Republican 'deficit hawk' hypocrites

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders lays out a brief history of Republic hypocrisy concerning the deficit.

Bernie Sanders: "The Republican party is now an extreme right-wing party that is owned by their billionaire campaign contributors"

Former TARP special inspector Neil Barofsky on the need to tackle Banking Reform | Bill Moyers

Former TARP special inspector Neil Barofsky joins Bill to discuss the critical yet unmet need to rein in big banks.

Bill Moyers: Neil Barofsky’s disappointment with Vikram Pandit and President Obama

October 23, 2012 | Former TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky explains his disappointment with the former Citigroup CEO and the president for failed financial leadership.

Stevie Ray Vaughan - "Cold Shot"

Who Stole the American Dream?

The promise of a prosperous middle-class life with decent work, rising living standards, and the potential for a better future has long been the foundation of the American dream. But as America continues to struggle to recover from the Great Recession, it has become clear that the middle class is in jeopardy – and many of the policies of the last 40 years are to blame.



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Carl Sagan in 1994

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when we're a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition". – Carl Sagan (1934-1996), astronomer and popularizer of science, in 1994

How the GOP became the party of the rich

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent

Tim Dickinson | rollingstone.com
9 Nov 2011

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

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The Last Word - Sen. Webb rewrites Mitt Romney

Sarah Muller | msnbc.com
28 Sept 2012

We've heard from his own mouth that Mitt Romney thinks of "47 percent" of Americans as takers dependent on government.

Before introducing President Obama at a campaign rally in Virginia on Thursday, Virginia Senator Jim Webb, a former Marine who served in Vietnam, called out the Republican presidential candidate over those harsh comments and reminded him of what the so-called "47 percent" has done for the country, which includes members of the military:

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The War Prayer by Mark Twain

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.

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."

Why Romney’s theory of the 'taker class' matters

Ezra Klein | washingtonpost.com
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.

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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:

White House demands military prisons for Americans under NDAA

17 Sept 2012

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.
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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.”

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Texas asks thousands of voters to verify that they aren’t dead

David Barer | Cox Newspapers
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.

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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.

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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.

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.



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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.

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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.

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Presidential election may hinge on Virginia candidate

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