UnAmerican Fox News Misleads Nation About Economy and Deficit

Can't Add It Up: Fox Still Misleading On Economy, Debt, Stimulus

Fox & Friends repeatedly attacked comments made by Democratic officials and legislators to suggest that the 2009 stimulus failed and that the Obama administration is primarily to blame for the nation's debt. In fact, economists have agreed that the stimulus promoted job growth and had positive economic effects, and several analyses have shown that most of the U.S. debt in the past decade can be attributed to former President Bush's tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pelosi: "If [Obama] Hadn't Taken The Actions That He Did ... The [Economic] Situation Would Be Worse." In an interview that aired on the June 5 edition of CBS's Face the Nation, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said:

What the president has done has improved the situation from where it may have been," Pelosi said. "If he hadn't taken the actions he did, the situation would be worse. He pulled us from the brink of the financial crisis, from an economic crisis, and now we have to dig out of a deep debt. And we have to also make it clear that we're not getting into this situation again. [CBS, Face The Nation, 6/5/11 via CBSNews.com]

Fox & Friends Mock Pelosi And Goolsbee, Pin Debt On Obama, Attack Stimulus

Carlson: "How Long Can You Continue To Say" The Recession "Is Something That They Inherited?" On the June 6 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, the co-hosts discussed Goolsbee and Pelosi's comments about the economy. Co-host Gretchen Carlson said:

CARLSON: The argument to me is, you know, how long can you continue to say that the hard hit recession of 2007, moving into 2008 is something that they inherited? I mean at one point, at what point does it become this administration's situation that they have to take full control for, and I think we're kind of teetering right now on the fact that it is their responsibility now and the policies that they've put into place to try and fix it. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 6/6/11]

Carlson is a typical Fox Stalinist. She spouts propaganda like a fountain:

But Economists Agree That The Stimulus Raised Employment, Had "Very Substantial" Effects

Independent And Private Analysts: Stimulus Significantly Raised Employment. As Media Matters has previously documented, many analysts confirmed that the stimulus significantly raised employment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the stimulus increased the number of people employed, as of the second quarter of FY2010, by "between 1.4 million and 3.3 million." Moody's Economy.com estimated it would have created 1.9 million jobs by 2010. [Media Matters, 9/26/10]

Economists: "The Effects Of The Fiscal Stimulus" On Economy "Appear Very Substantial." Economists also agreed that the stimulus was effective. A March 2010 study in The Wall Street Journal found that 70 percent of economists surveyed said the stimulus "boosted growth and mitigated job losses." ABC News reported on February 18, 2010, that most of the economists on its panel thought the economy "would be worse today without the big aid package." And a February 2010 survey of 203 members of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) found that "[e]ighty-three percent believe that GDP is currently higher than it would have been without the 2009 stimulus package (ARRA)." [Media Matters, 9/26/10]
Eight Percent Unemployment Projection Made Before Data Was Released Showing "Far Worse" Economic Conditions

Initial Eight Percent Unemployment Projection Made Before Fourth-Quarter FY2008 Results. As Media Matters has previously noted, while Obama advisers initially predicted that after stimulus spending the unemployment rate would not exceed 8 percent -- a prediction made "10 days before Mr. Obama was inaugurated," according to The New York Times -- advisers later explained that this estimate was made before fourth-quarter results for the GDP were available. Jared Bernstein, then-economic advisor to the vice president, explained, "[W]hen we made our initial estimates, that was before we had fourth-quarter results on GDP, which we later found out was contracting on an annual rate of 6 percent, far worse than we expected at that time." [Media Matters, 6/9/09; The New York Times, 6/8/09]
Analyses Show Most U.S. Debt Can Be Attributed To Bush-Era Policies, Economic Downturn

Wash. Post Graphic Shows Bush Tax Cuts And Iraq Wars Contributed Most To Current Deficit. From a June 4 post on The Washington Post blog PostPolitics:

In the debate over the nation's rising debt, rhetoric trumps reality. In January 2001, the U.S. budget was balanced for the first time in decades and the Congressional Budget Office was forecasting surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion by 2011. A decade later, the national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.

[ ]...CBPP: "[V]irtually The Entire Deficit Over The Next Ten Years" Due To Bush Policies, Economic Downturn." The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) published an analysis of federal deficits in December 2009, which was updated on June 28, 2010, titled, "Critics Still Wrong on What's Driving Deficits in Coming Years: Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers." The report noted:

Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush's policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade -- that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.

The report also graphed the effects of Bush's policies and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the deficit. From the report: ( charts and citations at link).

Sarah Palin is develping quite the reputation for mangling facts and history. She usually follows up by not having the maturity or humility to admit she is wrong.

Palin said: "He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed."

So while riding his horse, a reference to Revere's famous ride, he " ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells". Palin and her toadie apologists say this is correct because AFTER the famous ride Revere was captured by the British and told them in so many words they would get theirs someday. So having time to get some coaching from her handlers she says that captured incident was what she was talking about, when Revere "warned" the British. That only makes a little sense if in her original ignorant account of events she had not the referred to Revere riding his horse. One also has to ask why Revere's taunting of the British would be counted as a sincere warning by Palin. Did she honestly believe Revere was concerned for British troops. Revere's account of the night and his capture when he told off the British.

Colbert Reenacts Revere's Famous Ride To Prove Palin Right (VIDEO)

Sarah Palin was dead on when she said that Paul Revere did...whatever it is she thought he did. And to prove it, Stephen Colbert reenacted Revere's midnight ride with a bell, a musket and a mechanical horse.

"It's just like we all learned in grade school," Colbert said. "'One if by land, bells if by two, hey, British, you're warned, sailed the ocean blue.'"

"I could not have said a random string of words better," he added, referencing Palin's subsequent garbled defense that she hadn't flubbed her facts.

So, donning a tricorn hat, Colbert hopped aboard a coin-operated horse ride and showed what Palin's version of history would have looked like.

Watch the video at the link:

Love Those Conservative Koch Brothers and Their Oil Speculation

How Koch Became An Oil Speculation Powerhouse
From Inventing Oil Derivatives To Deregulating The Market

– 2008: Rampant oil speculation spikes prices to unprecedented levels. As academics from the Peterson Institute, the James Baker Institute at Rice University, and others conclude, non-commercial speculators begin to dominate the market, forcing up prices. Although the evidence was abundant that speculators caused the massive price spikes during the summer of 2008, regulators were toothless to act. A bipartisan majority in the House overwhelmingly passed legislation to award powers to the CFTC to oversee rampant oil speculation, but Republican in the Senate — acting with help from Koch lobbyists — killed the bill, called the Energy Markets Emergency Act.

– 2009: Koch presentation to ICE boasts that Koch is on the level of transnational big banks and can now be considered one of the world’s top five oil speculators. The presentation, and our analysis, can be found here. Of course, Koch is not the only large corporation engaged in this practice. Large investors, like pension funds, hedge funds, investment banks, and others flocked to the commodities market after the financial crisis of 2008 and the collapse of mortgage-backed securities.

– 2010: Koch’s Tea Party front groups and lobbyists fight financial reforms designed to reign in the unregulated energy market. While Americans for Prosperity, as well as other Koch fronts, decry the Wall Street reform bill debated in Congress, Koch lobbied to water-down provisions of the bill related to derivatives. The sweeping Dodd-Frank reform bill contained broad new powers for the CFTC to crack down on excessive oil speculation, while also requiring that derivative are eventually traded on a regulated and open exchange.

– 2011: As oil speculation again hits record highs, leading to record high oil prices, Koch’s allies in Congress fight to undermine new reforms and allow unchecked speculation to spiral out of control. As ThinkProgress has reported, oil speculation is currently at a record level, which experts, and even many Republicans now agree, is causing pain at the pump. After a furious lobbying campaign, the CFTC postpones Dodd-Frank mandated regulations on excessive oil speculation, known as position limits. As the CFTC grapples with how to implement these new rules, newly elected Republicans, many with Koch-backing, propose steep cuts to the CFTC to undercut any rules on oil speculation.

Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries who is worth a reported $22 billion, likes to call his business an example of something he describes as the “Science of Liberty.” In reality, his company’s deregulation crusade has contributed to rolling blackouts, consolidation and monopolies in financial markets, and economy-wrecking oil price spikes. In comments to the CFTC, the reform-minded nonprofit Better Markets noted that, “the history of these markets is a history of anti-competitive, self-interested, predatory conduct that serves the interest of the exclusive few at the expense of the many and the system as a whole.”

Think current gas prices are high? It is estimated that the oil futures speculation by the Koch brothers are driving up the price per barrel of oil by $27 dollars a barrel. You might be paying as much as 75 cents to a dollar less per gallon if not for these denizens of crony capitalism.

Tea Bagger Conservatives Are Some of The Same Old Racist Xenophobes With a Make-Over

Tea party Conservatives Are Some of The Same Old Racist Xenophobes With a Make-Over

In May 2009, I profiled a nutty 71-year-old border vigilante named Glenn Spencer, who had converted his ranch on the Arizona-Mexico border into a hi-tech militarized security zone packed with infrared cameras, aerial drones and motion detectors. His goal was to demonstrate to the feds how easy it was to stop illegal border-crossers, and he blew through his life savings to prove it. But Spencer’s reputation as a white supremacist and nativist meant no one heard his message in Washington; CNN’s Lou Dobbs was about the only mainstream media figure who took him seriously.

When I left his ranch back in 2009, I was sure that Spencer had reached the end of his line. His project had failed; Obama was heralding in a liberal future; the old geezer had nothing else waiting in the wings and nothing to look forward to, except spending his retirement in an isolated double-wide trailer.

So it was surprising to learn that Spencer was a big player in the Tea Party scene. Suddenly, no one in Arizona cared about his past associations with white supremacists. Instead, they were very keen on hearing his anti-immigration solutions. All of a sudden Spencer found himself hanging out with Arizona state senators, hosting GOP political events, speaking at rallies and rubbing shoulders with the creme de la creme of Arizona’s Tea Party beau monde. He was not only back in the game, he’s bigger than ever.

Yes, sir, Glenn Spencer got a new lease on life. And he owes it all to the good graces of those two enterprising brothers who founded and funded the Tea Party that rescued Spencer from doom: GOP kingpins Charles and David Koch. Thanks to their funding of the Tea Party movement, scores of washed-up white power activists like Spencer were brought back from the dead and reincarnated as proud patriots dedicated to defending the Holy Trinity of the American Republic: Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and the Free Markets.

A surprisingly thorough—and curiously ignored—investigation by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, found that a good chunk of the Tea Party movement’s High Command is made up of former leaders and active members of various border vigilante groups. For some reason the Minutemen, a loose collection of groups infamous for running armed patrols and bagging illegal crossers at the Mexican border, were present in particularly large numbers. Not only did the two leaders of the Minutemen Project segue directly into the Tea Party Movement via the TeaParty.org Web site, but the event organizer for the Tea Party Express—that’s the one that did those bus tours with Sarah Palin—worked as a former spokesperson for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

A member of that group was recently sentenced to death for the murder of a 9-year-old girl. With at least another dozen examples like these, one thing’s clear: border vigilantes didn’t just join up with the Tea Party movement. In many cases, they are the Tea Party movement. And that includes Glenn Spencer.

Journalist David Holthouse, writing in Media Matters, described Spencer’s new life at the center of Arizona’s ultra-racist Tea Party GOP:

Last August, more than 600 right-wing activists gathered for a Tea Party Nation rally on private land near the U.S.-Mexico border in Cochise County, Arizona. Fluttering in the desert breeze were hundreds of tiny American flags attached to a border fence of 15-foot-tall rusty poles.

Rally speakers included Tea Party candidates for the US Senate and House of Representatives, as well as marquee names from Arizona’s anti-immigration movement. The headliner was Fox News favorite Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the swaggering lawman whose ski-maskeddeputies terrorize suspected “illegals” in controversial round-ups, and whose idea of a good photo op is the forced march of shackled Latino immigrants down a city street.

Arpaio shared the stage with Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce, the chief architect of Arizona’s infamous Senate Bill 1070.

“We have an invasion going on that’s going to destroy this Republic,” Pearce said.

“USA!” came the chanted reply. “USA!”

Grinning on the sidelines behind mirrored sunglasses was Glenn Spencer, the leader of the border vigilante group American Border Patrol and the owner of the Tea Party Nation rally site.

Spencer’s founding of American Border Patrol in 2002 pre-dated the first Minuteman “civilian border patrols” by three years. Before his ranchland became a Tea Party rallying point it served as both meeting grounds and temporary housing for high-ranking members of various border vigilante factions. Minuteman American Defense leader Shawna Forde lived on the property in an RV owned by Spencer in the summer of 2008.

In June 2009, about two months after I visited Spencer’s American Border Patrol, the FBI and a SWAT team tracked Shawna Forde, a 41-year-old female member of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps (that’s the one connected to Palin’s Tea Party Express), to Spencer’s property. She was wanted for the murder of a Hispanic man and his 9-year-old daughter in a bungled robbery meant to finance her group’s militant anti-immigrant operations, and was arrested at a roadblock as she left the ranch. Spencer claimed he had no idea of Forde’s involvement in the murders, and that he’d broken off all contact with her and the Minutemen, saying that she arrived without advance warning and only stayed for 20 minutes.

Whatever Spencer’s relationship with Shawna Forde, the fact that a fellow vigilante accused of murdering a child was arrested on his property should have made Spencer persona non grata to any public figure. But no one cared about the girl’s murder, or Spencer’s connection to it. On the contrary, Spencer hosted a Tea Party Republican soiree on his ranch/hideout, in the summer of 2010, while Forde’s trial was going on. And he continued to host political events on the property even after Forde was sentenced to death in February 2011.

According to Media Matters’ Holthouse, Spencer not only isn’t shunned, he’s now a sought-after speaker on the Tea Party lecture circuit:

Spencer informed Media Matters that he travels almost weekly to speak at Tea Party events, and that his ranch, the onetime vigilante outpost where Forde took shelter, is now a Tea Party rallying point. “Plans are for Tea Party groups to come to the ranch every week from now on,” he said. “They are really fired up over the border issue.”

Despite his association with Forde and his well-documented history of bigoted ranting and “reconquista” conspiracy mongering, Spencer is a rising star in the Tea Party movement.

True to form, a couple of Arizona’s elected officials swung by Spencer’s ranch this past May as part of an event organized by the Maricopa County Republican Committee. Maricopa is the home of meat-head Sheriff Joe Arpaio. One of the pols, state Senator Sylvia Allen, who thinks the earth is only 6,000 years old, praised Spencer in her account of the event:

The last leg of the trip was to American Border Patrol where we met and visited with Glenn Spencer, president of ABP. Ten years ago, Mr. Spencer moved to the border area from California. For years he had wanted to do something about illegal aliens. He worked hard in California to get legislation passed. When finally the voters approved an SB1070-look-alike bill, Governor Davis would not implement it.

Once he was settled in his new home in Arizona, Glenn built a small, remote-controlled plane with cameras mounted on it. From his headquarters, Glenn can fly the plane along the entire Arizona border, from east to west. He has been able to inform the Border Patrol where illegals are crossing the border and help them to know where to go to capture them. At one point, he was offered $40,000 to stop calling the border patrol so the drug runners could pass through his property without a problem, but he refused. Shortly thereafter, two of his vehicles were torched.

Just across the border from Glenn Spencer’s property (on the Mexico side) is a ranch that was once owned by John Wayne. It is now owned by a drug cartel. In fact, vast amounts of land along the border are being bought up by the cartels.

America is losing her sovereignty. Borders define the customs, culture, traditions, language, and government of the people who live there. American’s unique form of government based on God-given rights and personal responsibilities has created our standard of living.

So here you have Arizona’s Tea Partiers, who are supposed to be all about small government and protecting civil liberties, embracing a nutter who fantasizes about the total militarization of America’s borders, including increased land and aerial video surveillance, expanded police powers, police checkpoints, and racial profiling—not to mention a fence running the whole length of the border with Mexico. But none of them care about Spencer’s white supremacist history, or that he pals around with child murderers. The fact that Arizona’s politicians don’t consider Spencer a massive political liability that could be exploited by an opponent is a major sign of how extreme and racist the Tea Party has become–and how far right they’ve pushed the “center” of this country.

In the Arizona Tea Party, overt and violent racism is no longer stigmatized. On the contrary, it’s a badge of honor, a sign of purity of purpose and unwavering conviction to the Cause. And why shouldn’t it be? The Tea Party movement was launched by oligarchs in order to defend said oligarchs. And there might be no oligarchy preservation technique that is as effective and time-tested as whipping up ethnic and racial hatred between two groups of uppity peasants.

***

According to Glenn Spencer, illegal immigration is part of a clandestine war against the U.S., a slow invasion planned at the highest levels of the Mexican government to recapture California, Texas, and much of the Southwest to reestablish the mythical Aztec empire of Aztlan. Spencer lays the blame for a host of contemporary social ills—everything from LA’s Rodney King riots to meth addiction—on Mexico’s attempt to destabilize America. Any fool can see that a country of God-fearing, family-oriented Protestants is much to harder to invade and occupy than one one that’s full of rioting crackheads. He’s even produced several documentaries outlining “La Reconquista,” which he sells through his Web site.

“What really got me, though, was the Rodney King riots,” Spencer told a journalist from the Los Angeles Weekly in 2005. “I watched as TV helicopters zoomed in on the people who were tearing down my old neighborhood. They weren’t black. They were Hispanic. They were Mexicans.”

Lou Dobbs outlines the conquest of Aztlan conspiracy theory for CNN viewers…

Spencer’s right. There is a conspiracy to flood America with illegal immigrants, but it’s not being hatched by the Mexican government, which can’t even control its own territory. He and his anti-immigration vigilante buddies have no problem criticizing the federal government and blaming the Jew-controlled liberal media for aiding and abetting the Mexican invasion, but they’re too racist and wrapped up in right-wing propaganda to pay much attention to the real culprit: multi-billion dollar corporations, which have come to rely on a constant stream of cheap, disposable labor to keep their profit margins high and their investors happy.

“Illegal immigration” is not an immigration issue at all. It’s a labor issue. And the way you go about stopping much of the illegal immigration into this country is not by building fences or by bagging Mexicans at the border, but by enforcing existing labor and employment laws in a few key industries dominated by huge corporations.

There are an estimated 6 to 8 million undocumented workers in America; nearly 40 percent of them slave on corporate farms and in slaughterhouses, while 20 percent build houses on Wall Street’s behalf (at least during the housing boom). For the business you can’t offshore to China, illegal labor provides the next best alternative. Call it the “domestic offshoring solution.”

A 2007 report by the the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy shows just how reliant some corporations have become on imported serf labor:

In the United States, agribusiness has been one of the main beneficiaries of new immigrants, who are usually non-union and work for low wages. For example, Swift & Company had to shut down 100 percent of its beef production and 77 percent of its pork production following the high-pro? le immigration raids earlier this year that resulted in the arrest of 1,282 workers. In February 2007, Smith?eld Packing Co., the largest U.S. hog processor, had to shut down its North Carolina plant after hundreds of workers left their jobs or refused to come to work to protest a crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Agribusinesses are particularly aggressive about securing a cheap labor supply. If they don’t have enough illegal labor to meet their demands domestically, some companies routinely send out headhunting/smuggling expeditions to bring fresh, exploitable workers directly to them.

Read more of Yasha Levine at eXiledonline.com.

Another irony via that anti-American political movement called conservatism. The corporate right encourages illegal aliens and the wing-nut militia conservatives than have an issue they can get all paranoid about. They feed off each other like ideological leeches.

Why Progressives Should be Mad at Anthony Weiner

Hypocrite and Criminal Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida Accepts Stimulus Money he Vowed Never to Take

Hypocrite and Criminal Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida Accepts Stimulus Money he Vowed Never to Take

As a gubernatorial candidate, Florida’s Rick Scott (R) vowed he “would fight all the stimulus money.” He even chastised then-Gov. Charlie Crist for accepting the federal funds and lessening the blow of the Great Recession. “I would have figured out how to balance the budget without it,” Scott boasted.

It’s funny how some things change after an election.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott campaigned against President Obama’s “failed stimulus” program — yet the freshman politician kept nearly $370 million of the federal cash in the Florida budget he signed last week. […]

The stimulus money Scott and Republican legislators approved touch every corner of the state: $290 million to improve electronic medical records, $4.2 million to aid disadvantaged children, $3.2 million for fighting wildfires, $12.5 million for drug courts, $8.6 million for county health departments, $1 million to fight infectious diseases, and $4.4 million to help public defenders and prosecutors.

The [Recovery Act] is specifically referenced 66 times in the budget.

To be sure, I don’t blame Scott for the change of heart. His budget plan was ridiculous enough without leaving stimulus money sitting on the table. Of course he took it. The problem is the governor taking advantage of the resources after condemning the Recovery Act, and continuing to pretend the funding is some kind of horrible imposition on taxpayers.

Scott was pressed on why his administration hates the Recovery Act but nevertheless put the funds to good use. That didn’t go well, either.

When asked why he didn’t veto the stimulus money, Scott reverted to his standard talking point — bashing the federal government. But when pressed by the Miami Herald reporter, Scott said he went through every line of the budget and considered each through the lens of job creation. “That’s the filter I used,” he said. “So if the stimulus money helps creates jobs, then it’s okay?” the reporter replied. Scott immediately reversed himself and denounced stimulus money again, saying, “I think it’s a mistake. It’s taxpayer money and we have to watch how we spend all that money.” “But you okayed it,” the reporter pointed out.

Scott’s staffer then stepped in to try to end the interview. Scott walked away hedging about how he would need more detail about which lines the reporter was talking about, again contradicting himself by suggesting he didn’t know which lines of the budget contained stimulus money.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: the economy-saving legislation Republicans refuse to admit they like.

Scott was the tea nut candidate. A known criminal, the tea nuts raced to elect him. How he has bungled the state budget. Screwed over teachers, fire fighters and police. No surprise he is a blazing small government wing-nut hypocrite who can't run his state without federal dollars.

Why Does Republican Justice Clarence Thomas Think he is Not Bound by Ethics

Why Does Republican Justice Clarence Thomas Think he is Not Bound by Ethics

Justice Clarence Thomas needs to follow the ethics lead of his colleague, Justice Samuel Alito, who discovered that he voted in a case in which he unwittingly had a financial interest.

Justice Samuel Alito, acknowledging an unintentional conflict of interest, said a staff oversight led him to take part in a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s ABC Inc. even though his children held Disney stock.

Alito voted against ABC in the case, joining a 5-4 majority that revived Federal Communications Commission efforts to crack down on televised vulgarities. The decision left open the prospect that the FCC rules might be struck down on First Amendment grounds.

That's not the part to be commended, this is:

He has disqualified himself in other cases involving companies whose shares he owns. In 2008, Alito didn’t take part in the court’s 5-3 decision cutting the punitive damage award against Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) for the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster to from $2.5 billion to $507.5 million.

Alito also stepped aside in June 2009 when the justices refused to hear another case, concerning home television recording, that involved a Disney unit.

With the revelation last week of the Thomas's financial stake in the political opposition to the Affordable Care Act—Ginni Thomas received $105,000 in salary from a Tea Party group organized to repeal the law and less than $15,000 in payments from an anti-health care lobbying firm she started—Thomas should recuse himself from the any future case coming before the court on the Affordable Care Act.

He won't, but he should.



Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to have ethics problems before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Many American had hopes that once in office he would change his ways. Nope, he seems as recalcitrant and unethical as ever. They say power corrupts. Thomas doesn't do much to dispel that old adage.

CASE CLOSED! CONGRESSMAN WEINER WAS FRAMED!

The only way to create a URL-free header is to have someone else send a pic to one's Yfrog address. Milowent did just that. You can see the result: The header now has a blank space beneath Dowson's name.

Why does Yfrog work that way? I don't know. Ask their programmers.

The important point is this: The anomaly in the header indicates that the image was not sent by Weiner. It had to have been sent by someone else.

Not only that. Believe it or not, when an outsider sends a pic to someone else's Yfrog account in this fashion, the action creates a message in the "twitterstream." The message seems to originate with the Twitter account holder -- but it doesn't. It comes from somewhere else -- from someone mailing a picture to the account holder.

This is a serious security flaw in the design of Yfrog and Twitter. It allows a malicious outsider to "spoof" a tweet that seems to come from someone else.

So Andrew Breitbart uses the hack/exploit of a wing-nut who was obsessed with Weiner to once again foist another journalistic fraud on the American people. There is nothing patriotic about that. Which is par for the course for Breitbart and conservatism - there is nothing patriotic or American about either.

Republicans Can’t Handle The Truth: Taxes Are Lower Under Obama Than Reagan

Republicans Can’t Handle The Truth: Taxes Are Lower Under Obama Than Reagan

President Obama met with House Republicans today at the White House to discuss ways to move forward on negotiations regarding the nation’s debt ceiling and the budget. During the discussion, talk evidently turned to taxes, and when Obama noted that taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan, the GOP, according to The Hill, “engaged in a lot of ‘eye-rolling’“:

Republicans attending a White House meeting on Wednesday didn’t take kindly to President Obama telling them tax rates were higher during the Reagan administration. GOP members engaged in a lot of “eye-rolling,” according to a member who was on hand to hear Obama, who invited House Republicans to the White House for discussions on the debt ceiling. [...]

“[The President] made a comment like the tax rate is the lightest, even more than (under former President) Reagan,” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told The Hill following the meeting. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joked that during the meeting, “We learned we had the lowest tax rates in history … lower than Reagan!”

That House Republicans find this preposterous is symptomatic of the hold Reagan mythology has over them. After all, for seven of Reagan’s eight years in office, the top tax rate was higher than the current 35 percent. In six of those years, it was 50 percent or more. And every year that Regan was in office, the bottom tax bracket was higher than the current ten percent.

For a family of four, the “average income tax rate under Reagan in 1983 was 11.06 percent. Under Clinton in 1992, it was 9.18 percent. And under Obama in 2010, it was 4.68 percent.” During Reagan’s time, income tax revenue ranged from 7.8 to 9.4 percent of GDP. Last year, it was 6.2 percent and is not projected to climb back to 9 percent until 2016. In fact, in 2009, Americans paid their lowest taxes in 60 years.

Republicans are very fond of saying that the U.S. has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” But the truth is that revenue has plunged due to the recession and to continued misguided tax cuts, and revenue needs to be raised to eventually bring the budget into balance. And Reagan knew that taxes were an important part of the budget equation. After all, he “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years.

The tea wackos like to say tea stands for taxed enough already. It would a little easier to sympathize with their complaint if they knew what they were talking about. It would also be easier not to think of the tea nut conservatives like Palin, Gingrich, Ryan, Paul and all the others if we had seen them out protesting when Regan or Bush 43 was president and taxes were higher. As it is conservative of every stripe are either suffer from a major ignorance problem or they are flaming hypocrites.

Don't Have a Job? Thank The Conservative Movement's Hate of Regulation

Republican Hypocrite of the Week - Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) Slashed EPA Funding, Now Outraged It’s Not Doing More In His District

Republican Hypocrite of the Week - Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) Slashed EPA Funding, Now Outraged It’s Not Doing More In His District

Three months after voting to eliminate funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) now says he’s outraged that the EPA isn’t doing more to protect the health of residents in his district. Barletta is insisting that the agency pay special attention to an area in Pittson, PA, after one resident alleged that a tunnel near a Superfund site gave him cancer. The EPA held an open house and information session to address the concerns of residents in the area, but said it did not plan to conduct further testing. This outraged Barletta, who called their decision “unacceptable”:

On Wednesday, Barletta sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson asking the agency to perform additional testing in the Carroll/Mill Street neighborhood.[...]“Frankly, this is unacceptable. The EPA’s own Web site indicates that one of the agency’s primary reasons for existence is to ensure that ‘all Americans are protected from significant risks to human health and the environment where they live, learn and work.’”[...]

“I was surprised to hear an EPA official basically tell the residents of the Carroll/Mill neighborhood that they would not conduct soil and water testing to find answers. It is absolutely the EPA’s job, and I’m going to make sure that job is done. The residents are scared, and they deserve answers and peace of mind.”

That’s an ironic position for Barletta, considering how often he’s tried to prevent the EPA from doing its job. In February, Barletta voted with the rest of the Republican-controlled House for an amendment that slashed funding for the EPA. Republicans were retaliating against the agency for its efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), one of the authors of the amendment, said, “The era of EPA overstepping its authority by imposing over-burdensome and unnecessary regulations at the expense of American businesses is over.”

Barletta’s vote to gut funding for the EPA flew in the face of popular opinion in his own district. A survey by Public Policy Polling found that 70 percent of voters in Barletta’s 11th Congressional District opposed Barletta’s vote to block the EPA from setting limits for carbon dioxide pollution. Those opposed included 58 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans. Voters also opposed Barletta’s votes to “prevent the EPA from reducing arsenic, mercury and other toxic pollution from cement kilns, or from collecting any data about carbon and other pollutants.”

It’s pretty audacious to attack an agency for not doing enough mere months after attacking them for doing too much. Barletta should hope his constituents have short memories and forget his attempts to stop the EPA from upholding health standards that Republicans insisted were a “burden” to business.

Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) is just an sad example of the lack of integrity and principles that is typical of today's crop of conservative Republicans. They say government doesn't work, than do everything in their power to make sure it does not work. There are some things individual Americans just cannot do on their own - clean up toxins in the local water supply, create a insurance program for retirees like Social Security or provide for national defense. Radical zealots like Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) just get up in the morning and hate things, until the wind shifts and decides he likes them. he, like most Republicans do not stand for anything and the way they govern proves that.