Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

When you don't have much substance to make a case about why your policies are better than that other smart guy and resort to making up stories using religion to stirrup emotions preaching lies in the church, you have pretty much lost your credibility as a Christian.

That is pretty much what happened to that fake ass Billy Graham's son, Evangelist Franklin Graham on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" when asked about if President Obama is a christian. He said, Obama "has said he's a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is." He continued spreading his back hand lies to create doubt and refused to acknowledge if he could say for sure that Obama is indeed of the Christian faith saying, "All I know is I'm a sinner, and God has forgiven me of my sins... you have to ask every person".

If you are given a choice between toxic and crazy, which would you choose? Trick question. House Republicans would choose both. Last week, in their sham hearing on contraception, the GOP leadership refused to allow a woman on the day's first panel on, you know, women's health. But Chairman Darrell Issa told us that on women's health care, women must keep that aspirin between their knees and shut up. Well, the Republicans have done it again. Sandra Fluke, the law student whose friend lost an ovary to an illness easily treatable with birth control medication, is set to testify before the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee tomorrow. But if the Republicans can't totally shut her up, they will make sure she is not seen.

The Democratic Steering & Policy Committee's hearing will be held in the House Recording Studio, in order to help broadcast the event, except in this case, it won't be seen by anyone outside the room. According to House Dems, the Republican-controlled Committee on House Administration has refused to allow the hearing to be televised.

In other words, the House GOP blocked Sandra Fluke from testifying at a hearing last week, and now they're apparently blocking the public from hearing Sandra Fluke's testimony at another hearing this week.

“I was amazed. I’m standing next to a guy who has the most blatantly dishonest answers I can remember in any presidential race in my lifetime… I don’t know how you can debate someone with civility if they’re prepared to say things that are factually false.”

—Newt Gingrich

My last essay was an attempt to tease out the strands of hope out of a world that on the face of it seems to descend into mere anarchy with each passing day. I still believe in that hope, all these days later, and that things will work out, if only because the alternatives are so dire.

But for whatever reason, I'm in a seething rage. Maybe it was this quote:

“(Obama’s) said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume, you know, that he is,” Graham said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, adding that he doesn’t know whether Obama has accepted Jesus Christ as his lord and savior. Then Graham repeated his claim that Obama’s father was a Muslim and therefore the “Muslim world sees (Obama) as a son of Islam.”

Because this is so awesome!



I'm soooooooo in!

The anti-woman Right is rather fond of making the argument of "fungible" dollars. It goes something like this: if you give taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, and even if Planned Parenthood does not use that money to provide abortion services, you are still using taxpayer dollars to fund abortions because money is fungible. That is, taxpayer dollars they get frees up their other, non-taxpayer resources, which they can then use to provide abortions. The same argument is used against making religious employers contribute to any insurance plan that provides contraceptive services, even if they didn't directly have to pay for it.

Of course, the logic only applies to abortions and contraceptives. You would never hear the same argument of "fungible" money when it comes to giving taxpayer dollars to Churches or religious charities for non-proselytizing purposes, which opens up other non-taxpayer resources for the religious charity which they can use to proselytize. But suddenly, that's not fungible money.

Neither is, it seems, the money flying around in the corporate world of multinational businesses. Rick Santorum's Super PAC just had to give back $50,000 to a financial multinational because the money was drawn "mistakenly" from the firm's foreign account.

Stuart Roy, the spokesman for the Red, White and Blue super PAC, said the $50,000 donation made in January by Liquid Capital Markets Ltd. originated with an American executive at the firm. The money was returned, Roy said, because the donation was mistakenly drawn from the foreign firm's accounts.

Sure that was a gaffe...

Rick Santorum’s spokeswoman Alice Stewart said in a TV interview on Monday that Santorum was referring to President Barack Obama’s “radical Islamic policies” when he said the president’s agenda was driven by “phony theology” — but then quickly called up MSNBC after the segment aired to say she misspoke.

“There is a type of theological secularism when it comes to the global warmists in this country. That’s what he was referring to. He was referring to the president’s policies in terms of the radical Islamic policies the president has,” Stewart said on “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”

This is not a misspeak. This is  a dog whistle. This is a dog whistle telling the Republican primary voters and wingnut candidates for various offices that it was time to start running on the racist and Islamophobic theme that President Obama is a black (Kenyan) Muslim.

The rise of the Tea Party seems to have subsided in American politics as an electoral force, but the central sentiment from which it rose - racism - seems to be have new life breathed into it by the 2010 elections that put rabid right wing radicals in charge of state houses. There is now a real possibility that between the Teabaggers running the states and the appointments to the federal courts stacked by conservatives from Reagan to Bush Jr., the Voting Rights Act is under assault.

An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option: a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box.[...]

“There certainly has been a major change,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California at Irvine. “Now, you have a whole bunch of credible mainstream state attorneys general and governors taking this view. … That would have been unheard of even five years ago. You would have been accused of being a racist.”

I humbly submit, Prof. Hasen, that they are racists. The difference between now and five years ago is that the racists are emboldened because they know that they now run an entire political party. They know that no Republican candidate for president can get anywhere without sounding the dog whistle loudly and proudly. They know that the Southern Strategy to suppress minority votes might now be on its way to being given legal blessing.

So as you know, Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee - and known crybaby - held a hearing on insurance coverage for contraceptives, with the day's first panel consisting of men only. That's right - no women need testify on a vital women's issue. On what basis does Issa feel it appropriate to not let women testify? Well, on his wild goose chase of an idea that this is about religious liberty (eh, screw the religious liberty of women) and not contraception. Riiiight.

Shameful, but it would be one thing if it stopped there. It didn't. Darrell Issa went on Fox to defend his choice of an all-male theocratic panel to discuss a vital issue of women's health and women's religious freedom.

Appearing on Fox News with host Greta Van Susteren last night, Issa defended the decision, saying Fluke was unqualified to speak and that her first hand experience “wasn’t in any way related” to the issue at hand:

ISSA: They then wanted a different witness, a college student, who really didn’t belong on that panel for obvious reasons. [...]

She had a compelling story, a very sad story of a classmate who developed an ovarian cyst that might have been prevented by using contraception in another way, one that by the way, the Catholic bishop and everyone else there said is fully allowed, under their faith. But it was one of those things where her story was compelling, but it wasn’t in any way related to the point of the stated reason for hearing.

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

It has been three-year since the $787 billion bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act[ARRA]) was signed by President Obama in February 2009. So, how much do American know about the effect it had yanking America out of the worse recession since the great depression?

Well, that depends on who you ask. If you asked disgruntled economists like Paul Krugman and a minority of economists, they will tell you the sky is falling and continue to remain unimpressed with the spending bill’s economic effects. But, one thing is clear. According to the survey of a 40 member economists from a range of U.S. universities, 80% of the surveyed economists believe the stimulus has avoided higher unemployment where without it, it would have increased at the end of 2010 while 4% disagreed with that assertion.

Sam Stein in the Huffington Post summarizing a new book by Noam Scheiber of the New Republic:

Chief among the examples of the administration's failures is the stimulus itself. When Summers made the final presentation to the president's then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Scheiber writes, "It reflected what he deemed the best course that was politically feasible ... Yet because Emanuel and the president assumed Summers was largely giving them [economic advice], they believed they were closer to the ideal than they actually were."  (quoted by Delong so I do not have to link to sleazy Huffington Post).

According to Stein, according to Scheiber, Summers overruled the advice of  Presidential adviser Christina Romer.  For a different perspective, however, we could look at what, um, Christina Romer actually says: 

In retrospect, it would have been good if the Recovery Act had been even larger. But as it was, it was the largest countercyclical fiscal stimulus in American history – not just in dollar terms, but relative to the size of the economy[ my bold, R] As we've gotten more evidence about how it has worked, it is clear that it was immensely helpful. The Recovery Act is part of the reason why, despite the terrible shocks that hit the American economy in 2008, this recession, as bad as it was, wasn't a second Great Depression. The policy response was much more effective and much more aggressive than it was in the early thirties.

 What, even more aggressive than what the sainted FDR did? To make matters more pathetic, Stein writes:

 Scheiber writes…. [W]hen the final document was ultimately laid out for the president, even the $1.2 trillion figure wasn't included. Summers thought it was still politically impractical.

 Sadly for these fake journalists, the actual memo itself has leaked , and was published by a real journalist in the New Yorker, a it's quite a sensible document, but does include a list of recommendations from other sources including this line

Robert Reich believes it should be $1.2 trillion over two years, but also indicated it could
be larger.

 And it's worth noting that these people who are still whining about the size of the stimulus somehow neglect to explain how a bill that passed by ONE VOTE could have been made larger and still passed. Because none of these people care about reality.

It's a winning message...for President Obama

It's not just Mitt Romney that would have crashed the economy by letting Chrysler and GM fail. Rick Santorum would have, too:

Making his Michigan campaign debut in the home of the auto industry, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Thursday he would not have supported the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler.

"If we had just stayed out of it completely and let the market work, I believe that the market would have worked," Santorum said in an address to the Detroit Economic Club. "Would the auto industry look different than it does today? Yes it would be. Would it still be alive and well? I think it would be alive and equally as well, if not better."

Better? Better than this?

Just two years after it was rescued and reconstituted through bankruptcy and a government bailout, General Motors Co. cruised through 2011 to post the biggest profit in its history.

The 103-year-old company, leaner and smarter under new management, cut costs by taking advantage of its size around the globe. And its new products boosted sales so much that it has reclaimed the title of world's biggest automaker from Toyota. [...]

But the company's performance in North America and Asia still helped it earn $7.6 billion for the year, beating the record of $6.7 billion set during the truck boom in 1997.

—And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant.

Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.

—Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction off in Morocco like slaves or cattles.

—Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.

—I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.

—Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.

That's an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he'd adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse's apron on him. And then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag.

—But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

—What? says Alf.

—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

James Joyce, Ulysses

This is an essay on hatred.  And on love.  And how these two dipoles are contending not only for the soul of America, but in a real sense for that of the world.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Criminalizing President Obama
by Kay Whitlock

The 2012 presidential election will not turn on facts, figures, and reasonable arguments. Nor will the undue and terrible influence of huge amounts of right-wing/corporate money determine the outcome – though the flood of cash will be a malevolent and destabilizing influence.

Rather, it is the power of Story, the compelling nature of narrative, that will – together with the successes or failure of Get Out the Vote (GOTV) and voter suppression efforts, both from the left and the right – determine the outcome. And it will do so because Story embodies and conveys layers of meaning – spiritual as well as political; emotional as well as intellectual – in ways cold facts and figures cannot.

And when we talk about the power of Story, we mean the narrative arc that embodies – to varying degrees – collective hopes, dreams, possibilities, terrors, resentments, and rage. The power to stir powerful unconscious associations by evoking archetypal images and messages. (For a useful discussion of criminalizing archetypes, including their racialization, see Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.) The invitation Story extends to discover within ourselves compassion, generosity, and possibility or cynicism, fear, and loathing. We mean the depictions of what’s at stake, for whom, and the blatant as well as more coded signifiers, of the worthiness – or expendability – of various lives and communities.

This year, opponents and harsh critics of President Obama, especially from the right, but also, regrettably, from some within libertarian and liberal/progressive/left ranks, will rely significantly on criminalizing narratives that tap deeply into this country’s well of racist criminal archetypes. Beyond the presidential contest, these narratives will also be deployed to further polarize – and paralyze – other races for national and state office, voter initiatives, and more, not only by associating liberals, progressives, and leftists with criminal action and intent, but triggering waves of both conscious and unconscious racism.

Here, we briefly review the various kinds of anti-Obama criminalizing narratives that have been circulating for some time, anticipate their expansion and deepening, and analyze their meaning. All build on historical racist narratives; all of them embody snarling accusations of racial insubordination.

Among them:

President Obama as a welfare queen/thief/lazy black person
President Obama as a rapist/thug/violator of men, women, children, and the entire nation
President Obama as a deceptive, dishonest, secretive, untrustworthy “sleeper cell” Kenyan/Muslim, bent on the destruction of this country.

And we say clearly that it is critical for all of us to not only challenge these narratives and the larger Story they seek to tell, but also to understand why it is essential to the future of progressive politics to undermine all criminalizing narratives. In the run-up to the 2012 elections, CI will be alerting you to and commenting on varieties of criminalizing narratives being used to strategic purpose nationally and in the states.

Whether you enthusiastically support President Obama’s re-election, do so only tepidly, or are trying to decide whether you’ll vote for him, if you care about confronting and dismantling systemic racism in this country, you should be speaking up and out against these narratives.

(Full disclosure: this commentator does not always agree with President Obama, but strongly supports his re-election.)

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog
A Republican-supported “informed consent” bill is now law in Virginia. You may be wondering what this bill that just passed the House of Delegates yesterday and the State Senate a couple of weeks ago is all about? Well, in short, it is a legalized rape that requires women to undergo forced vaginal penetration to determine a fetus’ gestation age before getting an abortion.

Abortion; informed consent. Requires that, as a component of informed consent to an abortion, to determine gestation age, every pregnant female shall undergo ultrasound imaging and be given an opportunity to view the ultrasound image of her fetus prior to the abortion. The medical professional performing the ultrasound must obtain written certification from the woman that the opportunity was offered and whether the woman availed herself of the opportunity to see the ultrasound image or hear the fetal heartbeat. A copy of the ultrasound and the written certification shall be maintained in the woman's medical records at the facility where the abortion is to be performed.

Do we live in 2012? WTF? How the hell is it possible in America that a women against her will be forced to have something pushed into her vaginally in the name of the law? This is no simple matter nor is it like taking an images of a baby in mom's womb where a jelly is covering the tummy and an image scanner is run along the tummy while you watch the baby picture on TeeVee monitors. No, that is just not what this law will force. What it force on Virginia's women is legalized RAPE.

The Washington Post's Josh Hicks has given President Obama two Pinocchios on his claim that the dramatic increase in interest-group advertising manifested in the election cycle so far is a threat to a fair election. Specifically, Hicks doesn't like the use of the graphic (represented partially to the right) by the President's campaign. The specific claim of the graphic? That there is a 1600% increase in ad-spending by interest groups, thanks to the Supreme Court's anti-democratic Citizens United ruling.

Here comes the funny. Hicks says the President is "misleading" voters with that graphic, and here is his undeniable, numeric, mathematical slam dunk evidence to prove that he's got the goods on Obama.

That being said, the president’s campaign got its numbers right. The number of pro-Republican interest group advertisements increased from 1,763 in January 2008 to 30,442 during the same period in 2012, representing a 1,600 percent increase.

“Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.”
― Joe Biden

Yesterday, President Obama sent his budget to Congress. There is a party in our country that likes to invoke the word "values" at election time. That party - the Republican party - has a funny formulation of their "values": they claim to value the family but vehemently oppose family planning; they claim to value children but show it by cutting funds from our public schools; they claim to value community and show that by reducing funding for police and firefighters; and they claim to value faith but deny the central tenet of every faith: helping the least among us.

Capital Hill Republicans and the US Chamber of Commerce (my apologies for the redundancy) are in a tizzy over the it, but the President's budget is not just a statement of his values. It is a statement of American values.

Yesterday I was listening to a Conservative coworker of mine cheerfully preach about how President Obama was standing in the way of oil jobs. After a bit of thought I couldn't help but respond

So the American Conservative position is that President Obama should hurry up and bypass state desires to allow a foreign company to build another pipeline across the nation to ship oil from Socialist Canada to Communist China?

I was surprised that a person fluent in right-wing radio bubblespeak could take this position. After all this is a demand for the President (or one of his czars!?) to intervene in the private market and pick winners and losers!! They say it's about jobs, using the government to create jobs? The government doesn't create any jobs is what all those Senators and Congressman and lobbyists and political commentators told us before! When I broke it down from my point of view while using the appropriate anti-government constructs my friend's smugness deteriorated.
This should be an easy one for Democrats to win the messaging war on. In fact generally this should be an area were we can attack Republicans. Gas was $1.30/gallon when Bush became president and more than $3.50 after his ideas of economic anarchy took hold. All serious economists knew that would happen. When you take away the rules and refs a football game becomes a street fight. A drag race becomes destruction derby (although even that has rules).
We've let the oil and gas industry and financial speculators have free reign in the past with clear devastating results. It's time on this Keystone Pipeline to say no, or at least, "let's leave that up to the states." ;) UPDATE: I didn't know that gas prices fell during the economic crash at the end of Bush's term and starting President Obama's. I apologize for not checking on those stats.

Ian Kershaw is one of the most eminent historians of the Second World War.  His most recent book, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945, is a powerful examination of the last year of the war, from the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944 to Germany's final capitulation in May 1945.  Specifically, Kershaw attempts to answer a very important question:  Why did Germany continue fighting when it was obvious to anyone with an understanding of the military and political situation that the war was lost?  Here is Kershaw's conclusion:

Of the reasons why Germany was willing and able to fight on to the end, these structures of rule and underlying mentalities behind them are the most fundamental.  All other factors... were ultimately subordinate to the way the charismatic... regime was structured, and how it functioned, in its dying phase...  The dominant elites possessed neither the collective will nor the mechanisms of power to prevent Hitler from taking Germany to total destruction.

It wasn't so much that the Nazi leaders were bound up with Hitler's fate; by this time Hitler had lost most of his charisma.  But they were all bound together to a common ideology, and had committed common crimes.  Hitler knew that the only way out for him was victory or death; his closest acolytes, even though some tried to make deals with the West in the war's dying days, knew this as well.  The ones who drove the German war machine into its destruction knew they had nothing to lose, and that nothing awaited them on the other side of a defeat.  It was the desperation of the desperate.

Last December, inexplicably, Republicans handed President Obama a most beautiful political gift. They extended the president's payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance for only two months rather than the whole year. Why? So they could protect their millionaire friends from a 3% surtax on income over $1 million.

So of course, with amazing political malpractice, John Boehner and the Republicans handed to the president and he Democrats a golden goose - the chance to re-argue the case for extending these benefits to help working Americans and Americans looking for work in just two short months, a debate the president and the Democrats have already decidedly won.

And so here it comes. The two months are almost up, the Republicans are refusing to agree on any revenue raisers and arguing for cutting critical support from programs for the elderly, poor and job-seekers, and Democrats are putting the squeeze on. The result? The Republicans folded like a cheap wallet on the payroll tax cut; offering to extend it without any pay-fors.

“Because the president and Senate Democratic leaders have not allowed their conferees to support a responsible bipartisan agreement, today House Republicans will introduce a backup plan that would simply extend the payroll tax holiday for the remainder of the year while the conference negotiations continue,” Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a joint statement.

You all remember Operation Chaos - Rush Limbaugh's failed attempt in 2008 to get Republicans to vote in the Democratic primaries so as to keep it going longer and weaken the eventual nominee - don't you? Well, what if I told you that President Obama has launched his own "Operation Chaos" in the Republican primaries this year?

Thus far, on the politics of the contraception nontroversy, I have discussed how the President is advantaged by both standing up for women's health and women rights as well as by exposing the extremist, anti-women agenda of the GOP. What had escaped me though is that the exact way it played out - first announcing a rule that religious employers, like other employers, would be required to cover contraception in the insurance of non-Church employees and then shifting the mandate to insurance companies masterfully to take out any even supposed reasonable religious liberty concerns - could well have been engineered to do one other thing: throw the Republican primary process into chaos.

It certainly happened that way.

Hey everyone, I'm Curtis Abbey. Thanks so much to Deaniac for inviting me to post here. I wrote for years on the Progressive Electorate (now inactive) and on the Daily Kos as CornSyrupAwareness. I've got a degree in economics and do local work electing Democrats as well as national fundraising for Congressional candidates. I often write about the idiocy that is supply side economics, which is built on the belief that the economy does best when companies are allowed to do whatever they want. This cartoon is original, I came up with the concept and a good friend of mine did the artwork. It's based off of Mitt Romney's comments that anyone who questions his work for Bain Capital is just jealous.

“President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” Romney said in his prepared speech, which he delivered on a stage filled with family and supporters. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision.”

A vision where near billionaires should be applauded for raping and pillaging companies!? Bain's favorite trick was having the newly acquired company borrow epic sums of money and then pay out bonuses to the Bain execs. This leaves the victim company to sell off assets, slash pensions and/or just fold up shop, while Bain walks away free and eager to repeat the process.

Another study that looked at the eight-year period following 77 deals during the same time found that in 17 cases the company went bankrupt or out of business, and in 6 cases Bain Capital lost all its investment. But 10 deals were very successful and represented 70 percent of the total profits. wiki

It's not jealousy I feel, it's disgust. And pity for those whose lives were destroyed.