Must-read Progressive Book Alert: Max Blumenthal exposes patterns in radical right-wing extremism

I've been holding back on posting a missive entitled "The Death of the Republican Party." Why would I write something so far-reaching and grandiose? 


The party has destroyed itself by relying on its "Taliban wing" (a term used by moderate Republicans) to drive its tone, agenda and platform--much of which represents its shocking lack of morality. 



Sarah Palin image from Scrapetv.com


The Republican Party has, in fact and deed, become the Party of No, the Know-Nothing Party and the Do-Nothing Party. Its platform and values, when spelled out in raw human terms include:

• Denial of human rights for gays and lesbians
• Racism - turning back the clock on racial quotas designed to make up for hundreds of years of stolen time for minority opportunities
• Failing abstinence education programs that increase teen anal and oral sexual activity, and fail to curtail teen pregnancies
• Cronyism and corruption in government--all the while preaching smaller government and less waste
• Government by and for the rich and big business
• Denial of mountains of scientific evidence for human causes of global warming/climate change
• Denial of human rights for detainees using specious legal arguments
• Blocking advances in health care rights for the poor and middle class 
• Further enriching the rich while robbing the poor and middle classes through corporate and tax law changes

It's sad news for a party that once stood for good things like fiscal responsibility in government. 


If the situation didn't hurt so many people, it would be good news for progressives and liberals; we only want to help the United States become the true democracy and beacon of freedom and fairness, the exemplar nation envisioned by the founding fathers.


Now I may not have to write about the party's demise. Max Blumenthal's explosive book, Republican Gomorrah, is subtitled Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. 


It promises to shock you as it reveals a pattern of ugly truths that Republicans and conservatives don't want you to know or understand, a pattern that has itself created divisions that cracked not only the Republican party's alabaster facade, but its very structure.


Many, many regressive right-wing acts collectively form a conspiracy to shoulder America into the dark ages. Conservative regressives, racists and nut-jobs have worked relentlessly since Reagan's regime to turn back rights for blacks and other minorities, keep women as chattel--largely confined to the bedroom and the kitchen--and clutch their historic governmental and business dominance with the ferocity of a pit bull trained for the ring.


These acts are all perpetrated under the cloaks of "tradition," "family values," "love of our country," "morality" and "freedom of  speech and religion." But these terms are code that actually mean "keep the white man in power at all costs."


So many acts, in toto, are hard to connect. Some may see a general pattern of mayhem, lying, spreading disinformation, insanity and corruption on the part of extremist right-wingers. But it doesn't look very coordinated--at least from outside the halls of power.


Blumenthal clears the conservative miasma, managing to connect the dots within an antisocial pattern that links many disparate acts of the far-right conservative movement like a grand murder conspiracy. Even further, he examines the twisted thinking and belief systems that underpin their sometimes ridiculous, and more than occasionally heinous acts.


In the book's introduction, Escape from Freedom, Blumenthal describes  his view of the party at its 2008 national convention:

...almost exclusively white, overwhelmingly evangelical, fixated on abortion, homosexuality, and abstinence education; resentful and angry; and unable to discuss how and why it had become this way.

He might well have added "a party grasping desperately for minority support while propping up token leaders of any race available in a hurried moment." Predictably, such tin leaders as Sarah Palin, Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal have fallen flat on their faces when the light of reason hits their repetitive bleating for regressive action.



Piyush "Bobby" Jindal image from Wikipedia


This anti-humanitarian and corrupt right-wing conspiracy has managed to murder--certainly in financial and economic terms, as well as in terms of social equality--opportunities for the middle class and poor, gays and lesbians, and other minorities and disenfranchised.




Jane Smiley image from Accuracy in Media


Smiley wrote in Slate in 2004 about "the unteachable ignorance of the red states" in an article that described the Republican's strategy of winning at any cost:

A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey—workers and consumers.

The architects of this strategy knew perfectly well that they were exploiting, among other unsavory qualities, a long American habit of virulent racism, but they did it anyway, and we see the outcome now—Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. 

They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

From Jane Smiley's review of Republican Gomorrah in the Huffington Post:

Apparently there isn't a single person in the present incarnation of the Republican party who does anything. Things happen--God does it. Satan does it. No Republican is an agent of his or her own success or failure, sin or redemption. It just happens.

The consequences of this lack of responsibility are there for all to see--screaming threats, guns at rallies, unhinged behavior every time a Republican doesn't feel the way he or she wants to feel, absolute sense of powerlessness leading directly to an absolute will to power... 

Republican Gomorrah is a frightening book because it is clear to all of us on the outside that the various Republican operatives who surround James Dobson and his ilk have no consciences and will stop at nothing. They invoke the name of God for purposes that shame God absolutely--hurting, destroying, maiming, and damning others who either don't accept their beliefs or don't acknowledge their power and righteousness. Of course that is frightening.

But Blumenthal's cast of characters, beginning with Dobson and his prodigal son, Ryan, and including John Hagee, Sarah Palin, Ralph Reed, Charles Colson, Judith Reisman, Christina Regnery, Donald Wildmon, et al. strike the reader as above all else very small--egocentric, narrow minded, uneducated, selfish, and resentful. Each of these qualities is destructive in and of itself. The combination is turning out to be coercive. Even those of us who are immune to the emotions these people play upon are getting more and more nervous about the power that they wish to exert.

Blumenthal does two things that no one else I have read manages to do--the first of these is that he organizes the network. He shows how Ted Bundy is connected to James Dobson is connected to Gary Bauer is connected to Erik Prince is connected to Ralph Reed is connected to Jack Abramoff is connected to Tom Delay is connected to Tony Perkins is connected to David Duke is connected to Mel Gibson, and so forth, and in the course of tracing these connections, he informs us, or reminds us, of the crimes and misdemeanors these people have committed.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/republican-gomorrah_b_290293.html&cp

Tom Delay image from Wikipedia


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/republican-gomorrah_b_290293.html&cp


Read more about Max Blumenthal at Wikipedia.


Find more about Jane Smiley at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Smiley

Rudderless Republicans Led by Lunatics and the Lifeless

Republicans have been spinning like a rudderless ship for a long time. And no wonder.

The so-called leaders they follow are sociopaths, fringe-dwellers, fanatics and worse who care only for their rich buddies who come knocking from industry and are let in the backdoor of government under cover of night with nary a background check.

Happy Halloween--NOT. We're now enduring the Nightmare on America Street they engineered, starting when Ronald Reagan implementing insane clown-economists' trickle-down theories. Now money doesn't even trickle down.

Some conservative leaders are actually insane and/or dangerously deluded by visions of grandeur, acting like saviors even as they wreck the planet, the people and the economy for their selfish or insane rationales.

The epitome are the King and Queen of Ineptitude and Ignorance: the dry drunk, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, the Idiot from Alaska. Like the Frankenstein monster and his bride, they ought to marry each other.

Bush, driven by delusions of a savior's role to fight "Gog and Magog in the Middle East," started the Iraq War with its anti-humanitarian and deadly fallout.

Palin believes Africa is a country, cannot name any major magazines she has read, and thinks she has a handle on foreign policy because the border of the state she governed, Alaska, is nine miles from Russia.

So flies any good sense out the window! And Republicans follow like lemmings down the cliff, dragging all of America with them. Thank God Almighty we didn't elect McSame and Palin--or where in hell--yes, literally--would we be now??

Republican conservatives have commandeered the party, but they are a fringe-dwellers who delude themselves into believing they are mainstream--mostly because the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck attract ratings from loonies and crazies--and the many who are sane but cannot believe what these wingnuts are saying and doing.

(I watch and listen to them out of deep concern for our nation. I feel a need to keep tabs on such people who push such clearly racist, broken, anti-Christian values and ideas as supposedly mainstream.)

Their ideas are about as mainstream as kidney stones pushed agonizingly out of the America's collective urethra.

Their poisonous pap--headlined, parroted and shouted by the likes of the Captains of Self-Centered Righteousness, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh--alternates between excruciating and howlingly funny for those with any sense and logic to hear.

If ever the Republican Party met its nadir, and fell on the wrong side of human rights, good sense and history, it is now. Their whole corrupt team of insane clowns needs to fall on the sharp spike of sanity and die with blood spewing out their orifices.

Good riddance. They never did a thing for the poor and middle class American.

"Starve the beast" is the conservative Republican slogan for cutting government spending. Well, the "beast" they so denigrate is actually the people of America.

The people ARE the government. We do elect our representatives, and despite corrupt lobbyists-as-rulers, revolving-door politics on the part of both parties, this is a nominal democracy. So when you hear the wrong-headed "right" say "starve the beast," it's YOU they're starving. They've succeeded, and they're literally taking your food, clothing and shelter.

This entire economic debacle, the economic crisis of 2008-2009, is the result of Reagan's trickle-down economic revolution. (Did you know that, according to Wikipedia, "The term has been attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression that 'money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.^'[2]" Trickle-down economics" was a joke, never a policy directive--until it got into the hands of the Insane republican Clown Posse!)

Don't believe it? Now Goldman Sachs, for just one example, propped up by the dollars of the poor and middle class, is posting profits and giving bonues to its executives--the same execs who stole from you, knocked you out of your homes with exorbitant interest rates and investments in shaky securities. Their ineptitude is being rewarded once again, and they ride in their yachts while you starve and live on the streets after losing your hard-earned homes.

They've starved us all right--right into the third world.

Statisticians: Global Warming Deniers' Cooling Claim is False

New evidence trounces claims of global warming deniers who say that the Earth's temperatures are cooling. This evidence adds to the mountains of data that demonstrates ever more conclusively that human activity is the essential cause for the spike in global termperatures since the Industrial Revolution began burning of fossil fuels on a mass-scale. 

 

"Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years"--either in data from the NOAA's climate data center or data preferred by global warming deniers fromthe University of Alabama at Huntsville, reports Seth Borenstein, science and ecology reporter from the Associated Press.

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Climate change has been hte center of public debate and controversy since the late 1990s when vested interests like Exxon-Mobil began to pour millions of dollars into global warming denial claims designed to cast doubt on  the work of trained, legitimate climate scientists. The oil and coal industries would obviously suffer under any rules demanding decreases in fossil fuel use and production.

Trust legitimate scientific sources

For more information on climate science done by trained, professional climate scientists check out these websites:

Real Climate - Climate science from climate scientists

NOAA - Illegitimate, nonscientific sources

 

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/14/real-climate-gives-reason-to-cheer/

 

 

 

 

 

Thirty Republican Senators support subcontractor gang rape!

I feel angry when I see someone helpless victimized--and even angrier when the hypocrite "right" defends the attackers, not the victims. This debacle is another symptom of how politicians have been co-opted by capitalism and corporate power over human rights.

Jon Stewart on the Daily Show exposed 30 Republicans who voted against the anti-gang rape amendment for government contractors, Senator Al Franken's first sponsored bill in the Senate.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN)

Q: What kind of person votes against the ability to sue a company whose employees gang-rape them??

A: A sick, twisted, conservative Republican--apparently the same kind of person who opposes ACORN because, they claim, ACORN is "immoral." And not a single woman among this gang of misogynists.

The Karl Rovish hypocrisy of these sickos is shocking. Conservatives say they are tough on crime--unless the criminals steal from the government and cover up crimes against the innocent.

What kind of company makes employees sign a contract forbidding lawsuits agains them after their employees gang-raped a woman and locked her in a crate when she complains? (She was imprisoned without food, water, or a bed, she says, as part of the cover-up.) Oh...of course: a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR. The kind of company that anti-Christian Bush and vampire VP Dick Cheney love. And apparently, the kind their butt-boy Republican Senators love, too.

Oh--and they covered it up! After KBR security officers were handed the rape kit, it vanished.

From the UK Guardian: Jamie Leigh Jones testifying in Washington in 2007. Photograph: Greg Nash/AP

That makes sense. Halliburton gang-raped us financially in Iraq, with Dick Cheney leading the charge by offering them a corrupt, no-bid contract--then allowed its employees to gang-rape a 19-year-old woman. And fights the lawsuit with a slimy contract.

And thirty Republican Senators voted for more of the same violations of human rights. I guess if it happens to their wives or daughters, no big deal, right? Just another business day at the government trough they claim to want to shrink.

Thank God a few other compassionate Republicans and Democrats outvoted them. The new law passed, 68-30.

Note: Most of these stone cold profits-over-people Senators are from dumb cracker southern and western states--the ones like Afghanistan, where women's rights barely exist.

Should we call these compassion-free losers the Taliban Republicans?

And even John McCain? We knew he sunk to new lows in the campaign against Obama--or atleast authorized sleazy ads--but this? Maybe dementia is setting in. He himself was a victim of torture--which is certainly a component of rape.

Here's the list of pro-gang-rape Republican Senators, according to Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post:

Franken's amendment ended up passing, 68-30. Here's a list of the Senators who showed broad support for Roman Polanski by voting against it:

Alexander (R-TN)  (202) 224-4944

Barrasso (R-WY)  (202) 224-6441

Bond (R-MO)  (202) 224-5721

Brownback (R-KS)   (202) 224-6521

Bunning (R-KY)  (202) 224-4343

Burr (R-NC)  (202) 224-3154

Chambliss (R-GA)   (202) 224-3521

Coburn (R-OK)   (202) 224-5754

Cochran (R-MS)  (202) 224-5054 

Corker (R-TN)   (202) 224-3344

Cornyn (R-TX)   (202) 224-2934

Crapo (R-ID)  (202) 224-6142

DeMint (R-SC)  (202) 224-6121

Ensign (R-NV)   202) 224-6244

Enzi (R-WY)   (202) 224-3424

Graham (R-SC)  (202) 224-5972

Gregg (R-NH)  (202) 224-3324

Inhofe (R-OK)  (202) 224-4721

Isakson (R-GA)   (202) 224-3643

Johanns (R-NE)  (202) 224-4224

Kyl (R-AZ)  (202) 224-4521

McCain (R-AZ)   (202) 224-2235

McConnell (R-KY)  (02) 224-2541

Risch (R-ID)  (202) 224-2752

Roberts (R-KS)  (202) 224-4774

Sessions (R-AL)  (202) 224-4124

Shelby (R-AL)  (202) 224-5744

Thune (R-SD)  (202) 224-2321

Vitter (R-LA)   (202) 224-4623

Wicker (R-MS)    (202) 224-6253

Maybe we can take health care away from these Republican creeps--just in case they're gang-raped in prison.

Take action:

Call or email these pro-gang-rape senators and tell them what you think of their despicable and twisted vote on this should-have-been slam-dunk piece of worker protection legislation.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/meet-the-senators-who-vot_n_312976.html

US health care system a poor deal for its high cost

What's the bottom line on US health care reform?

• The "health care reform" debate is actually a debate between progressive and regressive, conservative ideologies: Progressives want fairness and coverage for all. Conservatives want to save money at the expense of people's lives.
• Some members of Congress have been bought by the health care industry. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, the chair of the Senate Finance Comittee who wrote much of the criticised water-down health care reform bill, was given $413,000 by the health care insurance and drug industry over 4 years. This is corruption.
  
• Under capitalism, fewer people in the US are covered, death rates are higher and health care costs much more. Obesity and diabetes are also soaring epidemics in America--and our health care system is failing to both cure and prevent them.
  
• There is too great a (capitalist) focus on making and selling medicines that make people sicker or don't cure the problem, and hurt the environment. And we don't push enough to change behaviors that prevent illness: exercise, a healthy diet and less well-known factors like strong personal relationships.
  
• Capitalism is failing our weakest, most vulnerable members of society--especially in health care.
• Capitalism undermines democracy, public health and the environment by putting too much wealth and power into the hands of too few individuals and institutions.

Those are my views after reading excerpts from T.R. Reid's quest to understand health care systems around the world. His book is titled "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care."

Writer dispels health care reform myths

From the AARP site that busts many myths on health care reform:

T.R. Reid set off exploring health care economics around the world and came back with a morality tale.

Two years ago, Reid, an author of seven books and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post for more than three decades, wanted to understand why Americans pay twice as much as other industrialized nations for their health care, yet get far less in return. American children die more frequently; Americans don't live as long; and nearly 50 million Americans lack any health care coverage.

He examined the dynamics of health care in the 21st century. What he discovered is the morality tale: The rest of the industrialized world started with the moral obligation to provide health care to the entire population of their countries. "The richest country in the world has never made that commitment," he says. "The other countries made the decision to cover everyone and then decided how to pay for it."

The result is his compelling book "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care." It has become an essential reader for the ongoing debate over how to overhaul America's ailing health care system. (Read an excerpt.)

His other conclusion, validated frequently by the summer of raging town hall meetings, is more complicated. "There are a lot of myths out there,"Reid said in a recent interview at AARP's Washington headquarters. "A lot of it is ideological."

Free enterprise, not government, can solve everything, the argument goes. But in the United States, Reid adds, "it's clearly not true when it comes to medicine. Fewer people are covered." What's more, the United States has "more people dying and much higher cost than everywhere else in the world."

You must decide what's more important, a CEO's yacht or the life or your child or grandmother?

Lives and quality of life are more important than profits that enrich the veritable kings of our nation--the richest 1% who already own 40-50% of the wealth in America, and 40% of the entire planet's wealth.

Lawmakers influenced by health care industry
Many of the senators and congresspersons fighting this are bought by the health care and insurance lobby. They make their living by living off of you.

The Washington Post recently reported on health insurance campaign contributions:

Health insurers and drug makers have showered members of the 111th Congress with millions in campaign contributions over the last four years, with a special focus on leaders who will play major roles in shaping health-care legislation, according to a study to be released tomorrow.

Health insurers and their employees contributed $2.2 million to the top 10 recipients in the House and Senate since 2005, while drug makers and their employees gave more than $3.3 million to top lawmakers during that period, according to an analysis of federal elections data by Consumer Watchdog, a California-based advocacy group.

The biggest beneficiaries in the Senate included John McCain (R-Ariz.), with $546,000; Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), with $425,000; and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), with $413,000, who as head of the Finance Committee will play a leading role in the debate over health-care reform.

Don't buy the anti-reform and self-centered, self-serving hype of conservatives who deride "Obamacare." Do your own research on the dollars that congressmen and senators receive from the health care lobby.

If you want health care to cost less, health care providers should charge less. Doctors and hospitals don't have to get rich off the sick and dying. Let's question the morality of that equation--then we'll make some moral progress in health issues.

Michael Moore does just that, in a letter published on the Network of Spiritual Progressives website:

We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds. 14,000 people every day lose their health insurance.

At the same time, Wall Street bankers ("Blessed Are the Wealthy"?) are amassing more and more loot -- and they do their best to pay little or no income tax (last year Goldman Sachs' tax rate was a mere 1%!). Would Jesus approve of this? If not, why do we let such an evil system continue? It doesn't seem you can call yourself a Capitalist AND a Christian -- because you cannot love your money AND love your neighbor when you are denying your neighbor the ability to see a doctor just so you can have a better bottom line. That's called "immoral" -- and you are committing a sin when you benefit at the expense of others.

Take action
To be heard, and for government to change, you must raise your voice. Hey people, jump off your couches! Let's just do it:

• Reform health care
• Provide a public option
• Cover everyone regardless of ability to pay

It's the right and moral thing to do--regardless of cost. The value that affordable health care offers to society is what's important.

Contact your President, your senator or congressperson and your governor today and let them know how you stand on health care.

Talking points

• You want the public option--now, not ten years from now.
• Health care reform should not serve the insurance industry but the people who need it most.
• Max Baucus' health care reform plan is, as Bill Maher says (pardon the language--but it's necessary to shock you into action), "a blowjob to the insurance industry." (Wendell Potter agrees. He's a former insurance exec who testified before Congress about the excesses and corruption in the industry).
  
• We can't afford to pay for health insurance company CEOs' yachts and jets while people die from lack of care