Wild Conspiracy Theories in the GOP

June 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

From Think Progress:

“Here is theory that some Congressional Republicans believe: The Obama Administration intentionally handed over automatic weapons to Mexican drug cartels, who they knew would commit violent acts, because they wanted to scare Americans into supporting stricter gun laws.

“That supposed series of events has now led Congress to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt.

The man who started the conspiracy theory also rallied people to break congressional windows. Mike Vanderboegh, a man who once called for militias to break the windows of members of Congress because of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, started this conspiracy theory. Rachel Maddow uncovered that Vanderboegh has been encouraging members of Congress to embrace the theory.

Major Republicans, including Darrell Issa, endorse this conspiracy theory. Among those are Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who is Chair of the House Oversight Committee and is heading up the investigation of Eric Holder. In an interview on FOX, Issa said, “very clearly, they made a crisis, and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s Second Amendment rights.” He alsopushed the theory at an NRA convention. But Issa isn’t the only one who is buying in: former Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich just two days agoagreed with the theory. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), and many other Republicans have voiced support for this theory too.

Read the whole stupefying thing…

Filed under Extremism, Republicans Tagged with , , ,

Privatizing Government – Cui Bono?

June 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Paul Krugman points out that rationale behind right-wing calls for privatizing many government functions, most recently and infamously prisons, does not stand up even to quick scrutiny.  The free-market can not respond with the best solution because there is no market.  There are two or three big groups which are essentially set up to suck at one big teat.

 

You might be tempted to say that it reflects conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.

But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.

And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”

And, as the series he mentions, done by the Times, shows, private companies mean less public scrutiny and more abuses.

Filed under Economy, Republicans

What is Romney Doing?

June 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Garry Wills delves into Dostoyevsky and Kundera to understand Mitt Romney’s laugh.

“Everyone has noticed by now the non-laugh laugh of Mitt Romney, a kind of half-stifled barking. But what does it mean? It is blurted out as abruptly as it is broken off. Is it a kind of punctuation, part comma, part full stop, part interrogatory mark? What, if anything, is it trying to convey? Why does it seem more like coughing or burping than laughter?”

Gary Wills

Filed under Republicans

Is Mitt Romney a Unicorn? Let’s See His Long From Birth Certificate

May 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment

LeftAction has a nice little push back to Arizona’s Secretary of State, Ken Bennet, who threatened to keep Obama off the Arizona ballot because he might have been born in Africa (since retracted, and apologized with the standard ‘if I’ve offended anyone’ line.

There are a lot of nutty birthers still pushing their idiocy, including Donald Trump who is now supporting Romney with money and face — and Mr. Mitt won’t repudiate the Donald’s poisonous nonsense.

Romney is scheduled to hold a fundraiser Tuesday night in Las Vegas with Donald Trump, the nation’s most prominent “birther.” The real-estate tycoon, in interviews last week with the Daily Beast and Tuesday with the Las Vegas Review Journal, revived his charge that Obama was born in Kenya.

Romney on Monday declined to repudiate Trump, telling reporters aboard his plane: “I don’t agree with all the people who support me. . . . But I need to get 50.1 percent or more. And I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”

It’s not the first time Romney, who once distanced himself from the birthers, has failed to stand up to sinister elements on the right. But this is a particularly unsavory crowd.

 

Dana Milbank

So get on board and sign up at LeftAction, demanding to see the Mitt man’s birth certificate…

 

 

 

Filed under Extremism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

The Supreme Court: Legal Judgment from Blogs and Tweets

April 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Several commentators have broken the news of  the visible twitter trail from right wing opinionators to the tongues of the Supreme Court justices.  They are no longer immersed in studies of precedent and muscular legal thinking but are glued, apparently, to the latest in social media.

E.J Dionne in the Washington Post followed up a column on the activist right wing judges with another calling recent events in the GOP a stealthy coup.

[in the Oral Arguments] conservative justices repeatedly spouted views closely resembling the tweets and talking points issued by organizations of the sort funded by the Koch brothers. Don’t take it from me. Charles Fried, solicitor general for Ronald Reagan, told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that it was absurd for conservatives to pretend that the mandate created a market in health care. “The whole thing is just a canard that’s been invented by the tea party . . .,” Fried said, “and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.”

The right’s stealthy coup

Chris Hayes, filling in for Rachel Maddow, on March 29, showed us that very trail:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Filed under Politics Tagged with , , ,

Krugman on ALEC and Guns

March 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Krugman takes the news of the shooting of young Trayvon Martin beyond the immediate firestorm to look at the Florida “stand your ground” law, and how it came into being — in  20 states!  The take away, something we should all be hyper aware of has the acronym ALEC — American Legislative Exchange Council

Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.

Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization…

Read All

Filed under Politics Tagged with , , ,

The Age of Ignorance

March 20, 2012 by 1 Comment

Whew! Here’s some plain talk we don’t usually hear from the better behaved side of the aisle…

Charles Simic is a poet of international repute. He teaches at the University of New Hampshire where he is Professor Emeritus.

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

Read all at NYRB

And read a poem, Eyes Fastened With Pins, at Poets.org

 

[cross posted at AllInOneBoat.org]

Filed under Poetry, Politics Tagged with , ,

Risk Free Entrepreneurship by Mitt Romney

March 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Louis Menand, the fine student of American Literature and Culture, [see especially his Pulitzer winning The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America]  has an interesting piece in the current New Yorker, using Michael Kranish and Scott Helman’s biography “The Real Romney” (HarperCollins), and Mitt Romney’s own campaign book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” to take a look at the current front runner for the Republican nomination.

There are many nuggets of interest, including a short course on theories of management.  One that leaped out at me was  the telling of Romney’s actual experience of the risks of entrepreneurship and the “creative destruction” he is fond of citing as necessary.  He was asked by his boss, Bill Bain, at  Bain & Company, to head up Bain Capital, premised on a new business model.  Romney said no.

It sounded too risky, he said. Bain (who was Kranish and Helman’s source for this account) replied that if the business didn’t work out he would guarantee Romney his old job back at Bain & Company, at the old salary plus any raises he would have earned. Romney was worried, though, that if the new business failed it might damage his reputation. Bain promised that if Bain Capital didn’t work out he would provide Romney with a cover story—something about his value as a consultant being too great to lose. So Romney finally took the job. As Bain told Kranish and Helman, Romney was facing “no professional or financial risk.”

Filed under Books, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

“A Special Pile of Human Excrement” Dies

March 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Andrew Breitbart, who opined on Ted Kennedy’s death that “he was a special pile of human excrement” has died, fortunately for the world,  at the age of 43.  Whatever his father-in-law wants to believe, it was not of natural causes.

And why anyone who witnessed the viciousness of his personality and his use of it against others would have nice words to say about him, is beyond me.

It is particularly illuminating that the phalanx of right wing presidential candidate zombies who want to impose their special brand of morality on the country admire a man with none, of any kind.

 

From the campaign trail, the Republican presidential candidates offered their condolences.

“That’s shocking, obviously prayers go out to him and his family,” said Rick Santorum, who called Breitbart a “powerful force.”

“What a huge loss, in my opinion for our country, and certainly for the conservative movement,” added Santorum, who was stumping in Dalton, Ga. “I’m crestfallen.”

“Ann and I are deeply saddened by the passing of @AndrewBreitbart: brilliant entrepreneur, fearless conservative, loving husband and father,” tweeted fellow presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

“Andrew Breitbart was the most creative conservative in the country, in his use of technology, in his understanding of how to wage cultural war using the new media, in his courage in standing up and fighting, and I think in his zest and excitement for the life of politics and the life of ideas. It was an enormous tragedy to lose him. A tragedy for his family, but it’s a tragedy for the conservative movement and I think it’s a tragedy for America,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told POLITICO Thursday.

*
We should cheer every step of Shirley Sherrod’s defamation law suit against him and hope it continues against his estate.

Filed under Politics, Pundits Tagged with

Ron Paul Supporters Hacked: Not Pretty

February 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Several sites have picked up on claims by Anonymous that it has hacked into American Third Position (A3P) and discovered a trove of data linking Ron Paul with members of A3P and the Board of Directors, as well as Nick Griffin of the British National Party.

International Business Times was the first to report, but it has been followed by Little Green Footballs, a formerly dependable right-wing site (now not so much,) which  calls A3P  “racist Neanderthals,” and Pensito Review.

Paul’s campaign denies any connection with A3P.

I can’t find any of the actual “dump,” from Anonymous, just their statement about what it found, and a list of racist sites it  claims to have defaced.   Release them, please.  We’d like to see.

The New Republic in its January 17, 2012 edition posted a long article detailing the articles that appeared under Ron Paul’s name in his newsletter Survival Report, in the 1990s — most of which Paul has recently claimed were not actually his thoughts. Yes, of course, people do change their minds over matters as serious as these.  To be convinced of a change, however, ownership of both before and after has to be acknowledged.

From left, Paul at the 2007 Values Voters debate with Don Black, of the neo-Nazi web site Stormfront, and his son, Derek Black

Filed under Politics, Race Tagged with , ,

← Older posts