Voters in Maryland started getting mysterious phone calls on election day last year, that told them to "relax" and not bother going to the polls because President Barack Obama and Gov. Martin O'Malley "have been successful."
"Everything is fine. The only thing left is to watch on TV tonight," the robocalls said.Some truth from The Brennan Center at NYU Law.
On the one hand, many Congressional Republicans are insisting that they don’t have to vote for an increase in the debt ceiling because the presumed dire consequences of not acting won’t be that bad. On the other hand, they’re also insisting that not raising the debt ceiling will indeed be harmful and, therefore, the White House had better agree to do what they want.Spectacular.
At a convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee in February, Cain told an enthusiastic audience: “They call me racist too, because I disagree with a president who happens to be black.” To cheers, he went on, “You will get called racist simply because you happen to disagree with a president who happens to be black. You are not racists! You are patriots because you are willing to stand up for what you believe in!”That last bit is what I've come to see as a good example of a defining statement for "conservatives" in general.
In all, over 13,000 contracts are currently underway with 165 countries for $327 billion, according to Landay.Perpetual war, permanent crisis mode. Every time we turn around, there's another outrageous attempt to strip away people's rights, or to roll back a bunch of the real social advances of the last 50 years or so; along with a juicy new scandal of some kind that distracts us from those outrages.
To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late- October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. "He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo."Lots of great take-aways in this thing, but I think my favorite is the term "liberal bigots". It has a great ring to it, and captures the perfect combination of conservative self-loathing, white-bread aggrievement, and guilty projection.
Dwell on this for a moment: A “news” network controlled by a GOP operative who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives – including those that helped elect the candidate’s father – declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to Bush over the facts. “Of everything that happened on election night, this was the most important in impact,” Rep. Henry Waxman said at the time. “It immeasurably helped George Bush maintain the idea in people’s minds that he was the man who won the election.”And the Big One: DumFux News has become the model, so it probably just gets weirder for a good long while.
The term Darwinism has, in recent times, come to suggest that savage, unbridled competition is the ruling principle of life in nature and must therefore rule in human society, too. Darwin’s views have, as neurobiology professor Steven Rose remarks, been seen as “justifying imperialism, racism, capitalism and patriarchy”. Today, he adds, “journalists refer to boardroom struggles and takeover battles for companies as Darwinian”.
All this is actually the opposite of what Darwin wrote when he discussed human and animal societies in The Descent of Man. There, he traced the origins of sociability in animals and pointed out how many kinds of creature show a direct concern for one another.It's kinda interesting that the GOP's Dead Jesus Wing takes every opportunity to trash Darwin, while all the swells in the Lizard King Wing practically cum in their pants if anybody even hints at the Dog-Eat-Dog Speech in Atlas Shrugged.
At the same time Tiffany & Co. was extending Callista (Bisek) Gingrich a virtual interest-free loan of tens of thousands of dollars, the diamond and silverware firm was spending big bucks to influence mining policy in Congress and in agencies over which the House Agriculture Committee--where she worked--had jurisdiction, official records show.
Filings by Tiffany’s lobbyist, Cassidy & Co., and other government records show that the firm’s spending on “mining law and mine permitting-related issues” in Congress, as well as the Forest Service, the Interior Department, and Interior’s Bureau of Land Management shot up sharply during the period when Callista Gingrich was chief clerk at the House Agriculture Committee.
Tiffany's annual lobbying expenditures rose from about $100,000 to $360,000 between 2005 and 2009, according to records assembled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization.
Members of the House of Representatives considerably outperform the stock market in their personal investments, according to a new academic study.
Four university researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found what they call "significant positive abnormal returns," with portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually.
What's their secret? The report speculates, but does not conclude, it could have something to do with the ability members of Congress have to trade on non-public information or to vote their own pocketbooks -- or both.It would be news if anybody in congress actually did something about it. The story does mention that a few Representatives have been trying to move legislation that could address this problem, but they've been at it for over 4 years now and it's gone nowhere.
