New American Dark Ages
Above all, I have one question for any candidate: Do you believe in evolution? If the answer is no, you cannot serve in any elected office (or as a teacher).
“To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”
That’s the best line of the day.
Rick Perry and the ‘treason’ card – PostPartisan – The Washington Post
By E.J. Dionne
Right-wingers have always loved accusing those they disagree with of “treason,” and it didn’t take Gov. Rick Perry more than a few days to get there.
Rick Perry and the ‘treason’ card – PostPartisan – The Washington Post
Six and a half years ago, I wrote this blog entry following the coronation of Duhbya, the Idiot King, the strutting fool, the faux Texun. Now, it turns out the Confederates are masquerading as tea partiers.
mjh’s blog — The Real Inaugural Address
Greetings from Richmond, Virginia, the Capital of the Confederacy. My name is Jefferson Davis and I am here to accept my mandate — the people have spoken! It was never red versus blue states; it was always Blue versus Gray. [keep reading after you finish the current entry]
mjh’s blog — The Real Inaugural Address
The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism – War Room – Salon.com
From the earliest years of the American republic, white Southern conservatives when they have lost elections and found themselves in the political minority have sought to extort concession from national majorities by paralyzing or threatening to destroy the United States. …
As white Southerners, upset with the Democratic Party’s racial and social liberalism, migrated into the post-Goldwater GOP, they brought their Dixiecrat attitudes into the party of Lincoln. The Kemp-Roth tax bill of 1981, which inaugurated the policy of creating permanent deficits by slashing taxes without cutting spending, had its strongest support among Southern and Western members of Congress and the least support in the fiscally conservative Northeast.
The Republican Party’s attempted government shutdown of 1995 marked the new domination of the Republican Party by Southerners like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. The impeachment of their fellow Southerner Bill Clinton was an attempted coup d’état by the Southern white minority in the United States, which, as in 1860, was frustrated because its candidate lost the presidential election.
The debt ceiling crisis is the latest case in which the radical right in the South has held America hostage until its demands are met. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln refused to appease the Southern fanatics. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress chose not to follow their example and instead gave in. In doing so, they have encouraged the neo-Confederate minority in Congress to find yet another opportunity in the near future to extort concessions from America’s majority by sabotaging America’s government.
Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation
[hat tip to dangerousmeta or NewMexiKen, I can’t remember which]
The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism – War Room – Salon.com
And a counterpoint:
The Tea Party is bigger than the South – War Room – Salon.com
Michael Lind is a very smart and wonderfully erudite writer with a bit of an obsession. His understanding of the deeper cultural wellsprings of American history and politics has left him, as a sort of side effect, with an abiding fearful hostility toward a particular group of people, the "Anglo-Celtic" Southerner. Lind sees them everywhere in our politics as a baleful, disturbing presence spreading bacilli of violence, bigotry and religious fanaticism. And in his recent Salon essay arguing that the Tea Party movement is an essentially Southern phenomenon, his prejudices blind him to a rather important and unprecedented phenomenon: the virtual disappearance of geography as a significant factor in the ideological character of the Republican Party.
The Tea Party is bigger than the South – War Room – Salon.com
In keeping with disappointment with Obama’s performance:
What if Barack Obama is a Reagan Democrat in every meaningful way, right down to a fanatical belief in trickle down economics? What if the president counts on corporate media and his army of careerists and sycophants to shut down and cover up cracks in the Obama consensus through which reality might leak? What if Obama is not weak, or timid, or vacillating or waiting for us to “make him do it”? What if what we’ve seen is all there is, all there ever was?
The truth is that Barack Obama’s actions are entirely rational, understandable and even predictable if you suppose him to have been a vicious, vacuous and cynical right wing operative from the very beginning. …
Still don’t believe it’s the job of corporate Democrats to push the corporate agenda further than Republicans ever could? When Bush 2 couldn’t even pass his own bankster bailout in September of 2008, he called Barack Obama in off the campaign trail to round up a sufficient number of Democratic votes, including votes in the Congressional Black Caucus, to pass the Bush bailout. Before even assuming office, Barack Obama was carrying out Republican policies even Republicans could not enact. Upon becoming president himself, Barack Obama quintupled down on the $3 trillion Bush bankster bailout with a further $16 trillion, the largest transfer of public wealth to private hands in the history of humankind.
So if you’re an Obama supporter, and you’re disappointed that your president won’t fight for you — if you’re an Obama supporter and you wonder why the president won’t stand up for Medicaid, Medicare and social security — here’s the answer. The president really, really is smarter than you. He knows what side he’s on and you don’t. He knows that the two-party system is a veal pen, where as long as “he can play good cop to the Republicans’ ever worsening bad cop, the game is fixed, and not in your favor.
Look out! Over there! It’s President Michelle Bachman!
[hat tip to dangerousmeta]
The Cult That Is Destroying America – NYTimes.com
The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.
What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.
[hat tip to NewMexiKen]
I donated more money to Obama than to all the candidates I’ve donated to before. I supported him when Hillary was the front runner and could have been my candidate. When Barack Hussein Obama was elected president, I felt America was reclaimed from the strutting dimwitted Duhbya and the ugly, small-minded, cheap bastards. I felt proud of my country, yes, for the first time.
I still think Obama is smart, decent, and competent. I even see he was a bit clever to get the Republicans to avoid a repeat of the recent nonsense in 2012 (surely they don’t comprehend how stupid they look). However, Obama is incapable of standing up for progressive values against the bullies of the GOP who see only their way and no other. The GOP doesn’t just want 100%, it wants you to give up more to persuade them to accept 110%, at which point half of them will crow like drunken frat boys and the other half will demand more concessions. Piss on them.
Progressives need a candidate NOW to pull Obama back to the left – the center, really. And, that whoop you just heard was the GOP celebrating their only goal: to keep Obama to one term. If only Democrats had worked with such focus to defeat Duhbya in 2004, the whole world would be a better off. Fuck you, GOP. You’re taking us all to Hell with you.
Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post
What’s also important, but not evident, on this chart is that Obama’s major expenses were temporary — the stimulus is over now — while Bush’s were, effectively, recurring. The Bush tax cuts didn’t just lower revenue for 10 years. It’s clear now that they lowered it indefinitely, which means this chart is understating their true cost. Similarly, the Medicare drug benefit is costing money on perpetuity, not just for two or three years. And Boehner, Ryan and others voted for these laws and, in some cases, helped to craft and pass them.To relate this specifically to the debt-ceiling debate, we’re not raising the debt ceiling because of the new policies passed in the past two years. We’re raising the debt ceiling because of the accumulated effect of policies passed in recent decades, many of them under Republicans. It’s convenient for whichever side isn’t in power, or wasn’t recently in power, to blame the debt ceiling on the other party. But it isn’t true.
By Ezra Klein | 01:00 PM ET, 07/25/2011
Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post
[hat to John Fleck]
