It’s automatic and necessary to explain the world in metaphors – to describe abstractions by comparing them to concrete things. In the case of inequality, we’re characterizing the differences between the rich and the poor as though they’re objects affixed on opposite sides of a chasm. But viewing inequality as an economic canyon makes it hard to argue for policies that might actually diminish it. A canyon, after all, is a natural formation.

“Gap” isn’t a stirring call to action; it’s a clothing store. It may provide a ready image of where we are, but it says nothing about how we got here. Studies of cognition and decades of experience tell us that when we don’t provide an explanation, our audiences will fill one in themselves.

Poor is "bad," wealthy is "good"

In this case, the cause-effect narrative for our “gap” seems to go like this: Those who are poor have chosen this condition. Whether it’s character flaw (lazy bum), moral failure (welfare queen), inherent defect (the bell curve), or all of the above, this story tells us what have-nots have not is ambition or intelligence.

It’s no accident that we routinely refer to the wealthiest as the “top” and the rest as the “bottom.” In English, good is up and bad is down. That’s why we say, “things are looking up” and “she’s down in the dumps.” No wonder we pull ourselves up (not forward or along) by our bootstraps. Calling certain folks upper class implies they are worth more not just materially but also morally.

Inequality isn't an individual choice

If being rich or poor is understood as the result of differential effort, then we can conclude each category is simply a lifestyle choice. Inequality is then a sign that our economy is doing exactly what it should – rewarding the deserving and motivating the lazy. And the line of reasoning continues: Since there’s nothing wrong with this, there's nothing anybody should do about it.

We use this “gap” language all the time. And then we wonder why the statistics we cite, the graphs we generate, and the examples we offer of widening inequality don’t raise the eyebrows, let alone the ire, of many in our audiences. Using this language tacitly degrades individuals and makes current conditions seem natural. By employing it, we blind the public to the fact that inequality isn't an individual choice. Rather, it’s the direct result of the rules financial and political elites have crafted for their own enrichment.

Read the whole thing.

Let's flip this "poor equals lazy" lie around and start telling this truth:

The rich are parasites. In today's America, nobody "earns" real wealth; it's handed to them by inheritance, investment windfalls or government subsidy.

Don't respect the rich - look down on them for not working for a living.

"The Brand" Matters More Than Human Beings

I love it when corporations make it easy. Liberals don't have to demonize corporations; their actions speak for themselves.

Digby:

Of course unions are going to complain if their landlord hires non-union labor. In fact, they are going to complain if anyone hires non-union labor. They explain why right there in the article --- it lowers wages and work standards in their community. I don't know when it became a crime for union workers to complain about non-union shops, but it's a fairly recent development.

But this seems to be a new theme. If a labor union complains about an employer they are "hurting the brand" which in America, in 2011, is akin to stealing someone's first born child:

Six key organizers with the Jimmy John’s Workers’ Union in Minneapolis were fired on Tuesday, March 22, after putting up posters around the city demanding paid sick days from the sandwich chain. According to David Boehnke, one of the discharged workers, the six workers received notices that they were fired for “defaming the brand and disloyalty to the company.”

The Jimmy John’s Workers’ Union, which is affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), garnered national media attention last year, as it would have been the first union in the American fast food industry. These workers' struggles could have implications for the entire service sector.

The firings come in the wake of a National Labor Relations Board settlement which threw out the results from an October 22 union election that the Jimmy John’s Workers’ Union narrowly lost, 87-85. In filings with the NLRB after the elections, the union alleged that the Mulligans, owners of the Minneapolis franchises, had threatened to freeze wages, falsely accused union supporters of sabotage, and engaged in other illegal actions prior to the election. The settlement allowed the union to call for a new election anytime in the next 18 months.

Over the past two months, union supporters had been campaigning to get the Mulligans to negotiate over their “10-Point Program for Justice at Jimmy John’s,” which includes wage increases, guaranteed hours, and better job security. Recently, they had begun to emphasize their demand for paid sick days, wearing buttons that said “Sick of Working Sick” and beginning to put up posters around the city.

I don't know about you, but I really don't want sick people making my food for me. More than that, I really don't want to live in a country where people don't get sick pay as a matter of course. Unions shouldn't have to fight for this one --- it should be a federal law.

However, that's not really the point, is it? The most important thing in all that is that the "brand" suffers when its business practices are called into question. And nothing is more valuable than a brand --- in fact, nothing else even matters.

"The Blackening of America"

Maybe this is where race and class finally converge. Since colonial times, the wealthy and powerful of America have been careful to stoke resentment between blacks and poor whites. Only race hate was strong enough to prevent them from joining in common cause against their exploiters.

But today the plutocrats are so powerful they don't bother to make the distinction any more; everyone who is not filthy rich is just a ni**er.

Melissa Harris-Perry in The Nation:

In recent months, I have been reminded of Professor West’s analysis because one way to read our current moment is as a blackening of America. The social, economic and political conditions that have long defined African-American life have descended onto a broader population, and it has been instructive to watch how the nation has responded.

Initially, conservatives argued that Tea Party activists had every right to be disgusted with national leadership and to demand swift economic intervention to combat the near 10 percent unemployment rate. Since the mid-1970s, except for a brief dip between 1998 and 2002, unemployment among African-Americans has routinely exceeded 10 percent, yet African-Americans were rarely encouraged to blame systems or organize collectively. Instead blacks were stereotyped as lazy and undeserving. This characterization has been an effective ideological tool for politicians intent on limiting social programs, cutting welfare, ignoring cities, slashing job training and neglecting housing.

Within months, the Tea Party shifted its focus to the deficit. As it did, policy debates about the poor and unemployed came to mirror decades of discourse about black Americans. Extensions of unemployment insurance were decried as “creeping socialism.” Echoing theories of dependency leveled against African-Americans for decades, one conservative blogger suggested that extending unemployment benefits would create “a permanent entitlement and would perpetuate unemployment.” Perhaps, in this moment, Americans understood how dangerously corrosive the characterization of the poor as “idle” is for black people.

This past November the TSA introduced screening procedures that many Americans—liberals and conservatives alike—deemed intrusive, random and demeaning. But for decades urban police forces have regularly employed race-based traffic stops and pedestrian stop-and-frisks in African-American communities. These policing practices have done little to make neighborhoods safer, but they have contributed to massive incarceration rates for black men. Justifying their racially punitive behavior as a reasonable response to potential crime, police forces have acted largely with the consent of white Americans, some of whom later decried the TSA’s new procedures. Perhaps, for a moment, they felt the stinging humiliation that routinely accompanies black life.

Few events more clearly demonstrated the blackening of America than the standoff in Wisconsin. Like the nineteenth-century leaders of Southern states who stripped black citizens of voting rights, public accommodation and civic associations, Wisconsin’s Republican majority dismantled the hard-won basic rights of Wisconsin workers. Like those Confederate leaders, the Wisconsin GOP used intimidation, threats and even the police against demonstrators and rival officials. As the saga unfolded, many Wisconsin citizens felt stunned that their once-secure rights might be eliminated. For a moment, perhaps, they glimpsed the experience of black men and women who watched the shadow of Jim Crow blot out the promises of emancipation.

The 1880s were also the decade when efforts to create corporate personhood were initiated by wealthy railroad barons. In a 2010 article, James and Tomilea Allison (psych professor at Indiana University and former mayor of Bloomington, respectively) traced how these corporate interests misrepresented past cases so that the Supreme Court eventually relied on nonexistent precedent to twist Fourteenth Amendment protections intended for newly freed slaves to instead offer shelter for profiteering corporations. More than a century later, these arguments were crucial to the Citizens United decision, which putatively endowed extraordinarily wealthy corporations with an “equal” right to electoral influence but in practice gave them breathtakingly unequal representation. Perhaps, as they are reduced to a fraction of a citizen, other Americans now catch a glimpse of what it means to be codified as only three-fifths of a person.

Today corporate greed, conservative ideology, manufactured right-wing populism and progressive complicity are making more and more Americans into, as Professor West might characterize them, “niggers.” Rather than try to escape the pain of experiencing some small familiarity with blackness, Americans could choose to learn from generations of African-Americans who resisted dehumanizing processes of domination and inequality. During the 2008 election Obama’s detractors tried to smear him by suggesting that “Hussein” was a terrorist’s moniker. As a demonstration of solidarity, thousands of Americans informally declared that they too would be known by the middle name Hussein. It was purely symbolic, but it rested on a belief in the power to change meaning by embracing rather than eschewing that which is labeled subordinate, alien, dangerous and shameful. By embracing our collective blackness, perhaps we can find the fortitude and creativity necessary to face the continuing erosion of our national social safety net in the face of a persistent economic crisis.

Read the whole thing.

Kentucky Highway Fatalities Lowest Since 1999 - Or Not

Fewer deaths is good. But a governor in a tough re-election campaign taking credit for an improvement that may have more to do with a shitty economy is bad.

Kentucky highway fatalities dropped to an 11-year low in 2010.

The Kentucky Office of Highway Safety (KOHS) today released final statistics for 2010. There were 760 fatalities last year, 31 fewer than in 2009 and the lowest total since 1999, when the death toll was 729. Fatalities declined for the fifth consecutive year.

“The good news is that 31 fewer lives were lost,” Gov. Steve Beshear said. “The bad news is that people are still needlessly dying on Kentucky highways. We will not rest until the number is zero, because one fatality is one too many.”

Gov. Beshear’s Executive Committee on Highway Safety is working to update and implement the state’s strategic highway safety plan, which focuses on four critical elements: engineering, education, enforcement and emergency response.

Transportation Secretary Mike Hancock, the governor’s designated highway safety representative and chair of the committee, said the data-driven, 2010-2014 comprehensive plan includes collaboration from stakeholders at every level — federal, state, local and private — to identify safety needs and guide investment decisions.

“If our effort results in just one life being saved, it will have been worth it”, Hancock said.

Of the 760 fatalities last year, 598 were in motor vehicles. Of those killed, 62.5 percent were not buckled up and 20 percent of fatalities involved alcohol. Motorcyclists accounted for 78 fatalities, with 57.7 not wearing helmets and 15.4 percent of fatal motorcycle crashes involved alcohol.

Here’s the problem: the number of deaths means little in the absence of data on traffic totals. Was the total number of miles driven on Kentucky highways also at an 11-year low? Then the number of deaths is probably not an improvement. Look at this list of number of traffic deaths for the last 12 years:

1999 729
2000 823
2001 843
2002 915
2003 931
2004 964
2005 985
2006 913
2007 864
2008 826
2009 791
2010 760

Notice anything? From 1999 to 2005, deaths steadily increased. Then they suddenly started dropping - by as much as five percent per year ever since.

Remember 1999? It was the last year of the Clinton Prosperity, right before the bottom dropped out of the economy when the Internet Bubble burst.

Even with the increase in population in Kentucky since 1999, I'd be willing to bet that between higher gas prices and much higher unemployment substantially fewer miles were driven on Kentucky highways in 2010 than in 1999. That would mean that highway deaths per miles driven are higher - maybe substantially higher - than in 1999.

I could be wrong. But based on the sparse data given in the press release, there's no way to know. I'd like to think that if the miles driven comparison also shows a significant drop in deaths, that would have been mentioned in the press release. That it wasn't makes me suspicious.

Twain warned us there are lies, damn lies and Statistics. He forgot to mention election-year press releases.

Old, Sick and Poor is No Way to Spend Your Retirement

I recently got a personal glimpse into the ugly reality of getting old with a chronic disability. The sense of helplessness is terrifying, and that's for someone with employer-provided health insurance, a non-yet-elderly brain and a support network of family and friends.

Anyone who can even consider throwing even 70-year-olds to the piranhas of the private health insurance industry is a sociopath with a long history of torturing puppies. Sound like any rethuglicans you know?

Digby:

Sometimes I think that the best thing that the only way our country is going to survive is if all of our political elites are forced to live like an average American for the next two years. And by average, I don't mean the delusional upper middle class, highly educated, well-connected professional kind of average. I mean the world of the sandwich shop owner, the garage mechanic, the office supply salesman and the corporate clerical pink collar ghetto office assistant. People who make between 30 and 60k a year and don't have a lot of expectations that they will make much more. The middle class workers who don't get to go on TV or have anyone but their closest families and friends ever tell them how great they are and encourage them to believe they will accomplish great things. The people who are just living their normal lives in their normal communities, doing normal, everyday, unremarkable things. In other words, most people:

If they did they would find that observations like this are totally absurd:

Seniors would enter the health care world the rest of us live in, with co-payments, deductibles and managed care. Eventually, cost control would require some tough decisions about end-of-life care and the rationing of high-tech treatments that have limited efficacy. But starting with a value of $15,000 per year, per senior—the amount government now spends on Medicare—Ryan's vouchers should provide excellent coverage. His change would amount to a minor amendment to the social contract, not a fundamental revision of it.

That's written by an alleged liberal, by the way, not some tea partying moron.

Most old people would be lost in "the health care world the rest of us live in" because if you are self-employed or unemployed, as retirees are, you'd have to "shop" for insurance, go through huge hoops to get insured, manage a complicated health care bureaucracy that you don't understand, even when you are sick.(Anyone heard of elder scams? Yeah, I though so. And just because they are illegal doesn't mean they don't exist.) Doing all that is difficult even for people who aren't aged, infirm and often very ill with debilitating diseases. Acting as though throwing those people into the pool is going to somehow be beneficial to the individual, much less the system as a whole, is nonsensical in the extreme.

SNIP

For those of us who live the the world outside that employer covered system as this person suggests seniors should do, the idea that a sick old person of 70 could be covered for 15k a year is laughable. A good policy for a 50 year old with a health problem can cost that right now (and the health care reform isn't going to change it.) It's absurd on its face that sick senior citizens are going to be able to be "cost conscious." The assumption is that they are overusing the system, when the truth is that they are all in the rather immediate process of dying. So let's not kid ourselves that they are living in the same world we are as healthy adults. They aren't. And even those with good pensions won't be able to shoulder the high cost of senior medical care on their own. The only people who will have no worries at all under this are the upper 5%.

Cost of medical care is a problem across the board for all ages. Solving it by telling the sick elderly that they are just going to have to suck it up "and join the world the rest of us live in" isn't going to solve it. There are ways to control costs without putting the burden on sick people. If that's the best solution "liberals" can come up with in a rich country in which the top 1% of its citizens owns nearly half the country's wealth, then I'm afraid our little experiment in enlightenment has been a failure and it's back to the drawing board.

Read the whole thing.

Speak Up, Soak-the-Richers! You're Not Alone

Think your "tax-the-rich" sentiments put you in the fringe minority? You're in the overwhelming majority, and it's time to stop being silent.

From The Nation:

Meanwhile, a majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the deficit rather than stealing retirees’ funds or axing health programs. Another poll conducted by 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair shows that 61 percent of Americans want taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to addressing the deficit. The next most popular strategy is cutting defense spending.

Major networks like CNN are adhering to the tradition of false equivalency where the “fringe players” (those opposing all cuts to the poor and those demanding a complete shutdown of the government in lieu of more cuts) are presented as having equal power in Washington. That simply isn’t true. While Congress is implementing deep, radical cuts to the budget—Democrats have already agreed to $10 billion in “reductions” in addition to having “identified” about $13 billion more—no one is seriously talking about cutting defense or taxing the wealthy despite the fact that a majority of Americans see that as a priority.

Read the whole thing.

Easy Solution to the States' Medicaid Crisis

It's the issue that has confounded every state government: funding its share of Medicaid. Here in Kentucky, the hole Medicaid funding blew in the state budget forced the General Assembly into a special session to try to figure out how to close the gap.

But for those of us in the reality-based community who understand what is the proper purpose of the federal government, the answer is obvious.

Kevin Drum:

Although Medicare is getting most of the attention today, Paul Ryan's budget proposal also contains big changes to Medicaid. But Suzy Khimm reports that cuts to Medicaid aren't much more popular than cuts to Medicare:

But new polling from the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation also suggests that Medicaid is more popular than Beltway insiders might assume. Though public support for Medicaid lags slightly behind support for Social Security and Medicare, it's still robust: According to the KFF poll, only 13 percent of the public was willing to support major cuts to Medicaid....[Drew] Altman explains that part of the support for Medicaid comes from the services it provides for the elderly and disabled: though the program's usually described as an entitlement for the poor, seniors and the disabled make up two-thirds of Medicaid costs.

For what it's worth, I think Ryan's Medicaid proposal is far worse than his Medicare proposal. Basically, he endorses the Republican party line, which is to turn Medicaid into block grants for states, and then give states the freedom to spend it any way they want. But this is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

Here's the problem: states aren't allowed to run budget deficits, so when the economy turns bad they have to cut back on spending. But bad economic times are precisely when more Medicaid spending is needed. So unless Ryan is proposing to automatically increase those block grants whenever individual states or the country as a whole are in a recession — and he's not — this produces the worst possible dynamic you can imagine: a safety net that gets worse at exactly the times when it's needed most.

States have been experimenting with Medicaid for decades, and successes are few and far between. There just aren't any magic bullets here, and giving them more scope for experimentation isn't likely to produce any new miracles. A better bet would be to federalize Medicaid entirely. It's a huge burden to state budgets, and one that's especially burdensome during an economic downturn like the one we're in now. Ryan is right that there's really no good reason for Medicaid funding to be split between states and the federal government, but he's wrong about how to fix that. Medicaid shouldn't be a 100% state program, it should be a 100% federal program, one that's both a true safety net and a useful automatic stabilizer during recessions.

Who will be the first state governor to call on President Obama to make this happen?

How Much Do Repugs Hate Women? Outlawing Abortion is Just the Beginning

How do you know repug forced-birth fanaticism has nothing to do with concern for blastocysts?

Because the repug War Against Women goes far, far beyond merely outlawing abortion.

Katha Pollitt at The Nation:

Remember “shared sacrifice”? Like the rain, the budget cuts were supposed to fall on all alike. But somehow men seem to be ending up with more than their share of umbrellas, and women are getting soaked. Attacks on reproductive healthcare are openly aimed at women and have gotten a lot of attention—like the House vote to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate the Title X family planning program, which has fortunately been blocked in the Senate. Less visible are the ways federal, state and local government cutbacks, touted as neutral and necessary belt-tightening, will fall disproportionately on women.

The cuts will affect women in three ways. Partly as a legacy of private sector discrimination, a huge proportion of working women are employed by government or government contractors, and they tend to work in the very areas slated for the most drastic slashes—education, healthcare, social services, libraries, legal aid, secretarial and other office work. Moreover, because they are more likely to be poor, old and caring for children or relatives, women are the major recipients of social services. Thus, when a senior center is closed down, not only is the elderly person deprived of care likely to be female, the staffer who prepared her lunch or organized her group activities is probably a woman too—and so is the relative who now must take up the slack. When Head Start and childcare slots are eliminated—the Continuing Resolution for fiscal year 2011 proposed by the House axes 368,000 of them—tens of thousands of teachers and aides, almost all female, lose their jobs, and so do many mothers who rely on them. Add massive proposed cuts in the Women, Infants and Children feeding program and the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant, and the abolition of the Women’s Educational Equity program (which monitors schools’ compliance with Title IX), and it’s almost as if there was some kind of concerted plan to undo forty years of progress for women—and, especially, to make sure poor women stay poor.

Read the whole thing.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

Republican Death Panels Are Real: If You Are Not Filthy Rich, You Will Die In the Street

Ignore the shutdown kabuki over what's left of the 2011 budget - the real fight over the 2012 budget is just starting, and the theme is clear: if you're not filthy rich, report to your neighborhood "Killing Social Security to Save It" euthanasia station immediately.

The Ryan Plan is far worse than we imagined: so bad, in fact, that it might let the only-slighly-less-horrible Bowles-Simpson Cat Food Commission plan slide through.

Don't fall into this trap. Both Ryan and Cat Food are expressways to a serfs-and-Lords economy, so far over the Reichwingnut cliff they cannot be seen from Reality World.

Reality demands massive tax hikes on the rich and corporations, massive spending on infrastructure to create 10 million jobs, massively tough re-regulation of Wall Street, Big Oil/Coal/industry, and telling the Deficit Crybabies and Austerity Vultures to fuck off and die.

Don't believe it's that bad? Read it for yourself.

Here's Steve Benen on Tuesday:

RYAN'S RADICAL, RIDICULOUS, RIP-OFF ROADMAP.... While the process of crafting a budget plan for this fiscal year implodes under the weight of GOP intransigence, today also happens to be the day next year's budget fight begins in earnest. And if you think the current fight is a mess, prepare to have Republicans take your breath away.

And if you're a disabled senior on Medicaid, relying on an oxygen tank, that expression should probably be taken literally.

Today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveils his plan for fiscal year 2012. He promised a truly radical approach to our entire system of government, and he wasn't lying -- Ryan's budget is based on his radical "roadmap" and effectively rewrites the American social contract.

Medicare would be eliminated and replaced with a voucher system. Medicaid would be gutted and sent to the states as a block grant. The Affordable Care Act would be scrapped, tax rates on corporations and the wealthy would be slashed, and all told, Ryan's plan intends to slash roughly $6 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years.

This is madness.

Think he’s exaggerating? From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The Ryan Budget's Radical Priorities

Provides Largest Tax Cuts in History for Wealthy, Raises Middle Class Taxes, Ends Guaranteed Medicare, Privatizes Social Security, Erodes Health Care

Kevin drum nails it:

A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that's already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?

I think I'm going to be sick.

Steve M. refers us to this:

Booman Tribune's Steven D and his wife are also just under 55, though a lot less fortunate in matters of health than my wife and I have been. Read Steven's heartbreaking post to learn what's really going to happen to a lot of people if Ryanomics prevails.

But it will eliminate the deficit and slash the debt! Sadly, no:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's initial analysis of the House GOP budget released today by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is filled with nuggets of bad news for Republicans.

In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Here's Kevin Drum on how Ryan is the polar opposite of "courageous."

In case you needed yet more proof that Ryan-style budget austerity kills economies, Zandar has it.

And no, of course the dems and the White House won’t accept it. They will, however, use Ryan’s extremism to make everybody lap up Simpson-Bowles cat food and love it.

Digby:

With all that reasonableness and thoughtfulness, It's hard to recall that the Fiscal Commission non-report was a trainwreck. It's only by comparison to the Von Ryan Express that they are able to portray it as moderate middle ground. If I were a conspiracy type, I might even think the catfood salesmen on the commission cooked this whole thing up sometime last December when it was obvious that the liberals weren't going to sign on. But I'm not a conspiracy type so I'd imagine that this is just something they all fortuitously and individually stumbled into on their way to a big donor meeting. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy --- it's just part of the culture. Look at how the Village greeted Ryan today. Cleopatra would be jealous.

Anything that will screw average folks and reward rich ones is automatically very, very "serious." They love being serious. And if it happened to benefit their benefactors well --- sometimes life really is fair.

If the Democrats don't take this plan and wrap it around every teabagging Republican in the congress in the fall of 2012 they don't deserve to win. Just on a purely primitive political basis, whether they secretly love the idea of death panels or not, their competitive spirit alone should be enough to make Paul Ryan and his cronies the poster boys for Soylent Green and decouple them from the aging baby boomers until we've all shuffled off our mortal coil.

From this moment on, the Democrats have the opportunity to reclaim their position as the party trusted by senior citizens. Over the next 15 years a gigantic number of them are going into the system --- and they vote. If the Republicans don't have them, they have nothing. (You know how badly they fare among younger people and racial and ethnic minorities.)

There should be a price to be paid for the kind of heartless abstraction we are seeing from the wealthy mandarins and starry-eyed Randians who are running things these days. The seniors are the ones who can make them pay it.

Steven Benen gets the last word:

Those in the media who are gushing over this plan as if it has something to do with fiscal responsibility aren't just wrong, they're missing the point on a fundamental level.

It matters that this budget plan's numbers don't add up. It matters that it would hurt working families that need help, deliberately targeting low-income Americans. It matters that Medicare would no longer exist if this proposal was somehow approved.

But as the debate gets underway in earnest, what really matters is getting observers to understand what we're fighting about. Congressional Republicans don't care about the deficit; they care about shrinking government to a size in which they can drown it in the bathtub, satisfying an ideological dream.

You're Welcome (with apologies to John Hodgeman)

Blue Texan fixes the budget, closes the deficit, pays off the debt, ends the wars, restores the middle class, makes the rich pay, punishes Wall Street and guarantees Obama's re-election with overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

No, I am not being sarcastic. Blue Texan's plan really does all that.

And it will, too, get passed. All the Democrats have to do is type it up, present it to the House repugs as an untouchable ultimatum and watch them all drop dead from shock. Not so much from the content as from the very idea of dems negotiating like they mean it.

I’ve got a better plan for returning the country to prosperity. Here it is.

Withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cut all defense spending by 50%.
Restore all tax rates to 1981 levels — across the board.
Double the Estate Tax.
Pass a millionaire’s tax.
Eliminate the mortgage interest deduction >$500,000.
Eliminate mortgage interest deduction on vacation homes.
Eliminate corporate tax loopholes.
Eliminate tax breaks for Big Oil.
Eliminate Big Farm subsidies.
Pass a carbon tax.
Pass a bank tax.

Problem solved.

Now when do I get breathlessly praised for my serious, courageous leadership?

Get a Job, You Fucking Parasite

What a loser.

Conservative provocateur James O'Keefe, who asked supporters for donations a few weeks back to help him and his friends pay off the major credit card debt they racked up when they targeted National Public Radio, is hitting up his email list one again.

O'Keefe wrote in an email to supporters on Monday that he hopes to "assemble and train an army of new truth-seekers and investigators who will expose more corruption in government and shine a bright spotlight on just how corrupt power can be in America -- including many at the highest levels of government."

"But to keep up our efforts, we must grow an army of truth-seekers and investigators, purchase equipment, hire staff, etc. All of this is very expensive," O'Keefe writes. "Remember, every dollar The Project Veritas receives comes from generous supporters, like you."

He also asks supporters for suggestions on who he should go after next, writing: "What institution, organization, or public figure would you like The Project Veritas to investigate next?"

How about an investigative piece on conservative parasites who want to destroy the working class but who have never worked a day in their lives - mostly because they wouldn't last five minutes doing real work.

"We Are One" Rally in Louisville

The Hillybilly was there, and has it all:



More videos here and pictures here.

Photos from the Courier here.

Unconditional Surrender

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Let's just swear in President Bachmann right now.

Right after we wave bye-bye to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, health care for anyone not a millionaire, public schools, minimum wage, clean water, safe food, police and fire protection .... and any last semblance of civilization here in New Gilead.

Genuflect to our new corporate overlords. Their minions, the republicans, have won.

No, I'm not exaggerating. Even never-say-die Obama apologist Steve Benen calls him a coward:

Holder told reporters this afternoon that his original decision was still the right one, but blamed Congress for "tying our hands."

He happens to be right. Even today, Holder wants to do the right thing, and so does President Obama. And yet, Gitmo is open today, and KSM will be subjected to a military commission in the near future, not because of an administration that backed down in the face of far-right whining, but because congressional Republicans orchestrated a massive, choreographed freak-out, and scared the bejesus out of congressional Democrats. Together, they limited the White House's options to, in effect, not having any choice at all.

There's plenty of room for criticism of the administration, but those slamming Obama for "breaking his word" on this are blaming the wrong end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

No, I'm not blaming him for breaking his word. I'm blaming him for being a coward - for letting the most pathetic bunch of retarded, narcissistic bullies in the history of the world push him around.

Steve M. says they're worse than cowards:

Not cowardice exactly -- more like false bravado. A big percentage of the country wants to flatter itself by imagining that these guys have superpowers, and the military or the Bush administration or Cheeto-chomping right-wing bloggers are somehow holding these supervillains at bay using superhuman powers of their own. These folks aren't pants-wetters, they're worse: they're people who want to persuade you they're tough by exaggerating the risks they, and they alone, are fending off. (They certainly give no credit to the actual current commander in chief, or anyone in his administration.)

****

And I'd just like to remind you of what Peggy Noonan wrote less than a month ago:

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations....

America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom.

Noonan's a right-wing apparatchik, but she's old-school, so she doesn't always remember what ideas have been disappeared by the right's culture commissars. She still thinks it's the early Bush era, when it was unthinkable that we wouldn't force bin Laden to do a perp walk into a courtroom in Manhattan, assuming we caught him alive. And, as Noonan's slip-up reminds us, that would have been perfectly fine.

Yes, these are the shitting-themselves morons to whom Barack Obama has unconditionally surrendered.

Quote of the Day

From emptywheel at Firedoglake:

Because nothing says “laying the foundation” of a Presidential campaign and “inspiring new” supporters like caving to fearmongering.

How You Pay for Corporate Donations to Reich-Wing Politics

Forget the public donations corporations and the obscenely wealthy give to politicans both repug and Democratic. The real money destroying our Democracy is not just hidden in secret donations - it's hidden in secret tax-deductable donations. And that means you and every other tax-paying working chump in the country is subsidizing the very corporatist politics-for-the-rich that is killing our jobs, stealing our homes and condemning us to poverty.

karoli at Crooks and Liars:

If you're wealthy and a Republican and you like your donations to be tax-deductible whenever possible, then Donors Trust, Inc. is your kind of "charity". AlterNet touched on the edges of what they do back in October, when they focused on a large donation which funded a weird effort to distribute a DVD entitled "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West", but they primarily focus on the donor and projects around the DVD with Koch Industries as the primary player.

Koch Industries is one player, but they're by no means the only player, nor are they even the only primary player.

What is Donors Trust?

Donors Trust is a tax-deductible slush fund. If a donor or foundation wants to put money toward a project and doesn't want it to be a direct gift reportable to the IRS, all they do is give it to Donors Trust.

Through multiple "non-profit" entities that receive donations and distribute grants, Donor's Trust allows corporations and the obscenely wealthy to subsidize every reich-wing, anti-democratic, un-American project out there, including:

• union-busting
• election fraud
• attacks on  minimum wage
• attacks on public schools
• kill Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Health Care
• tort reform (deny working people access to the courts)
• turning student journalists into Fox clones of Megan Kelly and Glenn Beck
• selling reich-wing propaganda through Hollywood movies and video games

Karoli again:

On and on it goes. There are many more organizations who received substantial gifts, including FreedomWorks, State Policy Network, Leadership Institute, Young America's Foundation and more.

At the very least, now you get a sense of who the donors are, and the circular nature of non-profit funding. They recycle the money through organizations like this -- it's almost a laundering operation, at least to the extent that it puts one degree of separation between the donor and the recipient for disclosure purposes. The next time some new policy think tank pops up out of nowhere to start touting libertarian/conservative/authoritarian think-tanky kind of ideas, bet on at least part of its funding coming through Donors Trust. It's a slush fund and an incubator for the inundation of public policy with conservative ideas on a state-by-state basis.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

Who Is Buying America's Democracy?

Corporations and the obscenely wealthy, of course. But we need a list of exactly who buys, how much they pay, and who gets paid.

The Hightower Lowdown has the details.

Politicians are the sellers, but who--specifically--is buying America's democracy? We will devote this and one other issue of the Lowdown to answering this crucial question.

This month, drawing on donor reports that individuals and corporations must file with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), we're identifying many of the largest givers to last year's Republican victors in the House and Senate. With officials in Washington now pushing hard to strengthen the grip that big bankers and corporations have over consumers, workers, the environment, and others, the public has a right to follow the money, including--where possible--tracing the funds to recognizable brand names and logos.

In our second issue, we'll do the best we can to lift the veil on the massive amounts of secret cash that was funneled into the 2010 elections through corporate front groups. This "mystery money" is the diabolical product of the Supreme Court's edict last year that corporations are "persons" with a First Amendment right to spend unlimited and unreported sums of their shareholders' funds to pervert America's elections.

Both issues of the Logo Lowdown are largely based on the exhaustive, nationally recognized research of two excellent public interest groups: www.opensecrets.org and www.sunlightfoundation.com. In this month's report, we break the donors into industry groups, listing corporate interests that gave $100,000 or more, with at least 60 percent of their money going to support Republican candidates. We also list the top Democratic donors.

Read the whole thing.

Then subscribe to the Lowdown. It's just $15 a year ($10 online) for 12 issues that are always jam-packed with facts, anecdotes, pithy commentary and directions for learning more and getting involved. It's a must-have for Dirty Fucking Hippies and other liberals. Need another reason to get the Lowdown? The DINO Blue Dog "Demcratic" establishment hates Hightower and the Lowdown.

Dems Can't Win If Minorities Can't Vote

Steve Benen has an excellent post on how changing demographics favor Democratic candidates for the foreseeable future.

But the conclusion he draws - that to save themselves as a viable political party the republicans are going to have start appealing to minorities - only applies to people capable of rational thought.

Repugs are pure Id and criminal corporate greed. So of course they will not let up at all on their attacks against non-white, non-Xian, non-males. They will double down, as they always have.

Think Progress:

Thursday, ThinkProgress reported that the Ohio House had approved the most restrictive voter id law in the nation — a bill that would exclude 890,000 Ohioans from voting. Earlier this week Texas lawmakers passed a similar bill, and voter id legislation — which would make it significantly more difficult for seniors, students and minorities to vote — is now under consideration in more than 22 states across the country

Conservatives have said voter id laws are necessary to combat mass voter fraud. Yet according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Americans are more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than commit voter fraud. And the Bush administration’s five-year national “war on voter fraud” resulted in only 86 convictions of illegal voting out of more than 196 million votes cast. Instead conservatives are employing an old tactic: using the specter of false voting to restrict the voting rights of minorities and the poor.

Below, ThinkProgress examines the history of conservatives anti-voter agenda:

Read the whole thing.

Don't be fooled: every single law, regulation, rule and practice that makes voting more difficult, inconvenient, annoying, costly or even dangerous is nothing but a way to stop Democratic voters from voting. It's nothing but cheating so repugs can force their way into office.

There is no such thing as "voter fraud." There is, however, widespread election fraud. Election fraud is perpetrated by and for republicans, and depends heavily on voter ID and other restrictions to stop Democratic voters from voting Democratic.

Stop wasting time on helping minorities and the elderly get ID cards so they can follow repug rules. Invest time in overturning voting restrictions and making it easy, convenient and fun for everybody to vote. Start with these:

• Same-day registration. Show up at the polls with something that shows where you live - a recent electric bill - and register and vote at the same time.
• Election Day national holiday. People who vote Democratic work for a living, which means Tuesday election day is a work day. If they can't get the day off, which most low-income workers cannot, they can't vote. Make election day a national holiday, and require businesses to give time off to workers to vote.
• Allow early voting for everyone, not just those who won't be around on Election Day.

Make it easy for everyone to vote.

When Everybody Votes, Democrats Win.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Before You Vote GOP for Governor, Look Around

We Kentucky dems bitch non-stop about our Governor Steve "Cowardly Waste of Oxygen" Beshear. We hate him so much we are very likely to either sit out the election this November or cast a vote for Insane All-Abortion-Is-Murder Freakazoid Gatewood Galbraith, thus allowing repub Senate President David Williams to win.

Beshear is certainly a painful disappointment who richly deserves to lose, but Kentucky does not deserve the corporatist takeover that GOP governors elected last year have launched all over the country.

Beshear probably won't deny voting rights to everyone who is not a white Xian repug male, or cancel employee rights for 35,000 state employees, or authorize a takeover of an elected municipal government, or pay for huge corporate tax breaks by firing thousands of teachers, or eliminate nursing home inspections or perform any of the other unconsitutional, anti-American stunts that have made GOP governors despised across the nation.

Alternet has the details on the 8 worst governors in America:

When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker rammed his union-busting bill through the legislature -- and then published it despite a judge's stay -- he seemed a lock for the honor of the Worst Governor in the United States. But then again, there are a lot of truly terrible executives in various state-houses these days.

So let's look at some of the others who might also vie for the title of America's Worst Governor -- to nobody's surprise, they're all Republicans!

The Governor: Rick Scott (Florida)

Rick Scott was once the CEO of Columbia/HCA, a massive hospital chain. The federal government fined Columbia/HCA for Medicaid and Medicare fraud. That fine, a jaw-dropping 1.7 billion dollars, is the largest in American history.

But instead of going to jail, Rick Scott became the governor of Florida.

A guy scams the government and now is an elected official of the government. And in the three months since he's been in office he's doing his best to destroy the fourth largest state.

1. He rejected $2.4 billion in stimulus money to build a high-speed rail line from Tampa to Orlando.

2. He wants to slash $4 billion in spending while cutting taxes for millionaires.

3. He tried to use state funds to build golf courses in state parks while cutting education by 10 percent and corporate taxes by 5 percent.

4. He's requiring 600,000 government workers (including police officers, teachers, firefighters, judges, and retirees) to contribute 5 percent to their retirement.

5. He just lopped off $2,300 a year in teacher salary to give massive tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy.

He's also not a fan of black people. He proposed eliminating state support for two HBCUs (Historically black colleges and universities). He's shutting down a state agency that assists minority businesses, and he refuses to appoint an African American to any significant position in his administration.

Read the whole thing. They cover Walker (WI), Paul LePage (ME), Rick Perry (TX), Jan Brewer (AZ)), Rick Snyder (MI), Tom Corbett (PA) and John Kasich (OH), but miss what Down with Tyranny calls New Jersey's loudmouthed Limbaughesque slob, Chris Christie.

So, Kentucky. Gubernatorial election in November. I pleaded for a Real Democratic to step up and challenge Beshear in the May primary, but Beshear cowardice is apparently contagious. And they all think Williams is going to win no matter who is on the Democratic ticket.

I think Williams is going to win, too, but I'm no longer shrugging it off. Repug governors are destroying the structures of democracy. They are tearing the viscera out of the body politic and feeding it to the corporate vultures.

Kentucky has fallen so far thanks to Beshear's neglect that I have a hard time imagining what Williams could do to make it any worse. But that's exactly what terrifies me. Democratic voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio and Florida and Pennsylvania and Texas and Arizona and Maine and New Jersey never imagined that punishing Democrats at the ballot box would result in widespread catastrophe.

You really think David Williams is not going to try to beat them at the Game of Anarchy?

Vote for Steve Beshear. Crawl into your hazmat suit, turn on the pure oxygen and vote for the worthless fucker. Do it with the vision of Rick Scott, burning Florida to the ground, in front of you.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

States Racing to See Which Can Humiliate and Destroy Women Most Horrifically

Bad enough that the freakazoids insist on treating women like non-sentient property incapable of controlling their own bodies.

Worse that the freakazoids have established a massive industry of lies and psychological/emotional torture to terrify women into surrendering bodily autonomy.

But unspeakably, inhumanly evil to force women seeking healthcare to endure the barrage of lies and torture.

Zandar:

When I say Republicans are misogynistic, evil bastards, this is what I mean. Republicans in the Indiana state House passed one of the nation's strictest abortion laws, outlawing nearly all abortions whatsoever after 20 weeks. Democratic State Rep. Gail Riecken proposed an an admendment that make exceptions in case of rape or incest.

Republicans voted it down. Republicans like Eric Turner.

TURNER: With all do respect to Rep. Riecken, I understand what she’s trying to do. But as you know that when the federal health care bill was going through Congress there was a lot of discussion whether this would allow for abortion coverage and of course we were all told it would not. And the bill, my house bill 1210, would prevent that for any insurance company to provide abortion coverage under federal health care bill. This [amendment] would open that window and I would ask you to oppose this amendment.

I just want you to think about this, in my view, giant loophole that could be created where someone who could — now I want to be careful, I don’t want to disparage in any way someone who has gone through the experience of a rape or incest — but someone who is desirous of an abortion could simply say that they’ve been raped or there’s incest.

He wants to be careful when he basically says Indiana women who say they are raped are all liars, and none of them deserve an exception because they are dirty, horrible, evil slutty women with vaginas that are filled with sin and no man in Indiana would ever rape a woman, ever, so there's no need for the exception amendment.

The logical rebuttal to Turner's point, that some women might lie, is not to assume all women are liars. It's that when a woman says no, she means no, and that if she's still forced to have sex, it's rape.

When people say "Well Democrats are just as bad" this is what I mean when I say "No, they are not."

But a 20-week deadline is almost benign compared to the hell South Dakota demands women endure. Digby:

Lying and Cheating for Jesus

This, from Alternet, is disgusting, especially coming from people who claim to care about the mental health of the people they are allegedly counseling:

What will happen when a woman who wants an abortion is counseled at a Fake Clinic? The monstrous deception that occurs in the Fake Clinics has been exposed in films such as the HBO Special 12th and Delaware. Because the Fakes have a well-hidden agenda, everything they do is designed to frighten and shame a woman who knows it is not the right time for her to have a baby. This fraudulence is clearly set out in the instructions given by the diabolical Robert Pearson, who came up with this brilliant and evil plan way back in 1967 when abortion was first legal in Hawaii. Pearson himself acknowledged and defended the deception in a 1994 speech: “obviously, we’re fighting Satan... A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby. Therefore, when she calls and says, ‘Do you do abortions?’ we do not tell her, No, we don’t do abortions.” The volunteers in his centers and others like them don’t mind tricking women because they think they are following some ‘higher law’. They don’t mind lying and misrepresenting things like the specious breast cancer-abortion link, the dangers of abortion, and most cruel of all, the help available to a woman who realizes that she honestly cannot support a child financially. The original Pearson manual includes: "[o]ur name of the game is to get the woman to come in as do the abortion chambers. Be put off by nothing... Let nothing stop you. The stakes are life or death." In 12th and Delaware we witnessed a young woman who came to a Fake and was so terrified by what they told her about abortion that she went home and months later knew with great anguish that she was still in no position to have and support a child. But by then she had little choice.

I remember in my own clinic years that when a woman came to our front desk crying and shaking I always knew she had been waylaid by the Fake Clinic directly across the hall from us--the Fake Clinic that advertised Free Pregnancy Testing and Financial Assistance. There was no financial assistance for abortion in Dallas, Texas. We did everything we knew to alert women to its existence including telling everyone who called us that the Fake Clinic was next door. But women who were poor, didn’t speak English, and had the very fewest resources went to the Fake Clinic because they believed they would be able to get a free abortion. During one of the most stressful days of their lives, some of our patients still got confused and went in the wrong door. Sometimes the Fake Clinic would actually send their white-coated volunteers out into the parking lot to take our unwitting patients into their facility--like spiders luring flies to their doom.

We always spent extra time with patients who had been to the Fake Clinic because we knew they hadn’t been told the truth. But I was shocked to really GET how powerful the lies were. I counseled with a patient who had been to the Fake. She said she didn’t feel like she could get up and leave even though she knew it wasn’t the right place, because the woman reminded her of her grandmother and she didn’t want to be rude. In counseling she seemed resolved about her choice, so we did all the usual paperwork and lab work. She was early in pregnancy so an abortion was many times safer than continuing a pregnancy. I went through her abortion with her. After the five-minute procedure she burst into tears and said, “I can’t believe I lived”.

NOW is it clear that this is Total War? No negotiation, no compromise, no quarter. They won't be satisfied until Gilead is reality.

Fuck that shit. Gloves off.

Demand Abortion on Demand.

If You Want Any Privacy At All, You've Got to Unplug Completely

Time to dig grandma's old manual typewriter out of the attic and starting conversing face to face with real people.

Bon the Geek at Zandar's place:

Prompted by privacy concerns, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is circulating draft legislation that would require law enforcement officials to obtain warrants before using data collected from mobile devices for tracking purposes.

If formally proposed as it’s now written, the bill would severely curtail the ability of police to use geolocation information acquired by wireless carriers. Such data is utilized frequently to pinpoint the whereabouts of criminals through items such as cell phones, global positioning systems and computers.

Sorry, I honestly thought protective measures were already in place. I have dealt with the FCC and other communication regulations, and I had no idea. Shows what I know. It appears in the era of spying and then justifying the data once you have it, that your location and other information is up for grabs and not that hard to get. Now for the bit that made my stomach actually churn:

“Law enforcement will say, ‘I don’t have time to get a warrant, so I guess we can’t do that,’” Wormeli said. “That puts the life of [a] victim in danger. There are consequences.”

Wormeli conceded that current law could be revised for clarity and strengthened regarding commercial use of location data. But he was steadfast that Wyden’s bill unduly restricts police from ensuring the public’s security.

“When it comes to public safety, we have a history in this country allowing the law enforcement agencies … to use whatever tools they need as long as they can show that it is a reasonable application of the tool,” Wormeli said. “I much rather see legislation that started from that whole notion of permission.”

To which I humbly reply: I just bet he freaking would.

I am sorry if our rights are an inconvenience to law enforcement, but do your job. If a judge would not justify a warrant, that means there is a reason. The article mentions the reasonable application of the tools, but we also read daily about gross abuses of authority. This is the foundation of checks and balances put in place to protect us, and ones that should never be sacrificed. To let this slip and go unprotested is to allow our privacy to be manipulated by people who just want us to trust them to do what's right. Kind of ironic, since they're stomping the hell out of our rights to privacy and control of our private data. Highly abusable private data, who we talk to, what we say, where we are. Already there are "helpful" services that allow remote "technical support" of devices. That means we're one step away from the day when law enforcement, without the burden of getting a warrant, can point a finger and snoop on anyone they please. This remote support capability means that our text messages, emails, control of our phone functions, pictures, instant messages, browser history and cookies, documents, music, videos, GPS location, call history, contacts, calendar and more will be subject to the whim of a power that does not have a counterbalance. It is for the greater good that those rules are in place. Backup services could become mines of information in the wrong hands.

The future of our lives will be digital. We'll never gain privacy rights, this is a purely downhill ride. This is not where we should start. We're talking about setting a foundation that will protect us from unwarranted intrusions, pun intended.

Unions Are Not the Enemy: Anti-Union Employers Are the Enemy

Did you catch this part of the news that the Ford truck plant in Louisville will lay off 3,600 worker because parts aren't available from earthquake-devastated Japan?

Laid-off workers will get unemployment benefits and supplemental income paid by Ford under its contract with the United Auto Workers. In all, workers can expect to receive a paycheck worth roughly 65 percent of the gross amount they would have received had they worked next week, UAW Local 862 President Rocky Comito said Friday.

What do you think about that?

Do you think "Good for those workers, that they formed a union that protects them in bad times. Everybody should belong to a union."

Or do you think "Fucking union workers get all the special breaks. Unions should be illegal."

Karoli at Crooks and Liars:

What this twitterer said is something I'm suddenly hearing a lot, so I'm assuming it's the next new reason why everyone should hate unions. Frank Luntz really ought to consider doing some deeper research before going in this direction. This particular tweet was sent in response to the following question asked by another twitterer and passed along by me:

When did it become OK to hate teachers& firefighters &cops? When did this happen? Did CEO's rush into WTC as it collapsed?

Think about that answer. The answer is that hating is bad, but 80% of private workers don't have pensions, and resent union members who do.

Rhetorical question: Wouldn't it be better to join a union and strengthen it so more workers have pensions, rather than the other way around? Part of the reason union pension funds are struggling in the private sector is the drop in covered employees, which can be attributed directly to the demonization of unions and efforts to break them. But only a part is attributable to that.

The much larger reason for union pensions' underfunding -- public AND private -- relates to Wall Street.

SNIP

All of this is to affirm the original respondent's statement: Most private sector workers do not enjoy the right to a pension benefit in addition to Social Security. This is a problem that should unite people, not cause them to divide. A fact: Union members have better, more secure health and pension benefits than non-union members, whether in the private or public sector.

Ask any union member: "Do you think only current union members are entitled to the benefits they get for belonging to a union? Or do you want everybody to be in a strong union and have the same benefits?"

Union members know that employers who get away with underpaying and refusing benefits to their workers hurt all workers. Union members know that each new union member puts pressure on non-union employers to match union wages and benefits. Union members know that when employers demonize unions and try to pit non-union workers against union workers, the only winners are employers. Corporations and Wall Street.

Their answer to your question will be some version of this:

We all do better when we all do better.

Japan Fallout Reaches Kentucky

If it hasn't reached your town yet, it will. This is just the beginning.

The Kentucky Truck Plant will furlough about 3,600 workers next week because parts from disaster-stricken Japan are starting to run out, and high fuel prices have hurt retail sales of its mainstay F-Series Super Duty trucks, Ford Motor Co. senior sales analyst George Pipas said Friday.

Kentucky Truck manufactures F-250, F-350 and larger pickup trucks in addition to Expedition and Lincoln Navigator SUVs.

“The supplier is making parts, but the number of parts coming over has been diminished,” said Pipas. He declined to name the Japan-based supplier or the truck components involved, saying “It is a supplier relations thing. We are not going to throw our supplier under the bus.”

Laid-off workers will get unemployment benefits and supplemental income paid by Ford under its contract with the United Auto Workers. In all, workers can expect to receive a paycheck worth roughly 65 percent of the gross amount they would have received had they worked next week, UAW Local 862 President Rocky Comito said Friday.

Toyota, which has told its workers there would be production cuts due to parts shortages, but hasn’t said when, where or how long, would only commit to its current North American production plans through next week, Dow Jones Newswires reported.

One Very Nasty Piece of Work

In case anyone you know seriously thinks Mike Huckabee is a nice guy:

Attaturk at Firedoglake:

Conservative non-scholars (redundant?) like to praise conservative crackpot David Barton and his fantasy-fiction as history. Plus, we all know there isn’t a conservative politician alive who doesn’t proclaim the Second Amendment the greatest single piece of over-compensation ever given to poorly endowed ‘Muricans by the hand of God (hey…kinky).

Most importantly, when you are able to combine these two dementias into one sound bite, you are clearly worthy of being the Republican front-runner:

“I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his [Barton's] tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced — at gun point no less — to listen to every David Barton message. And I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.”

I suppose it is possible to argue (after all, see above) that wishing Americans be indoctrinated at gun point was somehow taken out of context (as opposed to being plainly fucking nuts) which is why it was later edited out of the video.

I remember reading back in 2007 some Arkansas sources warning that Huckabee had a mean streak. That the aw-shucks jayzus-luvin' facade hid a vicious fucker who enjoyed hurting people.

Now he's revealing his Inner Totalitarian Tyrant. Yep, I don't think it's too early to predict that Huck's gonna take the repug nomination in a walk, that he's gonna leave the snowbilly bleeding from near-fatal wounds, and that he's gonna give Barack Obama the fight of his life.

Proposal of the Year

Jonathan Schell at The Nation:

Some have suggested that in light of the new developments we should abandon nuclear power. I have a different proposal, perhaps more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the peril. Let us pause and study the matter. For how long? Plutonium, a component of nuclear waste, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that half of it is transformed into other elements through radioactive decay. This suggests a time scale. We will not be precipitous if we study the matter for only half of that half-life, 12,000 years. In the interval, we can make a search for safe new energy sources, among other useful endeavors. Then perhaps we’ll be wise enough to make good use of the split atom.

Back to the Past on Energy

Good grief. Nixon's plan for dealing with the oil embargo in 1973 was more forward-looking than this drill-baby-drill fracking nonsense.



Full transcript here.

Florida Repugs Are What's Really Offensive

It's everywhere, but Steve M. nails it:

WHAT OFFENDS REPUBLICANS, AND WHAT DOESN'T

This offends Republicans in Florida:

Democrat chastized for saying 'uterus' on House floor

During last week's discussion about a bill that would prohibit governments from deducting union dues from a worker's paycheck, state Rep. Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, used his time during floor debate to argue that Republicans are against regulations -- except when it comes to the little guys, or serves their specific interests.

At one point Randolph suggested that his wife "incorporate her uterus" to stop Republicans from pushing measures that would restrict abortions. Republicans, after all, wouldn't want to further regulate a Florida business.

Apparently the GOP leadership of the House didn't like the one-liner.

They told Democrats that Randolph is not to discuss body parts on the House floor.

"The point was that Republicans are always talking about deregulation and big government," Randolph said Thursday. "And I always say their philosophy is small government for the big guy and big government for the little guy. And so, if my wife's uterus was incorporated or my friend's bedroom was incorporated, maybe they (Republicans) would be talking about deregulating.

"It's not like I used slang," said Randolph, who actually got the line from his wife....
My compliments to Representative Randolph's wife, by the way -- it's a great line.

This offended Florida Republicans -- but I can't find any evidence that any of them complained about this event involving pictures of bloody aborted fetuses, at a state-run institution:

Florida State University College Republicans invited the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform to FSU to set up a display comparing abortion to genocide. The demonstrators belonged to a group called the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), which travels the country displaying their murals. The demonstrations were set up Wednesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., with counter-protests springing up around it.

Mark Harrington, executive director for the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, explained how abortion could be compared to the genocides experienced by Jews in Nazi Germany, African-Americans in the Jim Crow south and Native Americans in the early days of United States....

(See a picture here.)

The FSU College Republicans went on to deny having invited GAP to mount its display on campus -- but the group did say it reserved space for GAP (freedom of speech, don't you know), and members of GAP say that, yes, they were invited by the College Republicans.

In any event, I see no evidence that any Republican, on campus or off, objected to this display. Huge blow-ups of bloody abortions? Hey, it's not like uttering the proper name for a body part in the state legislature, is it?

Ezra: Your Beltway Bubble is Showing, and Boy Is It Ugly

I have never been a fan of Ezra Klein, but jesusfuckingchocolatechristonapogostick, this idiocy proves he's one of three things: totally in the tank for rethuglicans and bucking for a gig on Fox, too stupid to live, or a motherfucking liar.

Kevin Drum:

Ezra Klein writes today about Republican Party priorities:

I’m not saying that congressional Republicans don’t care about poor people.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't say that, but whatever. Onward:

But they really care about rich people. So far, the policy agenda they’ve pushed has been a mixture of very expensive tax cuts for the very wealthy and very deep cuts to a lot of programs that focus on the very poor. It’s . . . curious.

....Now they’ve moved onto deficit reduction, or at least spending cuts, and their priorities in the 2011 budget are telling. Their cuts are coming from non-defense discretionary spending. That’s a category of spending, as you can see here, that tends to focus on services to the poor, the jobless and children. Among other cuts, they’ve proposed slicing more than $1 billion off Head Start, $1.1 billion off the Public Housing Capital Fund, $752 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, and $5.7 billion from Pell Grants.

I could, of course, go on. Democrats have tried to widen the cuts out to other
categories so their impact falls less heavily on the disadvantaged, but so far, Republicans have refused. If we’re going to cut spending, we’re going to do it on the backs of the poor.

In other words, congressional Republicans don’t care about poor people. But then, that's hardly anything new. They never have before, so it's hardly surprising that they still don't.

Guys, guys, guys. Honestly. Saying republicans don't care about poor people is - in the immortal words of Molly Ivins - like calling a dwarf short.

Get this straight: republicans live to make life more miserable for poor people. If Barack Obama gave rethuglicans the choice of eliminating taxes completely for rich people but also doubling food stamps, unemployment compensation, housing subsidies and welfare for poor people OR eliminating the social safety net entirely but also doubling taxes on the rich, the rethuglicans would take the latter in a heartbeat.

Ezra got it backwards: republicans may or may not love rich people, but they really, REALLY love sticking it to poor people.

Tell ya what, Ezra: you name one thing - ONE - that republicans as a party have done specifically to help poor people in the 102 years since Teddy Roosevelt left office and I will admit that it's remotely possible you are not a Village mouthpiece destined for the Politico shithole.

Stand Up Monday for the Workers King Died Supporting

They're predicting thunderstorms and tornadoes in Louisville Monday but I'm going to be there anyway.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., where he was standing with sanitation workers demanding their dream of a better life. Today, the right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a middle-class life are under attack as never before. Find out more here.

Join us to make April 4, 2011, and the days surrounding it, a day to stand in solidarity with working people in Wisconsin and dozens of other states where corporate-bought politicians are trying to take away the rights Dr. King gave his life for.

Join millions of others who are electrified by King’s same dream and are joining together for our common dreams.

Find an event near you here.

From Katrina vanden Heuvel at the Nation, "It's time for fair share politics":

Yet it’s par for the course in this take-no-prisoners, slashonomics budget debate, where fighting to protect programs that help people get basic needs like housing, healthcare and heat is derided, but no corporate loophole is left unprotected. The debate in Washington has almost always been out of touch with the realities of people’s lives, but that gap has now widened into a gulf—perhaps greater than we’ve seen in generations.

Yet I still have hope.

A strong inside-outside strategy to reset, reboot and reframe the budget debate is emerging. The spirit, energy and outrage we saw in Wisconsin is being sustained and nurtured in communities across the country. Driven by progressives allied with the labor movement, people from a great range of backgrounds are standing up and delivering a message: our problem isn’t one of caring too much for working people and the most vulnerable and it won’t be solved by cutting vital investments. Our problem is freeloading corporations that need to pony up their fair share.

What demoralized progressives need to remember is there are allies on Capitol Hill showing real moxie, and doing what they can to offer real alternatives that respond to rising suffering, inequality and corporate greed, rather than shrink from it.

Consider the good Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Always the people’s champion, he’s called for closing corporate tax loopholes to raise more than $400 billion over a ten-year period. He’s also introduced legislation that would impose a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires and yield up to $50 billion per year. In the House, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky introduced the Fairness in Taxation Act, which would create new tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires. (According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the most popular way to reduce the deficit is through a surtax on millionaires, preferred by 81 percent of Americans!)

SNIP

Common sense and humane response demand that we fight to reset the terms of a suffocatingly narrow and wrongheaded debate and pursue continued movement building. This is our heritage as progressives—independent mass movements have led this country towards its greatest ideals—we’ve seen it with the abolitionists, populists and suffragists and the workers, civil rights, women’s, LGBT and immigrant movements.

On April 4—the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he stood for the rights of sanitation workers in Memphis—this movement takes its next step. Progressive allies, the Nation-inspired US Uncut and people who have simply had enough of the lies and distortions that define this budget debate, and the poor and middle-class who pay the price for it, will participate in actions, teach-ins, demonstrations, vigils and more.

This is our moment to reclaim the best principles of this country. Turnout on April 4.

You're Even Poorer Than You Thought

First, if your income is more than $68K and you support fewer than four people, you need to make a large contribution to this blog toot sweet.

Second, if you think $68K a year is barely enough for four people to live on - you're right!

Ken Layne at Wonkette:

Have you been laboring under the delusion that you’re still part of the tiny, rapidly vanishing Middle Class? Happy April Fools Day! A new study proves that a family of four needs $67,920 a year (pre-tax) to survive in America. And that’s basic: no vacations, no fancy dinners, no wine tastings, no fun-box deliveries from Amazon or Zappos or whatever every couple of months to break up the crushing monotony of work and eventual death. You will, however, spend an average of $12,000 a year on car insurance and payments on your crappy mid-sized sedan, because we don’t have much in the way of public transportation in this country. And you’ll spend another $12,000 a year on child care, because we don’t like to provide socialism in these parts, ha ha. Freedom isn’t free, after all.

Not much left after $12,000 a year in rent and utilities, either. Don’t forget to pay $9,000 in taxes on that $67,920! Who do you think you are, General Electric?
The median household income in the United States is $52,029 — nearly $16,000 shy of what it actually costs to keep your head above water if you’ve got a two-income two-child household.

The DC-based nonprofit Wider Opportunities For Women has been compiling the numbers for exactly what it takes to have basic economic security in this country — housing, food, transportation, child care if you have little kids, utilities, and a tiny contribution to savings for your old age — and the numbers are more than triple the ridiculous official poverty levels.

Read the whole disgusting thing.