Conservative Republican ALEC-Linked Group Revealed As Attacking Average American's Most Fundamental Rights

Conservative Republican ALEC-Linked Group Revealed As Attacking Average American's Most Fundamental Rights

Last month, Maine voters delivered a major rebuke to Gov. Paul LePage (R) and the Republican-held legislature when they approved a referendum restoring election day voting registration rights in the state. Earlier this year, state legislators passed a bill repealing the state’s 38 year-old law allowing citizens to register at the polls on election day.

Tens of thousands of Mainers responded by petitioning for the matter come to a referendum. Issue 1 was one of the most-anticipated votes on election day this year, with pundits watching closely to see how citizens would react to the Republican-led war on voting, which ramped up in states across the country this year.

Recognizing the referendum’s importance, voting rights opponents poured money into the campaign to repeal election day registration. In fact, just two days after the state’s campaign finance reporting deadline, a secret conservative donor funneled $250,000 into the race, allowing the No On 1 campaign to make significant TV ad buys in an inexpensive media market.

Per state law, however, the identity of donors must be revealed within 45 days after the election. In fact, the entire $250,000 worth of late money came from a single source: the American Justice Partnership.

The AJP is a conservative legal organization based not in Maine, but in Michigan. On their website, the group states they are fighting against “the scheming George Soros money machine” which is “trying to sabotage your right to vote,” a claim apparently made without a hint of irony. Though the AJP doesn’t disclose where its funding comes from, the Bangor Daily News notes that it has partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the past, a group that has been instrumental in the proliferation of voter ID laws across the country.

The AJP’s secret $250,000 contribution ultimately accounted for over 78 percent of all the money raised by the No On 1 campaign. In other words, over three-quarters of the funding for opponents of election day registration in Maine came from Michigan. (This money was then used to run ads decrying “outsiders from other states” who were influencing the Maine election.) With Mainers of all stripes explaining to ThinkProgress why they cherish having the option to register at the polls on election day, it’s not altogether surprising that the predominance of financial support for No On 1 came from out of state.

Though AJP’s website correctly warns that “Your right to vote is at stake”, it’s groups like AJB and ALEC that are threatening that right in the first place. Maine voters stood up to the influence of voting rights opponents in November, however, passing Issue 1 by an overwhelming 61-39 margin and restoring election day registration in the Pine Tree State.

Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

During the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has lashed out at the Obama administration’s taxpayer subsidized grants to clean energy start-up companies. “The U.S. government shouldn’t be playing venture capitalist,” wrote Romney in October. “The very process invites cronyism and outright corruption.” But public records show that Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, repeatedly persuaded the government to play venture capitalist when it came to its own portfolio of companies.

News outlets have recently focused attention on Romney’s history as a businessman at Bain, which he founded in 1984. What hasn’t been reported, or fully explained by the candidate, is how Romney often got ahead in the private sector by using government help.

The likely GOP nominee made much of his estimated $250 million fortune buying companies, reorganizing them, and selling them for a profit. Though Romney, whose only government experience is his one term as Massachusetts governor, is quick to claim that he turned around investments using sound management and data-driven strategies, he does not mention one aspect of his success. Bain Capital owned companies that padded their profits using millions in public subsidies. In other cases, firms owned by Bain employed K Street lobbying firms to pursue lucrative government programs.

Gosh, are you as shocked as I am. Conservatives say they are all self-made, pulled themselves up by their own boot straps types and always get ahead by hard work. here we have Romney, just one among many conservatives who used big government, de facto tax payer subsidized money, special favors and inside contacts to get ahead - kind of like the Russian mob.

Starting in 2007, Bain Capital began retaining various  lobbying firms to pressure lawmakers to keep open a loophole that allows much of the earnings by private equity managers to be taxed as capital gains rather than the top income bracket of 35 percent. Given Romney’s profit-sharing retirement deal, the campaign to extend the loophole, which still hasn’t been closed, likely boosted the candidate’s fortune. (Romney has refused to release his tax return, leaving questions about his income.)

As Romney pillories Obama for using the government to fix problems in society (health reform, the auto bailout, etc.), he invites a closer examination of his own career. A balanced view of the Romney record shows he has never had any qualms about government help when it came to his own bottom line. Whether through hiring insider lobbyists or funneling taxpayer subsidies to his companies, government assistance has been part and parcel to the rise of Romney.

Is Romney's middle name Marx or Mao or Gov'mint Welfare Baby. He and his comrades are the ones who fed at the trough like pigs and bankrupted the country. Isn't that just the kind of twisted immoral crook America needs as its next president. You know, since G.W. Bush is ineligible to run again.

Is Mitt Romney Morally Fit to Be President - He refused to help decorated Iraq war veteran become a cop

Is Mitt Romney Morally Fit to Be President - He refused to help decorated Iraq war veteran become a cop

In an article documenting Mitt Romney's decade-long campaign for the presidency comes this extraordinary profile in political and moral cowardice:

    As Steve LeBlanc of The Associated Press documented in 2007, Romney issued no pardons or commutations while serving as governor, despite some seemingly benign pleas.

    In one of them, Anthony Circosta, a decorated Iraq war veteran, requested a pardon so he could pursue a career as a police officer.

    His background was marred because, as a 13 year old, he was convicted of assault for shooting another boy in the arm with a BB gun.

    The shot that did not break the other child’s skin.

    Nonetheless, Circosta’s plea was among the 100 requests for commutations and 172 requests for pardons that all were denied during Romney’s four years in office.

Apparently, Mitt Romney didn't want to risk having a Mike Dukakis-style Willie Horton issue appear on the campaign trail. Of course, even though Circosta "worked his way through college, joined the Army National Guard, and led a platoon of 20 soldiers in Iraq’s deadly Sunni triangle," Romney refused to help.

When it came to addressing George W. Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, Romney defended it, however. So why the sudden shift from Romney? Simple: He was running for office, for Pete's sake. Republican office.

In case you do not remember Scooter Libby lied to protect V.P. Cheney from being prosecuting for exposing the identity f a CIA NOC agent who specilized in Middle-East WMD intelligence. Romney has the same priotites as every wing-nut conservative - party first, America and decency last.

OWS Comes to the Aid of Right-wing Reporter From Daily Caller.

Because The American Middle-class Deserves a Future, We Are All Occupiers Now - The Mainstreaming of OWS

Because The American Middle-class Deserves a Future, We Are All Occupiers Now - The Mainstreaming of OWS

Perhaps the most significant mainstream supporters, though, are the only two most Americans have heard of. “Despite the Times’s finger-wagging that the movement is often muddled and misinformed, none of that is the point. The point is justice,” writes self-help guru Deepak Chopra, who visited Zuccotti Park and led meditations to help protesters turn “anger into awareness.” Suze Orman, who has made millions telling feckless consumers how to pay down debt and live on a budget, sounds like she’s channeling Naomi Klein: “To deride the movement because it has yet to formulate a well-delineated platform says plenty more about the critics than the protestors,” she wrote in the Huffington Post. “Revolutions tend to be messy, especially in the early going. The unholy alliance of much of Congress, K Street and Wall Street that has set the agenda from day one of the financial crisis is simply trying to protect its turf by casting aspersions on the ad hoc nature of the movement to date. I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything less. After all, there’s no way they could stage a substantive rebuttal based on facts.”

 After the New Deal, essentially starting Reagan America embarked on that great experiment known as trickle down or voodoo economics. That didn't work out so well for a middle-class that had enjoyed annual growth under New Deal policies. Time to correct course, start rewarding work instead of wealth.

Alleged ‘Skills Gap’ Takes Spotlight Off Who’s to Blame for Massive Jobs Shortageby Roger Bybee

Perhaps far too much attention has been devoted to the government role in job creation and retention, when American CEOs need to demand more from their employees and from the U.S. educational system to solve the jobless problem over the long term, this narrative suggests.

But in reality, this whole “Education, Training, and Skills” narrative serves to divert attention from the massive shortage of jobs and Corporate America's misdeeds to “failing” teachers and supposedly under-educated workers. Corporate America has failed to produce virtually any net gain in U.S. jobs since 1999; the period was the only decade when U.S. employment grew by less than 20 percent.

In short, the Education, Training and Skills "frame” on our economic problems plays several useful functions for the CEOs and the rest of the richest 1 percent. It takes the spotlight off CEOs' decisions to wipe out decent-paying job opportunities. As Gordon Lafer writes in The Training Charade,

    Workers are encouraged not to blame corporate profits, the export of jobs aboard, or eroding wage standards—that is, anything that they can fight—but rather to look inward for the source of their misfortune and the seeds of their resurrection.

Everyone, especially conservative loons like Herman Cain, Rick Perry and the conservative bloggers want America to blame anyone except corporate America for unemployment.

Myth of the Month - Higher Taxes on The Rich Kills Jobs

6 Dumb Arguments Against Taxing the Rich, ExplainedDebunking the conservative case against making the rich pay their fair share

On Saturday, the Obama administration unveiled the "Buffett Rule [1]," a proposed tax on millionaires and billionaires named after celebrity investor Warren Buffett, who has long argued that the federal government should demand more of the wealthy. The millionaires tax is certain to become a major point of contention in the 2012 presidential campaign, and Republicans have wasted no time in heaping it with calumnies. Here are the six most popular conservative arguments against a progressive tax code, and why they're wrong:

It's class warfare! [2]
Yeah right. Three decades of laissez-faire economic polices have allowed the rich to double their share of the national income while paying tax rates a fifth lower than before. The result, notes Kevin Drum [3], was "wage stagnation for everyone else, a massive financial collapse that ravaged the middle class, an enormous deficits that they'll be asked to pay off eventually." If the millionaires tax is the only blowback, the wealthy should count their blessings.

It's a tax on small business [4]
"Don't forget that most small businesses file taxes as individuals," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Fox News Sunday. "So when you are raising top tax rates, you are raising taxes on these job creators." Except when you aren't. ThinkProgress's Pat Garofalo points out [5] that fewer than 2 percent of the nation's small businesses fall into either of the top two tax brackets. Plus, many of the small business filers in the upper brackets are merely investors who have nothing to do with running the business. And if small businesses don't want to pay taxes as individuals, they can file always as corporations.

It reduces incentives to work and invest [6]
Experience shows otherwise. As Nancy Folbre points out [7] over at Economix, "average annual rates of growth in gross domestic product in the high tax era between 1950 and 1980 exceeded those of the last 30 years. Increases in the top tax rate under President Bill Clinton were followed by robust economic expansion."

The other reasons are at the link. Below are some links to the citations in the article.

[2] http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/obamas-millionaires-tax/

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/paul-ryan-insults-our-intelligence-yet-again

5] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/19/322193/small-business-taxes-lies/

[7] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/taxing-the-rich/

Let's all ask ourselves a basic question - how did the wealthy get their money. The micro details may differ but the macro reasons are the same as they have always been. A big complex infrastructure such as the one the USA has makes it possible for business to do business. That infrastructure - roads, air traffic control, higher education, etc has to be paid for. Conservatives do not want the people who have become the richest to pay for their share of that complex infrastructure. The other big part of the macro picture is labor. If you're not an executive you're labor. Business cannot make money without labor. part of labor's compensation in a big free market like ours is roads, schools, firefighters, nurses, libraries, national parks and teachers. Those people and institutions must be paid for. Conservatives want it all for free. last I heard getting a lot of stuff for free was the worse kind of welfare.

Republican Wuss of the Week - Why is House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) Afraid of His Constituents

Republican Wuss of the Week - Why is House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) Afraid of His Constituents

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the House GOP plan to phase out Medicare, does not like it when constituents publicly challenge him. In fact, people who disagree with Ryan have a habit of getting arrested for it. A few weeks ago, several of Ryan’s unemployed constituents staged a peaceful sit-in at his Kenosha, Wisconsin office to protest his unpopular decision not to hold any free public town halls during the August recess. These constituents didn’t think they should have to pay to ask their elected representative a question. Instead of meeting with them, Ryan’s staff called the police.

So it should come as no surprise that this week, three people who paid to see Ryan speak were arrested and charged with trespassing for protesting the event. One constituent, a 71-year-old retired plumber from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was handcuffed and pushed to the ground by security:

    Video footage taken by an attendee at the event shows that one of them, Tom Nielsen, received particularly harsh treatment — he was pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Nielsen received an additional charge of resisting arrest.

    Ryan was speaking Tuesday afternoon at the Whitnall Park Rotary Club. Protesters gathered both outside his event and inside, standing up and disrupting the congressman’s remarks.

    According to Oak Creek Patch, as many as a dozen protesters were escorted out of the event. Another dozen or so left willingly.

Ryan seemed supremely undisturbed that a senior citizen worried about receiving the Medicare he’s paid into his whole life was treated so brutally. Indeed, Ryan made light of the arrest and quipped to the audience, “I hope he’s taking his blood pressure medication.”

Watch it, courtesy of Wisconsin Jobs Now:

Another woman was shown the door when she challenged Ryan’s claim that the jobs crisis is directly related to the debt crisis. “Our debt is out of control because of the tax cuts you’re giving,” she said. “Our unemployment in 2003 was 6.2% before the tax cuts went through. Now our unemployment rate is 9.1%. What are you doing to create jobs, Congressman?” Another woman was escorted out when she stood up while Ryan was speaking and said, “You won’t talk to us. How can we give our opinions when you refuse to talk to us?”

Ryan has consistently faced angry constituents at his events since his Medicare-killing budget became a top GOP priority. Tired of being publicly embarrassed by constituents who voice their disagreement and say his policies are hurting them, Ryan has resorted to increasingly harsh responses to deal with people who have the audacity to speak up at his events.

I do have a question for the local police. I'm sure you're good folks but why are you acting as strong-arm bullies for this wussball Congress critter. That really is not your job. If one of them tries to physically attack Ryan that is another story. This people are just trying to get straight answers.

Republican Media Hero Rupert Murdoch Mission Is To Debase Democracy

Republican Media Hero Rupert Murdoch Mission Is To Debase Democracy

We are swimming in a gloop of scuttlebutt and tittle-tattle, driven by “unnamed sources” who always represent themselves as “close to the investigation” yet who speak only “on condition of anonymity.” Those deceptively anodyne descriptors have moved us down an ethical spectrum from transparent reporting to stories that are “underwritten,” bribed, extorted or outright lies.

Consider, for example, the insidious model of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Fox News Channel is a subsidiary of the Fox Entertainment Group, which in turn is a subsidiary of Murdoch’s conglomerate News Corporation. It’s a perfect circle, a consciously structured looping between news and entertainment, a business model premised on positing the amorality of “anything goes” as the civic equivalent of “freedom of the press.”

In Britain, Murdoch’s devouring influence is finally being challenged with revelations that his employees compromised a murder investigation by hacking into the voicemail of the victim and erasing her last messages; tapped the phones of politicians with whom Murdoch took issue; and paid police officers and government officials “in the six figures” for information about ongoing investigations. It is perhaps only in America that any enterprise of Murdoch’s labeled “fair and balanced” is still received as anything but laughable. We know, too, that paying for information has become broad practice among American tabloids like the Post; but we seem inured to the concern that tabloid sensibility is not just unreliable but corrupting.

The Anglo-American justice system constructs criminal cases as singular—as particular to named individuals and specifically delineated indictments. Social narratives, norms and values can never be entirely absent, but the system attempts to regulate their influence through mechanisms like the rules of evidence (barring rumor and unsubstantiated opinion) and standards of proof (like “reasonable person” and “reasonable doubt”). To keep from destroying reputations unnecessarily, we adhere to a presumption of innocence. Police are supposed to keep certain aspects of investigations closed until there is at least “probable cause.” Similarly, both sides screen and filter evidence for probity. In some cases, judges have the discretion to sequester juries from outside or inflammatory input. And we trust lawyers, prosecutors and judges to keep confidences as a matter of professional ethics.

But none of these structural buffers can operate as they should if a Murdoch-like empire runs the world, carelessly spitting out the home addresses of those it wishes to skewer, hacking into the phones of unlucky witnesses, pursuing stories into sealed records, private homes and bathroom stalls. Our democracy depends on a free press to discuss the issues of the day without interference from government. What that noble ideal does not account for is the existence of media monopolies able to exercise national and international control over civic spaces—even to the degree that their power vies with that of governments. Their careless, nonempirical, even fictionalized narratives invade privacy, ruin careers, mythologize racial stereotypes, exploit class divisions, exacerbate ideological discord, unleash mobs, wreak vengeance, assemble armies and annihilate the common good.

Today’s media chatter is beholden not to truth but rather to profit, fear and fantasy. What becomes of the duty to listen that is at the heart of free expression? What becomes of the shared mulling of ideas that allows us to think of one another as equals who exist in society with one another? What becomes of the measured thought exchange that is the essence of due process?

by Patricia J. Williams

Fox News is the embodiment of dumping down the news. making the truth merely a matter of opinion. Its defenders in parrot like fashion claim Rupert Murdochs Fox News tells it like it is. Meaning they tell their low information viewers who live in a mental bubble what they want to hear. many of them actually believe that Steve Doocy, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and the other talking heads would never look into the camera and tell lies. Isn't it illegal to lie anyway. Fox tells lies daily and no it is not against the law to tell the kind of twisted lies Rupert Murdoch 's Fox News tells. All they have to do is claim what they said was true to the best of their knowledge. Their knowledge extends as far as their radical right-wing agenda tells them. Tell the truth or push their anti-American agenda? Republicans, Murdoch and Fox News have made their choice - an anti-American, anti-Democracy agenda.

Republican Determined to Cause Their Second Great Recession. When Will America Learn

Republican Determined to Cause Their Second Great Recession. When Will America Learn

Call it what you will: punt, cave, Machiavellian genius; there's no question that Mitch McConnell's proposal to abandon the GOP's attempt to extract major spending cuts in return for a vote to raise the debt ceiling has drastically upset Washington's political calculus. There has been an an explosion of chatter about how McConnell's move is a tacit acknowledgement of a debt ceiling stalemate: Republicans won't agree to any deal that increases revenues; Democrats won't agree to any significant cuts in entitlements that don't include at least some new taxes.

Suddenly, there's a new conventional wisdom: Since the economic consequences of not raising the debt ceiling are supposedly unthinkable, something like the McConnell plan must eventually carry the day.

There's just one problem here: the House GOP.

The Wall Street Journal's David Wessell puts it nicely:

[T]he most contentious strikes (in the days when the U.S. had strikes) came when company executives and union leaders reached agreement, only to discover that union leaders couldn't deliver the membership. That's the House today. The Republican rank-and-file is distrustful of the leadership, and the leaders don't completely trust each other. Hence the president and Republican leaders are having trouble cutting a deal.

I don't normally believe much of what House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has to say, but his comments captured in a Politico story today seem to be an accurate description of the current reality:

"Nothing can get through the House right now," the Virginia Republican said. "Nothing."

Consider how we have arrived at this point. Cantor walked out of negotiations with the White House team led by Vice President Joe Biden, because, he said, the House would not accept any deal that resulted in revenue increases -- even if those increases were the result of ending tax breaks and closing loopholes. Then the "grand bargain" fell apart because House Republicans revolted en masse against the notion of sanctioning even $4 trillion in spending cuts if it required $1 trillion in tax hikes. Now we are supposed to believe that the same people who have rejected two big deals that would have resulted in real spending cuts are going to go along with a plan that might not result in any spending cuts at all. It's very difficult to see how that happens.

I've believed for a long time that pressure from Wall Street would ensure that the debt ceiling would be raised before the deadline -- and evidence is amassing that exactly such pressure explains why McConnell broached his "contingency" solution on Tuesday. But it now seems to me that the chances of a real disaster are even higher than they were before the McConnell stunner. As Robert Draper's Sunday New York Times Magazine story profiling the House Republican freshman class suggests, many members of the newest crop of representatives do not seem to understand, or care, about the potential fallout from their actions.

As Tim Griffin, a freshman from Arkansas, put it to me, "A lot of us feel that we're here on a mission, and the mission is now, and we're not that concerned about the political consequences." That mission -- to throttle the role of the federal government in general and Obama's progressive initiatives specifically -- may seem more like a kamikaze pursuit to some of the freshmen as the 2012 elections get closer and their constituents become increasingly impatient for government solutions. For now, however, they and their Tea Party backers constitute the most formidable power bloc on Capitol Hill.

Or, as Jon Chait puts it less politely: "The more we find out about the House Republican caucus, the more obvious it becomes that they're not just trying to maximize their leverage by pretending to be crazy. They're crazy."

Just look at Michele Bachmann, the chair of the House's Tea Party caucus. David Weigel reports her version of reality, delivered Wednesday morning, and it's a doozy:

It was Bachmann, at the end of the event, who captured the emerging GOP sentiment best: "President Obama is holding the full, faith and credit of the United States hostage so he can continue his spending spree!"

In Bachmann's world, Obama, the president who offered Republicans terms that disgust and horrify his own party, is holding the United States hostage. But Bachmann has long maintained that she would vote against raising the debt ceiling under almost any circumstances (unless attached to something completely unworkable as far as dealing with the nation's current economic situation, like a balanced-budget amendment.) Does Bachmann understand the meaning of the word "hostage"?

The Republicans are holding the economy hostage for the second time. Obama has agreed to every spending cut - weather its the $2 trillion dollar plan or the $4 trillion dollar spending cut plan. In exchange for paying Republican to release the hostage he has asked to close some tax loopholes and write-offs ( no tax increases). Republican have declared they're going to shoot the hostage anyway. Criminals who act like Republicans - who must have everything they want with NO Compromises are usually called sociopaths. The only reason we're at this point is because Republicans will not raise taxes to what they were during the peace and prosperity years of the Clinton administration.

The Ultra Conservative Republican Honeymoon is Over

The Ultra Conservative Republican Honeymoon is Over

Across America voters are having buyers regret.

Republicans swept last year's elections. The GOP captured more than 675 state legislative seats, flipped 10 governor's mansions, gained control of over 20 state legislative chambers, and won more than 60 seats in Congress previously occupied by Democrats.

Elections this lopsided have consequences for the victors and vanquished alike. Usually these consequences come in the form of a honeymoon, with the winning party able to pursue its ideological agenda.

But now, almost before it started, the honeymoon is over. Voters — Democrats, independents, and yes, growing numbers of Republicans — are concerned about tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans while working and middle-income Americans struggle to make ends meet.

In Florida, police officers in Broward County are planning a mass rally on July 16 to officially switch their party registration from Republican to Democrat. They are tired of Gov. Rick Scott's attacks on workers.

In Maine, Democrats and some Republican legislators are pushing back against an overreaching tea party governor who has insulted labor and minorities and signed bills rolling back health care reform and eliminating the state’s 38-year-old law allowing people to register to vote on Election Day. In New Hampshire, after the Democratic governor vetoed an anti-union, anti-worker bill, Republicans are working furiously to try to corral the two-thirds majority needed for an override.

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer has pushed back against Republican efforts to deny benefits to unemployed workers. "You don't balance the federal budget by turning your back on Arizonans in their time of need," she said. "That's not principled fiscal conservatism. It's just cruel. And we are better than this."

And in a number of key electoral battleground states, GOP governors are suffering from dismal approval ratings. Florida's Scott stands at 29 percent. Michigan's Rick Snyder and Ohio's John Kasich each top out at 33 percent. Wisconsin's Scott Walker's 43 percent, while slightly higher, is still lackluster and incredibly polarized. His approval rating from Republicans is 87 percent and just 9 percent from Democrats.

So why has the public lost that loving feeling? And where do we go from here?

The reason behind the disenchantment is clear. The GOP has not only attacked essential services popular with the public, like public education, Medicare, and Medicaid. Republican politicians have also made scapegoats of the public employees who provide these services. Yet every one of us knows someone who works in the public sector — the police officer or firefighter risking his life to protect us, the schoolteacher grappling with crowded classrooms, the public nurse in fear of losing her job. And we don't like seeing our family, friends, and neighbors attacked. Voters across the country are demanding an annulment from the GOP.

The good news? Across the country, people are fighting back. This July, activists are organizing more than 1,000 "house meetings" that will focus attention on the economy and the need for job creation. These "Rebuild the Dream" house meetings are being organized by national groups like Center for Community Change, MoveOn, and USAction. But the force driving them will be local, in places from Peoria, Illinois to Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Other activists plan to mark the July 30th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid and to attend congressional recess town hall events in August. Still others will turn out for a nationwide "jobs tour" sponsored by ProgressiveCongress.org.

To be sure, we face difficult choices as we figure out how to rebuild our economy, spread the necessary burden of taxation, and avoid debilitating cuts to the important services our families and communities depend on.

But Americans of all ideologies and political parties know the way forward. Instead of rewarding companies for shipping good jobs overseas, Americans want to close corporate loopholes and invest in good jobs right here in the USA. Instead of slashing Medicare and Medicaid, Americans want the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. Instead of attacking and scapegoating workers, Americans want working and middle-income families to be able to bargain for good American wages and benefits.

That's what we're organizing for this summer. This is a fight to take back our country and rebuild the American dream — good jobs and strong communities, with liberty and justice for all. Our country deserves no less.


David Elliot is communications director for USAction, a grassroots advocacy group with affiliates and partners in 24 states.

What happened in 2010 is not difficult to figure out. Republicans went into full fanatic mode - spreading lies about how health care reform was going to kill grandma, Obama was going to go house to house and take everyone's gun, the country was slipping into a Marxist state. It did not matter how big or ridiculous the lie conservatives told them over and over again as loudly as possible. Some of the tea baggers at health care reform town hall meetings looked like they were going to give themselves a heart attack. Now they have had a chance to show their agenda and America says that agenda sucks. They have created tax cuts for corporations making millions in profits and paying little to no taxes already, then turned around and cut bargaining rights for workers and cut jobs for teachers. It turns out the tea baggers had their grass roots lips firmly glued to the backsides of billionaires and corporate special interests. America wants government for the people not greedy plutocrats like the Koch brothers, for whom billions are not enough.

The Big Republican Lie of 2011 - We Have a "Spending" Problem

No, we do not have a spending problem in general. We have a problem with runaway military spending and lack of revenue to pay for that military spending - We have a revenue problem, not a spending problem

The refrain that's won the day, apparently, for budget negotiators racing to see who can get the most praise from the Very Serious People for making the most Americans suffer under austerity, is "we having a spending problem." Not to put too fine a point on it: Bullshit.



Our deficit and debts can be traced to the fact that spending on entitlement programs and defense has shot up, and tax revenues have plummeted to their lowest level in decades. But spending on domestic discretionary programs has grown much more slowly. And, if you correct for inflation, and for growing population, it turns out we're spending exactly the same amount on these programs as we were a full decade ago....

"Although non-defense discretionary spending in nominal dollars has increased, when taking inflation and population growth into account the amount contained in the [2011 budget] represents no increase over what we spent in 2001, a year in which we generated a surplus of $128 billion," said chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) in a prepared statement. "So the right question to ask is: Are we really spending too much on non-defense programs? The answer is clearly no."

...In the wake of the Bush tax cuts, and the Great Recession, tax revenue has fallen through the floor to near-historic lows. As a percentage of GDP, it's fallen 24 percent since 2001, and if you correct for inflation, the government is collecting nearly 20 percent less per person than it was a decade ago. At the same time, the population-adjusted costs of mandatory spending programs—driven by Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, and Medicaid—have increased by over 30 percent. And, of course, defense spending has skyrocketed. But if you isolate domestic discretionary programs, a decade later we're spending no more on a per-person basis than we were back then.

What has increased? Health care spending, but at a rate that would have nearly been covered by massive loss of revenue in the past decade. TPM took the numbers from the Committee and "put them in a slightly different context, so you can see by what percentage spending and revenues have risen and fallen on a population adjusted basis over the last decade."
spending/taxes graph

As they say, it clearly shows "what is and is not the culprit of deficits and our supposedly out-of-control spending."

It just seems to be a bad habit picked up by the media and Congress to include Medicare - which they call an entitlement into the spending debate that includes general federal tax revenue. Medicare has its own separate fund paid for with working folks payroll taxes. The vast majority of the debt would disappear tomorrow if the Bush tax cuts for millionaires was trashed. That is a simple fact. What would happen to those poor millionaires? They would simply be paying the same taxes they paid during the Clinton boom years. We do not have a debt crisis. We have a revenue crisis. We also have a crazy irresponsible far right-wing un-American Republican party crisis, because they are putting the interests of a few millionaires above the interests of the country.

More here, We Have A Revenue Problem!

The 10 Craziest Republican Governors in America and Their Radical Agenda

The 10 Craziest Republican Governors in America and Their Radical Agenda

10. Robert Bentley, Alabama. Bentley has been one of the quieter governors among the new class, but his lack of Chris Christie-like bluster has allowed some of Alabama's scarier provisions to sneak by unnoticed. A dermatologist who was accused of using his title “Dr.” on the ballot to sway voters, Bentley is also an evangelical Christian who declared on the day of his inauguration that “anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother."

No word if undocumented immigrants who happen to be Christian are his brothers. Alabama passed the nation's most restrictive immigration law just last month, surpassing Arizona's SB 1070 as the worst place in the country to be an undocumented immigrant—or be mistaken for one. The bill, HB 56, was called a “wish list of restrictionist immigration provisions at the state law level,” by Kevin Johnson, dean of the law school at the University of California, Davis.

The bill not only makes it a crime for undocumented immigrants to be in the state, but attempts to criminalize every aspect of their existence. It requires schools to ask students about their immigration status, and bans undocumented students from state universities; it makes it illegal to rent housing to immigrants, and allows police to ask for papers using “reasonable suspicion.” HB56 also makes contracts that undocumented people sign unenforceable—so if employers do break the law and hire immigrant workers, they can treat them as badly as they like without fear of repercussions. And that's just one possibility.

9. Nikki Haley, South Carolina. Nikki Haley, daughter of immigrants, is South Carolina's youngest governor, its first woman, and its first person of color. So we should be proud, right?

Not so much.

Haley defeated the good ol' boys on the campaign trail despite rumors of a sex scandal, mostly by outflanking them to the right. She used her status as the child of immigrants to tout a new, extreme anti-immigration bill, and took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to decry a decision by the National Labor Relations Board that Boeing was not able to circumvent its union workers by building new planes in non-union South Carolina. “It's called capitalism,” she wrote.

It's actually called union-busting. Boeing decided to move the assembly line to South Carolina after repeated strikes by the union workers in Washington State, and the NLRB ruled that the statements by company executives made it clear the move was in retaliation for union activity. Which is illegal.

Haley pushed for a picture ID law that would require voters to show ID at the polls before voting. In a state with a long history of disenfranchising people of color, the requirement, which makes it difficult for those without drivers' licenses to vote, brings back unpleasant memories.

Haley made national news before she'd even won her primary, but these days the news close to home isn't so good for her. “I believe she is the most corrupt person to occupy the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction,” John Rainey, a longtime Republican power broker told Corey Hutchins at the Nation. She's been replacing the old boys she promised to sweep out with confidantes and campaign contributors, and the only jobs she's created so far have been for close allies. Yet Sarah Palin-like, she remains popular on the national scale and appears to have far-reaching ambitions.

8. Jan Brewer, Arizona. It's Barack Obama's fault that we have Jan Brewer. Janet Napolitano was governor of Arizona, a popular Democrat in the state that gave us John McCain and Barry Goldwater. When she was tapped to become the new Homeland Security secretary, a border state with boiling-hot tension over immigration was left in the hands of the former Secretary of State, a Republican who went on to sign into law SB 1070, the “Papers Please” law that spawned the copycats in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and other states around the country.

Brewer likes to talk about the violent crime immigrants are responsible for, claiming “beheadings” despite absolutely no evidence, let alone links to immigrants, and blaming them for nearly every crisis her state (and the country) face.

She's also signed a law that aims to prevent unions from using member dues to fund political activity, and just for good measure cut funding for children's health care. She cut more than $72 million from health services, spearheaded a bill to eliminate KidsCare, the state's Medicaid program for children (though that failed, she pushed through an enrollment freeze on the program), and proposed eliminating the Early Childhood Development and Health Board. (Twenty-three percent of Arizona's children live in poverty).

In the interest of fairness, it is worth pointing out that Brewer has vetoed some of the more extreme bills coming out of the Arizona legislature this year. A “birther” bill that would have required candidates for office to submit a “circumcision certificate” or a “baptismal” certificate if the “long form” birth certificate constantly demanded of President Obama was unavailable was too much even for Brewer. And after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Brewer shot down a bill that would allow guns on “public pathways” close to state schools. State Senator Kyrsten Sinema told the Daily Beast, though, that it's all part of a plan where legislators pass bills to satisfy extremist primary voters, and Brewer, who is not up for re-election, vetoes them.
7. Paul LePage, Maine. LePage, Maine's new governor, first made headlines when he told the NAACP to “kiss my butt” on local television. The civil rights group had expressed anger that the governor would not be taking part in local Martin Luther King Day events. He then joined the ranks of the anti-union crowd when he ordered a labor-themed mural moved away from the state's labor department, claiming that it was not “balanced.”

But LePage's animosity toward labor history extends well beyond art. He recently signed into law a bill that eases child labor laws, lowering restrictions on the hours and days teenagers can work. No word as to what he plans to do about those 8 percent of adult Mainers who are looking for work as well—they want pesky things like health insurance, benefits, full-time hours, and are more likely to know their rights and complain about them than 16-year-olds.

He's been so vitriolic that eight state senators from his own party wrote an op-ed published in three Maine newspapers, asking him to tone it down. "Belittling comments, whether they come from the governor or his opponents, have no place in Maine public life," they wrote.

And while conservatives in Congress take aim at Barack Obama's health care reform, LePage signed into law a rollback of consumer protections against health insurance companies, which can now raise premiums on individuals up to 10 percent a year. Previously, the state had to grant permission to insurance companies before they could hike premiums. Maine progressives are organizing against this move.

LePage is one of many who have also targeted the voting process, aiming to make it more difficult to register to vote and to cast a ballot. First the state eliminated its nearly 40-year-old same-day registration process, a process that was used by 60,000 in 2008 and is credited with being the reason behind Maine's high voter turnout rates. A bill that would have required photo ID to vote did not make it through the legislature. Voter ID laws disproportionately target the elderly, students and poor people who are unlikely to have drivers' licenses; they add one more layer of difficulty between voters and the ballot box. Conveniently, those are all constituencies that usually lean left.

6. Rick Perry, Texas. Oh, Texas. You've given us so much: Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, as well as George W. Bush. And now you have given us Rick “Goodhair” Perry, as Ivins used to call him.

Perry and his hair have been governing Texas since Bush left, and unless he succeeds in seceding from the union or running for president, it looks like he'll be there for a while. So he's had the time to rack up a truly unfair list of achievements, from executing at least one innocent man to hosting Ted Nugent at a concert where Nugent wore a Confederate flag shirt and shouted insults about non-English speakers.

But what has Perry done for us lately? Plenty.

He's signed a voter ID bill, making it harder for elderly Texans, students, and others without drivers' licenses to vote, passed a budget with $15 billion in budget cuts, and a bill requiring women to have sonograms before they can obtain abortions. While a woman can refuse to look at the sonogram, her doctor is required to describe it.

Perry also pushed a bill that would ban so-called immigrant sanctuary cities, putting yet more pressure on Texas' large immigrant population, and a bill that would prohibit “intrusive” airport pat-downs, to curry favor with angry libertarians. Both bills died in the legislature.

Maybe next he'll combine his legislative achievements and require that fetuses have photo ID. If he doesn't hit the national campaign trail, that is.

5. John Kasich, Ohio. Ohio's one of those states that becomes tremendously important to the national political scene come presidential election time. In between elections, it's often forgotten.

But Kasich has done his part to keep Ohio in the news, first by choosing an all-white, mostly-male cabinet (and defending that choice by saying "I don't look at things from the standpoint of any of these sort of metrics that people tend to focus on, race or age, or any of those things"), then killing Ohio's high speed rail project, which would have created jobs and provided faster, greener transportation for Ohioans and those traveling across the state.

The move that drew thousands to protest in the Ohio capitol, though, was SB 5, a bill that eliminates collective bargaining over health care and benefits, bans strikes, and institutes so-called merit pay for the state's public workers. Ohio drew some energy from Wisconsin's labor protests, but has created its own movement to fight back against the law. Just last week, workers marched in a “People's Parade” to deliver their petition to repeal the bill to the Secretary of State; 1.3 million signatures were collected on the petition, more than five times the number required to get the repeal on the ballot in the fall.

Of course, no right-wing governor worth his salt would pass up an opportunity to sign the country's most restrictive anti-abortion bill, right? A bill that would ban all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected just passed the Ohio House and heads to the Senate.

Kasich's approval ratings have been the lowest for a first-term Ohio governor since 1983, dropping to a low of 33 percent, and Democrats are moving for a recall, though it's unlikely to happen while Republicans still control the legislature. Still, an unpopular Republican governor in the state spells good news for Democrats both on the state and national level.

4. Rick Scott, Florida. Rick Scott wins the award for being the least popular governor in the country. A mere 29 percent of Floridians think their governor is doing a good job.

The good news is Scott is so unpopular that even his party is abandoning their support of his agenda. State Senator Dennis Jones said of his state: “This is certainly not the ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ that the public expected. If we added everything up, we’re probably in the negative this session for jobs, not the positive.” The bad news is that Scott might actually be the most extreme governor in the country, and he's not giving up on his agenda just because the legislature dislikes him.

Suzy Khimm at Mother Jones wrote:

In 1997, Rick Scott was implicated in the biggest Medicare fraud case in US history, stepping down as CEO of Columbia/HCA after the hospital giant was fined $1.7 billion and found guilty of swindling the government. As Florida's new governor, Scott is now trying to kill off an anti-fraud database that would track the fraudulent distribution of addictive prescription drugs in Florida, over the protestations of law enforcement officials, Republican state lawmakers, and federal drug policy officials.

And that's just one step. Scott was the founder of Conservatives for Patients' Rights, which was out to torpedo health care reform any way it could, and he rejected first $2.4 billion in federal funds for high-speed rail and then $1 billion to implement health care reform. He's slashed 10 percent from the state's education budget, and couldn't even get his own party to vote for an SB 1070 copycat anti-immigrant bill. And like Rick Perry, he's signed a bill that requires pregnant women to get a sonogram before they can get an abortion.

Like in Ohio, a deeply unpopular GOP governor in Florida could be the key to Barack Obama's reelection. Democratic strategists credit anger at Scott for surprise victories in mayor's races, and hope the anger will still be there in 2012.

3. Rick Snyder, Michigan. Michigan has given us one of the most frightening power grabs in a year of power grabs. Snyder's “emergency manager” legislation gives him the power to appoint a unilateral authority over a city or school district, who can then fire officials, close schools, void union contracts, and otherwise assume near-total control.

AlterNet reported recently:

In March, the Michigan legislature passed an update to state law that gave “emergency financial managers” expanded powers over cities and school districts facing financial distress. The provision drew protests immediately, with thousands converging on the Capitol on March 16, the day the law was signed. Unions and community organizations recognized the law as a threat, not just in the cities where emergency financial managers were imposed, but around the state, where unions would be pressured to make concessions in order to keep a financial manager from being imposed on them. Since financial managers have the power to wipe away a union contract with a pen stroke, the unions are left with an impossible choice—concede great chunks of hard-won benefits and wages, or risk losing it all.

That would be enough to land Snyder near the top of this list, except of course it's not all. Snyder eliminated the Michigan Business Tax and replaced it with a flat tax of just 6 percent for corporations, which essentially handed them a $1.8 billion tax cut. To pay for that cut, he cut education spending and of course public workers—and then eliminated the exemption that allows senior citizens not to pay taxes on their pension income. Yes, he taxed old people and cut funding from children to lower the corporate income tax rate.

Of course there are anti-choice bills moving in Michigan, as well as anti-immigrant legislation, and swipes at domestic partner benefits for university employees. But the “emergency manager” law is a unique accomplishment for Snyder, one that warrants the recall campaign against him.

2. Chris Christie, New Jersey. Chris Christie seems to have watched a few too many episodes of "The Sopranos." The New Jersey governor relies on bluster and swagger, taking shots at teachers and legislators and engaging in a very public name-calling match with the very same Democratic State Senate president who helped him pass what has been called the worst anti-union bill in the country. He's made himself a YouTube star, prompting cheers from the right and sending chills up the spine of the left, who fear Christie on a national level.

Christie was the advance guard for the class of 2010, knocking out former Governor John Corzine in 2009 amid cheers from the Tea Party and shivers from Democrats, who were sure this guy couldn't possibly win in New Jersey. He could, and he did, and even though 51 percent of voters now say they'd support someone else, the damage has been done. He's pulled money out of renewable energy and cut $820 million from education budgets—a move ruled unconstitutional because it “fell more heavily upon our high risk districts and the children educated within those districts.”

The reason his former buddy Steve Sweeney is so angry with Christie? After cutting a deal with the Democrats for the anti-union law, Christie used his line-item veto to slash programs Democrats had bargained for:

He mowed down a series of Democratic add-ons, including $45 million in tax credits for the working poor, $9 million in health care for the working poor, $8 million for women’s health care, another $8 million in AIDS funding and $9 million in mental-health services. But the governor added $150 million in school aid for the suburbs, including the wealthiest towns in the state. That is enough to restore all the cuts just listed.

No wonder Sweeney called him a “mean old bastard.”

1. Scott Walker, Wisconsin. We really ought to be grateful to Scott Walker. Because of him and the Wisconsin state legislature, dominated by the Fitzgerald brothers, progressives and especially the labor movement were reenergized. The Tea Party became yesterday's news as protesters thronged the capitol in Madison, refusing to leave for days while the Democratic state senators hid out in another state to prevent a vote on Walker's bill, which eliminated collective bargaining for the state's public workers.

Without Walker, public sector unions wouldn't have become a rallying cry for the left, that's for sure. But he picked the wrong fight in a state with a proud history of organized labor—a state that teaches labor history in the public schools.

Still, the bill passed, Walker's still in charge, and he's been taking aim at those who could defeat him. He got his way with a vicious voter ID bill and his budget cuts hit everything from the state university to the public schools to the state's health care program, one of the best in the country. He targeted rural broadband, people with disabilities and reproductive health care, and he's even messing with craft beer. (He really should know better on that one, but it seems there isn't a fight Walker's unwilling to pick.)

Walker's not eligible for recall yet, but the state senators who're supporting him are, and the elections are already moving forward. And like most of the other states on this list, the results in Wisconsin could have a big impact on the race in 2012.

The rightward shift in the country in 2010 didn't just bring us Tea Party-backed governors salivating over a chance to enact their agenda on the bodies of women, union workers, and immigrants. It also brought us some Democrats who seem to be buying into the same pro-corporate, anti-working people policies. So honorable mention here goes to:

1. Andrew Cuomo, New York. I know, I know, he just passed marriage equality, right? Well, he's taking a bit too much credit for that, since the Republican-dominated state legislature wound up bringing up and passing the bill simply because it was actually really popular right now to do so in New York. Meanwhile, Cuomo's refused to keep the popular “millionaire's tax” and cut a third of homeless youth shelter beds instead. Cuomo too has made enemies within organized labor, freezing workers' salaries and calling for cutbacks, mounting a political campaign even after taking office aimed at demonizing labor.

And this is the leading Democrat being discussed as a presidential candidate for 2016?

Research assistance on this piece came from Charles Monaco at the Progressive States Network.

Notice anything in common. These Republicans governors all ran on a campaign to create jobs. All of them have actually done as much as they can to increase unemployment and at the same time give millions in tax giveaways to corporations that are making record profits. They have all made education cuts which will affect future employment in their states. Business looking for educated young workers to replace retiring older workers will be out of luck. They're spending millions on making it more difficult for students and seniors to vote. They're spending millions to hunt down a relatively few undocumented workers. We all want immigration laws to be enforced, but there is such a thing as putting money into priorities first. People who are here to pick lettuce. wash dishes and cut lawns are hardly a top priority.

Another Big Lie - Conservative Republicans Are Steeped in American History

Another Big Lie - Conservative Republicans Are Steeped in American History

When Tea Party darling Herman Cain announced his candidacy for president in May, he decided to cite words from the U.S. Constitution to underline his key points. Unfortunately for Cain, he got his documents wrong. The passage he chose was from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

Cain is not alone. There seems to be an epidemic of Tea Party Republicans botching historical accounts of the founding of the United States. Since Independence Day celebrates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and given the recent Tea Party problems with history, I thought it would be fitting to look a little closer at Cain's gaffe, as it has both symbolic and substantive importance regarding modern American politics.

Symbolically, Cain's problem with historical accuracy represents a major characteristic of the modern Tea Party-dominated Republican Party. Whether it is Sarah Palin's butchering of Paul Revere's role in the American Revolution, or Michele Bachmann's truly revisionist mangling of the facts to claim the founding fathers tried to abolish slavery (not to mention her belief that John Quincy Adams was a founding father, even though he was born in 1767), the Tea Party has shown a disdain for knowledge, facts and learning. History is not something set in stone, but rather something to be twisted and manipulated to support the immutable, ideological beliefs of the movement.

So if Palin or Bachmann plainly get American history wrong, the response isn't to admit it (after all, the statements are not debatable; Revere was not riding to warn the British, and slavery was enshrined as legitimate in the Constitution, notably through the three-fifths compromise). No, instead, their supporters tried to change history to match the statements of their leaders, which in 21st century practice means Palin supporters editing the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere to reflect her mistakes, and Bachmann's followers doing the same for the page on John Quincy Adams.

The ignorance of Cain, Palin and Bachmann holds importance beyond a "gotcha" moment to demonstrate that these three individuals aren't up to the task of being president (similar to Mitt Romney's gaffe of telling an unemployed attendee at one of his events that he, too, was unemployed). More importantly, the lack of respect (or even caring about) facts, both by the candidates and their supporters, is indicative of the larger GOP approach to political positions. For example, Republicans support lower taxes for millionaires because that is what their core constituency and base ideology calls for, but they justify the position through unsustainable assertions that such tax cuts somehow create jobs, even though we know they don't (also here and here). Or, Republicans reject the existence of climate change to keep costs as low as possible for corporations regardless of the consequences, but justify their position by denying the existence of climate change, even though the overwhelming majority of scientists say it is real.

There are myriad issues for which Republicans rely on patently false assertions to back policy positions that may be otherwise unpalatable to the American public ("We're creating jobs" plays better than "Rich people shouldn't have to pay a lot in taxes"), but nowhere is this lack of respect for facts and history more prevalent than in the party's attacks on Barack Obama. Rather than oppose his policies on the merits, Republicans have engaged in a two-prong strategy of personal attacks meant to score political victories: First, they opposed every proposal made by the president, even if Obama called for the adoption of a policy once embraced by Republicans (i.e. becoming the Party of No, although I have argued they have evolved into the Party of F You).

Second, the right, including politicians and the right-wing, Fox News/Limbaugh propaganda echo chamber, has engaged in a coordinated assault to paint the president as being out of the American mainstream, regardless of the facts. They want you to think he is dangerous and un-American, that he was born in Kenya, and that his policy proposals are radical, and that he has no desire to keep Americans safe from terrorists with whom he actually sympathizes.

(Never mind that he has governed as a centrist and consistent with his campaign promises, which resulted in a hefty victory. For example, the stimulus package was smaller than many economists supported and included a ton of tax cuts; he didn't push for a single-payer system or even a public option as part of health care reform, instead getting behind a bill that pushed tens of millions of new customers into the hands of private insurance companies; and he stepped up the pursuit of Qaeda and Taliban targets, including drone attacks, taking out more terrorists than his predecessor, including Osama bin Laden.)

In right-wing rhetoric, the president is a threat to the American way of life, a socialist who wants to change traditional American values, even though there is no actual evidence to support these claims.

Why do these attacks matter? Well, that question segues nicely into the substantive problem with Cain's Constitution/Declaration gaffe, since the Tea Party regularly invokes an Obama attack on liberties, drawing on the Declaration of Independence (even if Cain thought he was citing the Constitution, not an insignificant error since the Constitution is the law of the land, providing a framework for our entire political system, while the Declaration is mainly historical in nature).

In his speech, Cain said:

"You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believe in, they instilled in you. When you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don't stop right there, keep reading. Cause that's when it says that when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. We've got some altering and some abolishing to do."

This kind of language should sound familiar, since it is the bread and butter of Tea Party ideology. And Cain is right about what the Declaration says (well, he got the wrong document, but he got the right sequence of passages). The second paragraph of the Declaration begins:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

And then the paragraph goes on to say:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Warms the cockles of the Tea Party heart, right? Well, with a little more perspective and examination, not so much. First of all, I'm sure it's no coincidence Cain stopped where he did, since the next line of the Declaration is:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes."

So yes, the Declaration supports "the Right of the People to alter or to abolish" the government when it becomes "destructive" to "unalienable Rights." But not for "light and transient causes." What did the founding fathers think were big enough threats to warrant revolution? The answer is right in the Declaration, a laundry list of grievances that make up the bulk of the document. It is a litany of charges that the King of England had impinged on American liberties by, among other things, engaging in the hindering and dissolution of of legislative bodies, ignoring laws, preventing the adoption of laws (including, much to the Tea Party's disdain, I'm sure, the "Naturalization of Foreigners"), interfering with the judiciary, quartering English soldiers, interfering with trade, and imposing taxes without consent.

In short, the founding fathers bristled at being ruled by a dictatorial monarch. It is easy to see how in the over-hyped, rabid and, most importantly, false and historically inaccurate rhetoric of the Tea Party, such a connection would be apparent, from the tyranny of a King to a president looking to institute a socialist/Nazi/Islamist dictatorship in the United States.

Only, much like Bachmann's and Palin's lack of knowledge of our history, Cain (and it's not like he is the only Republican who talks about Obama's assault on our liberties) completely misunderstands and misapplies the content and context of the Declaration's call for revolution. Republicans can't seem to understand that if the president disagrees with them on how to address the country's roster of problems, it doesn't make him a tyrant. It's doubtful the founding father would look kindly on anyone trying to argue that the Obama presidency was comparable to the reign of King George III.

The language of the Declaration of Independence doesn't provide the support the Tea Party thinks it does.

(As an aside, the core charges of the Tea Party against Obama are all false: They complain about taxes, but Americans are experiencing their lowest tax burden since 1958, with taxes lower than they were under Reagan. They charge Obama with wanting to take away their guns, but the president hasn't signed a single piece of gun control legislation, nor did he veto bills with pro-gun provisions attached. I could go on and on.)

Cain (and Bachmann and Palin) getting history wrong isn't just about a funny media story. Rather, the Tea Party's ambivalence about facts and history is a necessary component of the GOP political strategy, as the party seeks to continue its drive since the 2010 elections to return the country to the 1920s (attacking social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, busting unions, cutting education, catering to corporate special interests and prioritizing eliminating abortion, all while further increasing the historically massive divide between the very wealthiest Americans and the rest of us). As Think Progress tweeted last week: "REMINDER: Current deficit + economy product of crisis created by deregulation + huge tax cuts. Solution isn't deregulation + huge tax cuts." (Just look at Tim Pawlenty's tax cut proposal, for example.)

Republicans, to win in 2012, are relying on Americans to forget history, not remember it.

So on this Independence Day, which commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, let's take the opportunity to read the document and better understand what it did (and did not) say, and, more importantly, against what the founding fathers were actually rebelling.

And let's try and stick to facts and accurate history when debating the issues. I know cognitive dissonance can be troubling for an ideologue, but here is a tip: If you find yourself literally trying to rewrite history, you're probably on the wrong side of a debate.

More often than not the facts of history support liberalism. A political philosophy espoused by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine. Maybe that is why rabid right-wing conservatives keep trying to rewrite history or invent their own.

Jon Stewart Was Correct. Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed

Jon Stewart Was Correct. Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed

I have a lot of respect for political fact checking sites. I think they play a critical role, especially in our misinformation-saturated political and media environment.

However, sometimes these sites fall for the allure of phony bipartisanship. In other words, in an environment in which conservatives are more inaccurate and more misinformed about science and basic policy facts, the “fact checkers” nevertheless feel unduly compelled to correct “liberal” errors too—which is fine, as long as they are really errors.

But sometimes they aren’t. A case in point is Politifact’s recent and deeply misguided attempt to correct Jon Stewart on the topic of…misinformation and Fox News. This is a subject on which we’ve developed some expertise here…my recent post on studies showing that Fox News viewers are more misinformed, on an array of issues, is the most comprehensive such collection that I’m aware of, at least when it comes to public opinion surveys detecting statistical correlations between being misinformed about contested facts and Fox News viewership. I’ve repeatedly asked whether anyone knows of additional studies—including contradictory studies—but none have yet been cited.

Stewart, very much in the vein of my prior post, went on the air with Fox’s Chris Wallace and stated,

"Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll."

My research, and my recent post, most emphatically supports this statement. Indeed, I cited five (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) separate public opinion studies in support of it—although I carefully noted that these studies do not prove causation (e.g., that watching Fox News causes one to be more misinformed). The causal arrow could very well run the other way—believing wrong things could make one more likely to watch Fox News in the first place.

Polifact provides a great service and they are right most of the time. Sometimes they bend themselves into a pretzel trying to be fair and end up being, to use their jargon, mostly wrong.

Some corporations spending more on executive pay than income taxes

As has been amply documented, income inequality in the United States has soared to historic (in a bad way) levels, with the richest 1% getting 24% of the income. If numbers like that don't convince you that corporations are doing their best to increase income inequality, consider this:

According to a new report called “S.& P. 500 Executive Pay: Bigger Than …Whatever You Think It Is,” put together by the independent research firm R. G. Associates, there are currently 32 companies that actually spent more on compensation for their top executives in 2010 than they paid in corporate income taxes

No wonder no one is hiring. If corporations can rake in profits without hiring they will. Obviously they do not need more tax cuts to encourage them to do more hiring.