Clip by incitebytes: “Republicans Say The Darndest Things (Greatest Modern Hits),” chronicling some of the (many) dumb, stupid things Republicans have said over the last few years (it was really tough narrowing it down to 10 minutes). Clip features: Joe Barton, Sue Lowden, Sharron Angle, Andre Bauer, Louis Gohmert, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, George Allen, Sarah Palin, Steve Doocy, people at Palin rally, Strongsville, Ohio and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Michele Bachmann and George Bush.
Washington, D.C. — “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, but consistency, foolish or otherwise, is something that the current Republican Congressional leadership wants very little part of.
This won’t be the week, it turns out, that Congress votes on whether we need to continue giving oil companies and foreign petro-states like Saudi Arabia billions of dollars in tax breaks. Senate Majority Leader Reid says he can’t yet schedule floor time, but the bill will come up soon. But it’s clear that in both the House and the Senate the issue of throwing our money at the richest companies and countries in the world is not going away.
Meanwhile it is amusing to watch the Republicans try to parse the words “deficit reduction” and “fiscal conservatism” to somehow obscure the reality that they are about to choose between their announced principles (and voters) on the one hand and their biggest campaign donors on the other. (Oil companies give 77 percent of their campaign gifts to Republicans.)
Rush Limbaugh doesn’t see why this should be hard for them. When, briefly, House Speaker Boehner announced that he thought Big Oil ought to pay its “fair share” of the nation’s tax bill, Limbaugh grumped, “If I were a political leader and a Republican, and the Democrats were hellbent on ending Big Oil subsidies and raising taxes on Big Oil in circumstances like we are in now …. I would defend Big Oil! Especially now.” (more…)
So the calvary’s here huh? The Tea Party is going to save the day right? I’ve heard those terms used by others in referring to the Tea Party and the new blood in our political leadership. Congratulations, you wanted it and now you got it.
What you got is leadership that would turn Medicare and programs like it into something totally different. Starting in 2022 their plan would no longer directly pay bills for senior citizens in the Medicare program. Instead, recipients would choose a plan from a list of private providers, which the federal government would subsidize. This proposed plan by Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, is very similar to what is affectionately called “Obamacare” by the Paul Ryan types and Tea Party types in that it would create a government subsidy for Americans to help them purchase healthcare.
The thing is “ObamaCare” doesn’t include senior citizens in its dynamic but does include younger healthier Americans who would be more apt to afford it. When it comes to Ryan’s bill, the older population is naturally more illness prone and therefore their healthcare would cost more. The government can provide subsidies of $1000 a month for healthcare, but if a senior citizen’s healthcare costs him $3000 a month and his retirement and social security totals a fixed amount of $900 a month, there’s nothing to live off of.
Talk about killing grandma. Oh, by the way, this same leadership is the one that balks at increasing taxes on the wealthy. As a matter of fact, Ryan’s bill which passed on the 15th of April in the Tea Party/Republican controlled Congress would lower the top income and corporate tax rates from 35% to 25%. What an outrage at this time of such a large deficit right? (more…)
Five years ago, a 47-year-old Missouri woman began a duplicitous on-line courtship through MySpace with a 13-year-old neighbor who once had been friends with the woman’s daughter.
The adult, Lori Drew, flirted with the 13-year-old, Megan Meier, through the guise of a fictitious, 16-year-old character named Josh Evans. Suddenly, “Josh” broke up with Miss Meier, writing to her, “the world would be a better place without you.” Just hours later, Miss Meier hung herself in her bedroom.
Words have consequences.
Drew wasn’t charged with the child’s death. In fact, a judge reversed her conviction on computer fraud charges, saying the law was intended to deal with hacking, not murder. But for most Americans, there is something deeply disturbing, something morally, if not criminally, wrong with deliberate torment, with predatory viciousness. Drew eluded accountability the same way conservatives are seeking to evade culpability after their irresponsible speech has provoked the delusional to violence.
It’s hard to draw a line directly from Drew’s cruel words to the noose around Miss Meier’s neck. Similarly, it’s difficult to directly link violent political rhetoric like Sarah Palin’s illustration showing gun sight cross hairs on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Arizona district to the shattering of Giffords’ office door after her vote for health insurance reform last March or Jared L. Loughner’s shooting spree last weekend that left six dead and Giffords and 13 others wounded.
What is clear, however, is that vile and threatening communication that becomes so repetitive that it’s routine has the effect of sanctioning an atmosphere of violence.
Conservatives are yammering that they’re not the only ones who engage in brutal rhetoric. That’s true. But in a contest for production of violent words and images, Republicans would, to use their words, “kill” the Democrats.
The Department of Homeland Security concluded in an April 2009 internal report that right-wing extremism, with a growing potential for violence, was on the rise. That was followed last spring by Capitol security officials reporting a tripling of threats against members of Congress – almost all from opponents of health care reform – in other words, from Republicans, right-wingers or people influenced by GOP TV and radio front men like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, who personally profit from the hostile climate they generate.
They didn’t stop though they had fair warning about the consequences. Consider the case of Byron Williams. He launched a 12-minute shoot out with California Highway Patrol officers last July after they stopped him for erratic driving. A police affidavit filed the following day said Williams intended to “start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at The Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”
The Right has for decades slammed the ACLU, whose sole purpose is to protect constitutional rights, but Glenn Beck had made the Tides Foundation, once an obscure progressive organization, famous by attacking it repeatedly – at least 29 times between January and the July shoot out last year, including two tirades the week before Williams began his assassination mission.
Williams, who was armed during the shootout with a handgun, shotgun, rifle and body armor, said he watched FOX News to see Beck, who blew his mind, and who he viewed as a “schoolteacher.”
Still Beck, expressed no remorse and tried to squirm out of any responsibility for inciting Williams, saying on his show:
“I am the only one that has mentioned the Tides Foundation. . . So that’s what they’re using. This guy couldn’t have found this out on his own; it had to come from me. . .America, if you don’t think that they will use anything, they will. They absolutely will.”
Words do have consequences, Mr. Beck, no matter how many times you cravenly shout denials.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives insisted on reading the U.S. Constitution on the opening day of the new Congressional session. It was, however, nothing but political theatre because conservatives disassociate the rights it grants from the incumbent responsibilities. Right-wing leaders like Beck disavow responsibility altogether.
When it was Arizona Rep. Giffords’s turn to read, the chamber had come upon the First Amendment, which guarantees, among other things, the right to free speech. It even guarantees Republican Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl the right to go on television the day after the shootings and contend that Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik didn’t have the right to speak about the complicity in the crime of vile, hateful and threatening political speech.
The courts have established the “crowded theater” test to determine when free speech ends and responsibility begins. Americans are responsible to refrain from yelling “fire” in a crowded theater when, in fact, there are no flames. The freedom to yell ends at the point when it endangers others.
Republicans are recklessly yelling. During the fall campaign, Arizona Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle suggested her supporters consider their Second Amendment rights if Sen. Harry Reid were re-elected. Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman said at a Tea Party rally on July 4, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and then was hired by new GOP Congressman Allen West to serve as chief of staff. Tea Party contender Jesse Kelly held a fund raiser in June asking his supporters to “get on target to . . . remove Gabrielle Giffords from office” by shooting a “fully automatic M16” with him.
Republicans bear responsibility for the consequences of this kind of brutal discourse – a political atmosphere charged with violence. Just like Glenn Beck, though, Republicans guard their rights, but shirk the concomitant responsibilities.
***
Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.
Although Arianna Huffington’s recent book Third World America was mostly about economics, my great fear is that her idea that this great country is moving too far in the direction of a third world nation was eerily prescient in more ways than one.
When members of Congress start being assassinated, when the rhetoric about politics and politicians becomes increasingly violent and extreme in nature, and when corrupt oligarchs with way too economic and political power assume they can operate outside the bounds of the law, you have the hallmarks of a Third World country. I have been focusing more and more on the incredible crisis brewing in the financial sector because the corruption there is at the core of so much that is messing up our country’s economy, but the assassination attempt on Gabby Giffords this weekend was a deadly and tragic reminder of how we have the potential to slide more and more toward Third World status in more than just economics. When media figures like Beck and Limbaugh, politicians like Palin, and way too many others so loosely talk about “death panels,” or the President being “friends with terrorists,” or the need to reload, we have a big problem in our democracy: the mentally ill who are close to the edge can easily go over the edge, and the far right borderline violent militia types start seeming like they are mainstream.
I am not an alarmist, a conspiracy theorist, or a pessimist about all this. I don’t think we are on the verge of a Third World dictatorship. This country has seen waves of political violence and terrorism repeatedly in its history, including assassinations, bombings of churches and clinics, and lynchings, and we have survived and overcome. This country has seen waves of economic concentration of wealth and power in the late 1800s and the 1920s before the Great Depression, and we survived that too, making the reforms we needed to make to get stronger. But we are at a very dangerous moment, and not just because of the threat of violence we saw play out this weekend. (more…)
By Bill Lucy
President, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists
Don’t pity Rand Paul, who pleads he’s not the civil rights bogeyman that his own words have exposed him to be. Paul, the new prince of the Tea Party movement and the Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky, got in hot water last week when he said private businesses shouldn’t be forced to adhere to civil right rights laws.
Even though Paul quickly backpedaled from his bigoted remark, I just don’t buy it. Based on Dr. Paul’s previous writings on civil rights, his comment was not a benign slip of the tongue.
For me, Rand Paul epitomizes what I would call the “rise (or return) of the Rollback Movement:” the Tea Party zealots who want to ‘take back their government;’ Arizona’s far-right Legislature that passed a hateful immigration law that blatantly discriminates against people with brown skin; the Texas State Board of Education that now requires students to study Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address [to secede from the United the States of America!] and to study the “contributions of Confederate generals.”
What binds these groups together is a passion and determination to rollback history and shift the burden of their economic and cultural insecurity onto people of color striving for a more tolerant, inclusive and equitable America.
This Rollback Movement recites the coded buzzwords spewed by conservative pied-pipers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. All the while, mainstream media rush to turn xenophobic noisemakers like the Tea Party into political celebrities. As a result, new dimensions of the economic crisis go unreported or get marginalized.
For example, last Friday (May 21), The Washington Post gave Rand Paul’s controversial remarks front-page coverage. Yet, the same day, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper totally ignored the release of a stunning new report that reveals the wealth gap between blacks and whites has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation from $20,000 to $95,000. But the study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University did catch the attention of James Parks on the AFL-CIO’s blog. According to the study:
African American families have fewer economic resources to fall back on during this economic crisis than do white families, mainly due to discrimination and tax policies that favor the rich.
In fact, a typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class.
That means blacks had little or no money to start businesses, send children to college or ensure a secure retirement, the authors say.
Black households have also been dealt another wealth-building blow in the shrinking part of the workforce that is unionized:
In 2009, black union membership plummeted by more than 200,000, constituting 27 percent of the total union jobs lost and more than double the share of black workers in unions (13 percent.)
This disproportionate erosion of black union jobs means African-American workers – already saddled with a steep wealth deficit – will lose health care coverage for their families, pension income for their retirement and a nest egg to help their children achieve some level of financial security.
That’s why with the economy barely creeping back to life, it’s imperative that workers of color have equal access to jobs that compensate them fully and fairly. Otherwise, the racial income and wealth gaps will only deepen and multiple over generations.
Congress can help shape the inclusive economy we must build to ensure shared prosperity across lines of class, color and gender. A crucial step in that direction would be passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would empower workers to join unions and demand fair pay without intimidation or retaliation.
I’m hopeful President Obama will champion this vital bill as he fine-tunes his strategy to tackle the jobs crisis. Then let the Rollback Movement confront an energized and multi-hued progressive movement.
***
In 1972, William Lucy founded the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), an organization of union leaders and rank-and-file members dedicated to the needs of black and minority group workers. Lucy, who served as International Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) for nearly 40 years, also co-founded the Free South Africa Movement. This grassroots campaign sparked widespread opposition to apartheid in the U.S. When South Africa conducted its first post-apartheid elections, Lucy served as a monitor with the AFL-CIO delegation. In November of 1994, he became the first African American to be elected president of Public Services International (PSI), the world’s largest union federation. A year later, the AFL-CIO appointed him to its executive council. In addition Lucy served on the boards of directors of civic groups such as the African America Institute, Americans for Democratic Action, and the Center for Policy Alternatives.
By Michael Brune
Author and Executive Director of the Sierra Club
I haven’t had many good laughs during the past few weeks. Since April 20th, I’ve been working alongside Sierra Club volunteers across the country to make sure that BP is held accountable for the catastrophic disaster in the Gulf. But I had to pause today for a good long laugh when I heard that Rush Limbaugh suggested that the Sierra Club should pay the bill for BP’s “leak.”
According to Rush, the Sierra Club and other “greeniacs” forced BP to drill far offshore. Well, let me just say to all you dittoheads out there: If you believe that, then I’ve got a Bridge to Nowhere to sell you.
Sure, I understand that supporters of “Drill, Baby Drill” are now in the uncomfortable position of watching this disaster make a mockery of their mantra. And I know from years of working to protect the environment that Big Oil and its allies will try every conceivable tactic to keep our country addicted to oil. But no one can deny the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels. And no one can deny who’s responsible for the recklessness that led to this disaster.
We can’t let Rush Limbaugh or anyone else distract us from the truth. BP is to blame for the disaster playing out before us, and BP must pay.
But Rush is right about one thing: The Sierra Club needs to do its part. We’re working hard to support the communities in the Gulf. We’re working hard to keep BP accountable. And we’re working hard to move this country to a clean energy future. Want to help us, Rush? You can make a donation here.
By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future
Glenn Beck has captured national attention with his caustic poison. The aging right-wing troubadours — Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly — still rouse the wingnuts and enforce discipline among Republican legislators. They’ve peddled the fantasies about ACORN and the all-powerful poverty lobby, and launched a search-and-destroy hunt for targets of opportunity in the Obama administration. Progressives have sensibly organized to question Beck’s advertisers, and even the president has called him out.
But it is worth remembering — Glenn Beck is not blocking the passage of a good health care bill. The old and new carny acts of the right aren’t undermining the energy legislation or frustrating financial reform. To focus on who and what is standing in the way — follow the money.
On health care, the lockstep opposition of Republicans in Congress is deplorable, but Republicans don’t have the votes to block progress. The president is forced to negotiate with Democrats who have 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House and could pass a good bill tomorrow if they unified.
The angry tea bag activists shouting slogans in town meetings in August provided drama, but the true opposition is writing checks, not waiving signs. They are wearing pin stripes, not jeans and t-shirts. They represent wealthy insurance company CEOs, not angry workers or small business owners.
The Washington media likes to paint the divisions as ideological. Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are said to be opposed to “big government,” cautious about spending, more concerned about deficits, reflecting more conservative districts and voters. Sure, there are ideological differences between the parties. And legislators do cater to the major interests in their districts. And no doubt, the Democratic Party is a big tent, with a broad range of political opinion.
But the president didn’t cut a deal with Big Pharma to sustain the ban that prohibits Medicare from negotiating lower prices on drugs because of ideology or a policy debate. He did it to neutralize one of the powerful lobbies standing in the way of reform. The deals with utilities and coal companies in the energy bill aren’t about ideology; they are about special interests and political clout. Republicans don’t mind government spending when pouring hundreds of millions into subsidizing insurance companies to compete with Medicare. Blue Dogs aren’t worried about costs when they oppose a public option that would help keep insurance companies honest.
The re-born McCarthy like conspiratorial fantasies of Glenn Beck should not go unanswered. His effort to discredit the administration by searching for appointees to target should be resisted and scorned.
But everyone should be clear. The president has called on the Congress to act on fundamental reforms that cannot be avoided. Our broken health care system is unaffordable and must be fixed. Moving to new energy is a national security, economic and environmental imperative, not a choice. Fundamental financial reform is necessary if we are to avoid a worse crisis in the near future.
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans in Congress oppose these reforms. They want, as Limbaugh proclaimed, the president to fail. But they aren’t the major roadblocks to the change we need. What stands in the way is the organized power of the entrenched lobbies that have a direct stake in limiting change, and are willing to spend hundreds of millions to obstruct it. Their legions are less angry citizens, than sophisticated lobbyists, increasingly Democrats, many of them retired legislators. They deliver campaign contributions, not votes. They threaten negative campaign ads, not authentic citizen uprisings.
With literally billions at stake, progressives will never be able to match the money of the industries fighting off change. Our only chance is to make their money toxic — to expose the contributions, the lobbyists, the inside deals — and to make legislators understand the president was right when he said we can’t let the permanent lobbies define what is possible in the nation’s capital.
The struggle over health care reform is now reaching its climax. The backroom struggle over energy and financial reform is already fierce. It is time for Democrats to unite to get these done. It is time for the two or three Senate Republicans with any iota of independence to put country over party and be part of the solution. But most of all, it is time for us to follow the money, to track the contributions, expose the lobbyists, and challenge the legislators in both parties who hope to benefit by serving special interests rather than representing their constituents.
Check out opensecrets.org, where the Center for Responsive Politics tracks contributions. Take a look at their study with the Sunlight Foundation on the lobbyists undermining health care reform. Get angry, not cynical. Let your legislators hear from you — and join with your neighbors to demand that they represent you and not the interests that are writing campaign checks. The president has called on the Congress to deal with fundamental national challenges that can not be ignored (although his predecessors were happy to do so). We’ll not have a better chance to get vital reforms done. But to succeed, legislators in both parties will have to learn that voters aren’t going to put up with the cozy beltway business as usual.
Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele appears to be suffering philosophical identity confusion, you know, like some people experience sexual identity confusion.
He’s got an organization named United STEELE Workers Union, white hardhat emblem and all, collecting members for him on Facebook. It had 255 worldwide as of June 19.
This is disconcerting on so many levels, least of which is that I head the original, authentic United Steelworkers Union (USW). It has, by the way, 1.2 million retired and active members in North America.
Far more importantly, Steele historically has expressed hostility toward unions. When President Obama agreed to help General Motors restructure in bankruptcy, for example, Steele said it was “another handout to the union cronies who helped bankroll his presidential campaign.” Now that there’s a union created in his own image, if Steele slams labor organizations, is he criticizing himself? Has he become a “union crony?”
Steele can perch that white hard hat atop his head, but he’s going to have to labor at learning some hard philosophical lessons before becoming a real steelworker, a true union man.
A union brother or sister knows it’s all for one and one for all. Our union brothers and sisters don’t see themselves as “ownership society” islands. That’s because they know when the sun stops shining, it’s nice to have union siblings to help clean up after the hurricane.
To join, Steele must learn that a union man has his brother’s back; he doesn’t stab him in the back. This may be a tough lesson for the Republican. Consider, for example, what Mark Bergeron, the STEELE Worker Union Facebook group administrator, says on his blog about the party’s 2008 nominee for president:
“How far to the left do we as Conservatives go to satisfy some of our Moderate ( Liberal ) Republicans? What sacrifices will we make to the Moderates? Abortion? Illegal Immiration [sic], a little more Socialism? Less Fiscal Responsibility? My point is that we have already made concessions to these softies and we got John McCain.”
In addition to insulting McCain, that smacks of exclusion. It is the Republican Party wringing itself out, shedding diversity at the insistence of its most conservative, self-appointed, over-amplified leader, Rush Limbaugh. So it has been reduced to little more than wealthy white protestant males — and wannabes. A union, by contrast, is a collective. By nature, then, it is inclusive. This may be a tough one for Steele to accept, considering he refused to stand up to Limbaugh earlier this year when the talk show host insisted he, not Steele, headed the Republican Party.
The STEELE Worker Union Facebook site says the group is interested in organizing. That’s a great first step in the correct direction. An important function of an international union, like the United Steelworkers, is to help employees at individual workplaces organize their local unions. Those efforts in recent years, however, have been thwarted by corporate campaigns of intimidation against union organizers and sympathizers. This is documented in a study called, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organization,” released in May by Cornell University professor, Kate Bronfenbrenner.
Bronfenbrenner, who has researched labor issues for a quarter century, documents employers obstructing unionization by firing union organizers, threatening to close down the shop, cutting wages and benefits, and forcing workers to meet one-on-one with supervisors who interrogate them to determine whether they support the union. Bronfenbrenner found employers conducted these coercive tactics, many of which are illegal, in the run-up to union elections more frequently than in the past to dissuade workers from voting for unionization.
The upshot is that organizers and union sympathizers risk their livelihoods and corporations are increasingly killing unions. The Employee Free Choice Act now before Congress would significantly reduce that. It would allow workers — rather than the employer — to decide how to form the union. It would give workers the right to choose whether to form their union by collecting signatures from a majority of the workers or by conducting a secret ballot election. The threat-filled period before balloting could be eliminated, if the workers wanted.
The United Steelworkers union actively and vociferously supports the Employee Free Choice Act. If Michael Steele wants to be a real union man, he must do so as well. I will be waiting to hear from him. If I do, I will be glad to take him under my wing and mentor him. I will make him an Associate Member of the real United Steelworkers union. We will embrace him. Of course, I will warn my male members to be careful not to actually hug him because this is a guy, so touchy about unions, that he even used the word “crazy” to describe civil unions.
