Sunday, September 30, 2012
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Bill Moyers: Elections for Sale
September 21, 2012
Bill
Moyers and Trevor Potter discuss how American elections are bought and
sold, who covers the cost, and how the rest of us pay the price.Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Wendy Davis for Texas Senate
Lone Star Project Director Matt Angle:
"The Senate District 10 race has boiled down to an interesting choice – It’s Wendy Davis and a coalition of Democrats, independents and fair-minded Republicans in SD10 versus Mark Shelton propped up by Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, the Tea Party and other harsh Austin-based partisans."
"The Senate District 10 race has boiled down to an interesting choice – It’s Wendy Davis and a coalition of Democrats, independents and fair-minded Republicans in SD10 versus Mark Shelton propped up by Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, the Tea Party and other harsh Austin-based partisans."
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Why Romney’s theory of the 'taker class' matters
17 Sept 2012
Part of the reason so many Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans have passed a series of very large tax cuts that wiped out the income-tax liability for many Americans. That’s why, when you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that.
snip
So notice what happened here: Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich.
Ezra Klein:
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
White House demands military prisons for Americans under NDAA
The White House has asked the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals to place an emergency stay on a ruling made last week by a federal judge so that the president’s power to indefinitely detain Americans without charge is reaffirmed immediately.
On Sept. 12, US District Court Judge Katherine Forrest made permanent a temporary injunction she issued in May that bars the federal government from abiding by the indefinite detention provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA. Judge Forrest ruled that a clause that gives the government the power to arrest US citizens suspected of maintaining alliances with terrorists and hold them without due process violated the Constitution and that the White House would be stripped of that ability immediately.
Only hours after Judge Forrest issued last week’s ruling, the Obama administration threatened to appeal the decision, and on Monday morning they followed through.
snip
Bruce Afran, who serves as co-lead counsel along with Mayer, tells Hedges that the White House could be waging a war against the injunction to ensure that the Obama administration has ample time to turn the NDAA against any protesters participating in domestic demonstrations.
“A Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued Friday claiming that the riots [in the Middle East] are likely to come to the US and saying that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely riots,” Afran tells Hedges. “It is my view that this is why the government wants to reopen the NDAA — so it has a tool to round up would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any protest, violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power. Since the request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the day of the riots, and following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that the two are connected. The government wants to reopen the NDAA injunction so that they can use it to block protests.”
Read it all:
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Texas asks thousands of voters to verify that they aren’t dead
14 Sept 2012
AUSTIN, Texas — Two months before the presidential election, thousands of registered Texas voters are receiving letters asking them to verify they are not dead.
The nearly 77,000 letters, called notices of examination, were sent out by election officials to comply with a 2011 law passed by the Legislature requiring the secretary of state’s office to cross-reference the voter rolls with the Social Security Administration’s enormous death master file to determine if a voter could be deceased.
-snip-
Voters have 30 days to complete and return the letters, but counties are encouraging people to call and report their eligibility by phone.
In Harris County, the voter registrar sent out more than 9,000 letters, but, after receiving complaints from voters, decided to take no further action, according to the Houston Chronicle. The Secretary of State’s Office has threatened to cut voter registration funding to the county if it does not comply, the newspaper reported.
Read it all:
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Moyers & Company: Thinking outside the box
The conventions are over -- Now it’s time for some thinking outside the box. This week on Moyers & Company, Bill talks with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been an independent on Congress longer than anyone in American history; and Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cherie Honkala about their role in -- and what they’ve learned about -- American politics.
Moyers & Company Show 135: Challenging Power, Changing Politics from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Moyers & Company Show 135: Challenging Power, Changing Politics from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Chuck Norris' dire warning for America
It's the next best thing to watching a fist-shaking codger tell an empty chair to get off his lawn.
Worth a click
Worth a click
RNC Convention vs. DNC Convention
7 Sept 2012 | The Colbert Report
Republicans and Democrats still despise and distrust each other after two weeks of saying the same things.
Republicans and Democrats still despise and distrust each other after two weeks of saying the same things.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| RNC Convention vs. DNC Convention | ||||
| ||||
Saturday, September 08, 2012
Democrats and the vanishing American middle class
David Seaton | 7 Sept 2012 | my.firedoglake.com
The European middle class was created as a bulwark of social stability, basically to prevent the masses from taking the “winter palace” and stringing up the super rich. The American middle class as we know it really came into being when Henry Ford decided to pay his workers enough to buy the cars they made. It made Ford rich and led to turning America into a land of mass prosperity.
The American middle class is perhaps the United States’ greatest social achievement, an enormous mass of prosperous, educated and healthy citizens which has been the envy of all the world for nearly a hundred years, and the not so secret weapon that destroyed the Soviet Union and reoriented China.
Simplifying to the extreme you could say that the modern, American middle class was created by Henry Ford and literally saved from extinction, (the first time) by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The whole story is in that reductio ad absurdum.
What most Americans, except for the one-percent perhaps, don’t seem to understand is that the American middle class is in reality a totally artificial construction, which if not carefully nurtured will dry up and die like an un-watered house plant. The super-rich are quite comfortable with its disappearance, as they think that they no longer depend on its prosperity for their own prosperity or even for their own physical safety.
I would argue that if the middle class is devastated then all the problems it was created to solve, all the dangers that it was meant to allay would reappear, just like uncut grass grows on the lawn of a foreclosed house.
Read it all:
The European middle class was created as a bulwark of social stability, basically to prevent the masses from taking the “winter palace” and stringing up the super rich. The American middle class as we know it really came into being when Henry Ford decided to pay his workers enough to buy the cars they made. It made Ford rich and led to turning America into a land of mass prosperity.
The American middle class is perhaps the United States’ greatest social achievement, an enormous mass of prosperous, educated and healthy citizens which has been the envy of all the world for nearly a hundred years, and the not so secret weapon that destroyed the Soviet Union and reoriented China.
Simplifying to the extreme you could say that the modern, American middle class was created by Henry Ford and literally saved from extinction, (the first time) by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The whole story is in that reductio ad absurdum.
What most Americans, except for the one-percent perhaps, don’t seem to understand is that the American middle class is in reality a totally artificial construction, which if not carefully nurtured will dry up and die like an un-watered house plant. The super-rich are quite comfortable with its disappearance, as they think that they no longer depend on its prosperity for their own prosperity or even for their own physical safety.
I would argue that if the middle class is devastated then all the problems it was created to solve, all the dangers that it was meant to allay would reappear, just like uncut grass grows on the lawn of a foreclosed house.
Read it all:
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Bill Clinton DNC Speech COMPLETE: "We're in this together" vs. "You're on your own"
Published 5 Sept 2012 by ABCNews
Former U.S. president offers a strong endorsement of Barack Obama, Democratic economic policies.
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
Five Reasons why Romney/Ryan must be defeated in 2012 - and why conservatives should hope they are
Kurt Eichenwald | kurteichenwald.com
2 Sept 2012
The GOP must be stopped in 2012. The future of America’s ideals of democracy – and of the Republican Party itself – could well be at stake.
Contrary to how it might seem, I am not a partisan bomb thrower. Throughout most of my adulthood, I have been just as likely to vote for a Republican as for a Democrat – in local, state and national contests. I have cast my ballot in presidential races for both Republicans and Democrats. But in the last four years, the GOP has transmogrified into something ugly and vicious and, more important, something wedded to the politics of fantasy and ignorance. It has rushed so far from its moorings that I cannot conceive of voting for members of this party until, hopefully, they pull themselves back from the precipice of self-destruction, paranoia and delusion.
Today, for Republicans, up is down and front is back. Lying has become so ingrained into the conservatives’ national dialogue that they are now dangerously demagogic or, worse, severely unhinged. Blind rage at the election of Barack Obama has wrecked a once great political party. Its leaders have made so many deals with the devil in their almost pathological obsession with unseating Obama that they have pushed the GOP into its own version of political hell – unable to speak truths to their now-rabid and conspiracy-addled base and unable to right the party back onto a path of responsibility.
Only through the disinfectant of defeat can the Republicans, and the two party system, be preserved. And so, the campaign of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan must be consigned to the ash heap of history. Defeat must not only be decisive, it must be crippling. Here are five reasons why:
Read it here:
2 Sept 2012
The GOP must be stopped in 2012. The future of America’s ideals of democracy – and of the Republican Party itself – could well be at stake.
Contrary to how it might seem, I am not a partisan bomb thrower. Throughout most of my adulthood, I have been just as likely to vote for a Republican as for a Democrat – in local, state and national contests. I have cast my ballot in presidential races for both Republicans and Democrats. But in the last four years, the GOP has transmogrified into something ugly and vicious and, more important, something wedded to the politics of fantasy and ignorance. It has rushed so far from its moorings that I cannot conceive of voting for members of this party until, hopefully, they pull themselves back from the precipice of self-destruction, paranoia and delusion.
Today, for Republicans, up is down and front is back. Lying has become so ingrained into the conservatives’ national dialogue that they are now dangerously demagogic or, worse, severely unhinged. Blind rage at the election of Barack Obama has wrecked a once great political party. Its leaders have made so many deals with the devil in their almost pathological obsession with unseating Obama that they have pushed the GOP into its own version of political hell – unable to speak truths to their now-rabid and conspiracy-addled base and unable to right the party back onto a path of responsibility.
Only through the disinfectant of defeat can the Republicans, and the two party system, be preserved. And so, the campaign of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan must be consigned to the ash heap of history. Defeat must not only be decisive, it must be crippling. Here are five reasons why:
Read it here:
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