Hobby Lobby Joins a Cult!

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Restricting the Vote

Sunday, July 20, 2014--The concerted national effort to restrict Americans' voting rights in 2012 was met with an equally dramatic pushback by courts, the press, and engaged citizens.

By Election Day, the worst laws had been blocked, blunted, postponed, or repealed.

At New York University School of Law, Brennan Center For Justice was instrumental in leading this fight.

Representing civil rights groups, Center attorneys helped win court rulings to block harsh voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas that could have made it harder for hundreds of thousands to cast ballots.

The Center’s suit on behalf of the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote blocked Florida’s new law, which had forced nonpartisan groups to end voter registration in the Sunshine State.

Thousands of voters were registered after the federal court ruled.

The Center led an extensive public opinion research project on attitudes toward voting.

Over 300 organizations used this cutting edge research to help win victories in Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere.

Overall in 2012, restrictive voting laws in 14 states were blocked, diluted, repealed, or postponed, which helped protect millions of votes.

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Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they?
They're all in favor of the unborn.
They will do anything for the unborn.
But once you're born, you're on your own.
Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months.
After that, they don't want to know about you.
They don't want to hear from you.
No nothing.
No neonatal care, no day care, no head start,
no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare,
no nothing.
If you're preborn, you're fine;
if you're preschool, you're f**ked.

George Carlin

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I was poor but a GOP die-hard:
How I finally left the politics of shame

By Anonymous in Las Vegas

Wednesday, Jul 16--I was a 20-year-old college dropout with no more than $100 in the bank the day my son was born in 1994.I’d been in the Coast Guard just over six months.

Joining the service was my solution to a lot of problems, not the least of which was being married to a pregnant, 19-year-old fellow dropout.

We were poor, and my overwhelming response to poverty was a profound shame that drove me into the arms of the people least willing to help―conservatives.

Just before our first baby arrived, my wife and I walked into the social services office near the base where I was stationed in rural North Carolina.

“You qualify for WIC and food stamps,” the middle-aged woman said.

I don’t know whether she disapproved of us or if all social services workers in the South oozed an understated unpleasantness.

We took the Women, Infants, Children vouchers for free peanut butter, cheese, and baby formula and got into the food stamp line.

Looking around, I saw no other young servicemen.

Coming from the white working class, I’d always been taught that food stamps were for the “other”―failures, drug addicts, or immigrants, maybe―not for real Americans like me.

I could not bear the stigma, so we walked out before our number was called.

Even though we didn’t take the food stamps, we lived in the warm embrace of the federal government with subsidized housing and utilities, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Yet I blamed all of my considerable problems on the government, the only institution that was actively working to alleviate my suffering.

I railed against government spending (i.e., raising my own salary).

At the same time, the earned income tax credit was the only way I could balance my budget at the end of the year.

I felt my own poverty was a moral failure.

To support my feelings of inadequacy, every move I made only pushed me deeper into poverty.

I bought a car and got screwed on the financing.

The credit I could get, I overused and was overpriced to start with.

My wife couldn’t get or keep a job, and we could not afford reliable day care in any case.

I was naive, broke, and uneducated but still felt entitled to a middle-class existence.

If you had taken WIC and the EITC away from me, my son would still have eaten, but my life would have been much more miserable.

Without government help, I would have had to borrow money from my family more often.

I borrowed money from my parents less than a handful of times, but I remember every single instance with a burning shame.

To ask for money was to admit defeat, to be a de facto loser.

To make up for my own failures, I voted to give rich people tax cuts, because somewhere deep inside, I knew they were better than me.

They earned it.

My support for conservative politics was atonement for the original sin of being white trash.

In my second tour of duty, I grew in rank and my circumstances improved.

I voted for George W. Bush.

I sent him campaign money, even though I had little to spare.

During the Bush v. Gore recount, I grabbed a sign and walked the streets of San Francisco to protest, carrying my toddler on my shoulders.

I got emotional, thinking of “freedom.”

Sometime after he took office, I watched Bush speak at an event.

He talked of tax cuts.

“It’s the people’s money,” he said.

By then I was making even better money, but I didn’t care about tax cuts for myself.

I was still paying little if any income tax, but I believed in “fairness.”

The “death tax” (aka the estate tax) was unfair and rich people paid more taxes so they should get more of a tax break.

I ignored my own personal struggles when I made political decisions.

By the financial meltdown of 2008, I was out of the military and living in Reno, Nevada―a state hard hit by the downturn.

I voted libertarian that election year, even though the utter failure of the free market was obvious.

The financial crisis proved that rich people are no better than me, and, in fact, are often inferior to average people.

They crash companies, loot pensions and destroy banks, and when they hit a snag, they scream to be rescued by government largess.

By contrast, I continued to pay my oversize mortgage for years, even as my home lost more than half its value.

I viewed my bad investment as yet another moral failure.

When it comes to voting and investing, rich people make calculated decisions, while regular people make “emotional” and “moral” ones.

Despite growing self-awareness, I pushed away reality for another election cycle.

In 2010, I couldn’t support my own Tea Party candidate for Senate because Sharron Angle was an obvious lunatic.

I instead sent money to the Rand Paul campaign.

Immediately the Tea Party-led Congress pushed drastic cuts in government spending that prolonged the economic pain.

The jobs crisis in my own city was exacerbated by the needless gutting of government employment.

The people who crashed the economy―bankers and business people―screamed about government spending and exploited Tea Party outrage to get their own taxes lowered. 

Just months after the Tea Party victory, I realized my mistake, but I could only watch as the people I supported inflicted massive, unnecessary pain on the economy through government shutdowns, spending cuts, and gleeful cruelty.

I finally “got it.”

In 2012, I shunned my self-destructive voting habits and supported Obama.

I only wished there were a major party more liberal than the Democrats for whom I could vote.

Even as I saw the folly of my own lifelong voting record, many of my friends and family moved further into the Tea Party embrace, even as conservative policies made their lives worse.

I have a close friend on permanent disability.

He votes reliably for the most extreme conservative in every election.

Although he’s a Nevadan, he lives just across the border in California, because that progressive state provides better social safety nets for its disabled.

He always votes for the person most likely to slash the program he depends on daily for his own survival.

It’s like clinging to the end of a thin rope and voting for the rope-cutting razor party.

The people who most support the Republicans and the Tea Party carry a secret burden.

Many know that they are one medical emergency or broken down car away from ruin, and they blame the government.

They vote against their own interests, often hurting themselves in concrete ways, in a vain attempt to deal with their own, misguided shame about being poor.

They believe “freedom” is the answer, even though they live a form of wage indenture in a rigged system.

I didn’t become a liberal until I was nearly 40.

By the time I came around, I was an educated professional, married to another professional. 

We’re “making it,” whatever that means these days.

I gladly pay taxes now, but this attitude is also rooted in self-interest.

I have relatives who are poor, and, without government services, I might have to support them.

We can all go back to living in clans, like cavemen, or we can build institutions and programs that help people who need it.

It seems like a great bargain to me.

I’m angry at my younger self, not for being poor, but for supporting politicians who would have kept me poor if they were able.

Despite my personal attempts to destroy the safety net, those benefits helped me.

I earned a bachelor’s degree for free courtesy of a federal program, and after my military service I used the GI Bill to get two graduate degrees, all while making ends meet with the earned income tax credit.

The GI Bill not only helped me, it also created much of the American middle class after World War II.

Conservatives often crow about “supporting the military,” but imagine how much better America would be if the government used just 10 percent of the military budget to pay for universal higher education, rather than saddling 20-year-olds with mortgage-like debt.

Government often fails because the moneyed interests don’t want it to succeed.

They hate government and most especially activist government (aka government that does something useful).

Their hatred for government is really disdain for Americans, except as consumers or underpaid labor.

Sadly, it took me years―decades―to see the logic of supporting people who disdain me.

But I’m a super-slow learner.

I wish I could take the poorest, struggling conservatives and shake them.

I would scream that their circumstances or failures or joblessness are not all their fault.

They should wise up and vote themselves a break.

Rich people vote their self-interest in every single election.

Why don’t poor people?

Remember Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies?

Doesn't Rick Perry remind you of him?

But Perry sports horned-rimmed glasses now so we're supposed to think he's no longer the moron he showed us on national TV.

Remember? He phucken forgot the third Department he’d eliminate?

He doesn't change from his Superman costume into Clark Kent with his studious look.

There are no longer phone booths...besides, he'd probably get arrested for fumbling with his shorts!

Sorry, Grover, you’re gonna have to come up with something better than glasses for this moron...Hillary’s gonna chew him up and spit him out like cheap chaw!

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We're in a time where corporations are treated like people and people are treated like things.

Rev. William Barber

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Rev. Barber is president of the North Carolina Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and he spoke these profound words of truth regarding the shutting of water to Detroit residents.

Borderline Behavior:

GOP Demands Action, Blocks Solutions,

and Always Complains

AlterNet / By Joe Conason
July 14, 2014

The Republicans have become the party of perpetual whining.

US Speaker of the House John Boehner speaks during his weekly news conference on February 6, 2014 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC
 

Listening to Republicans in Washington (and Texas and Arizona) scream about the "crisis" of migrant children arriving from Central America on our southern border, it is puzzling to realize they don't actually want to do anything to solve the problem. Nor do these hysterical politicians -- led by that down-home diva Rick Perry, the governor of Texas -- want to let President Barack Obama do anything, either.

 

Except that they insist the president absolutely must visit the border, in person, preferably with a thousand members of the National Guard (who could join the Border Patrol and local police in accepting the children as they surrender). Strangely enough, these Republicans, along with a few Texas Democrats, seem to believe this is the most important action Obama could undertake.

Understandably, the president is skeptical. "This isn't theater," he responded tartly. "This is a problem. I'm not interested in photo ops. I'm interested in solving a problem." As he knows, this episode is only the latest in a long sequence of similar clown shows, with Republicans citing ridiculous reasons to delay or prevent government action. His irritation is fully justified.

But perhaps Obama should have gone down to the border anyway, stood in the blazing sunlight with the dim governor for as long as Perry wished -- and allowed the television cameras to show that their presence had accomplished exactly nothing. Of course, if Obama showed up at the border, the Republicans assuredly would criticize him for wasting time on a photo op. They have become the party of perpetual whining.

When they aren't bleating about Obama, they're concocting weird theories about his secret plans to destroy America. Only last week, Perry coyly hinted -- although he said he didn't want to be "conspiratorial" -- that the White House must be "in on" the border crossings, because migrant kids couldn't have showed up en masse without "a highly coordinated effort."

Later, he tried to persuade CNN's Kate Bolduan that he didn't really mean what his idiotic words said -- an explanation everyone has heard from him before.

While Perry has taken the lead, he isn't the only elected official whose mouth spews absurdities on this subject. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., offered a policy approach that would please any simpleton, when he explained why the president's request for $3.7 billion in emergency funding looks far too big to him. "I've gone online and have taken a look on Orbitz and taken a look at what does it cost to fly people to El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras. You have fares as low as $207. There's nonstop flights at $450. You take those numbers and it costs somewhere between $11 million and $30 million to return people in a very humane fashion," he opined.

Evidently nobody informed the Wisconsin senator about the myriad other costs involved in rounding up and caring for these terrified children, who are entitled to a court hearing and other consideration under an anti-trafficking law signed by former President George W. Bush. Anyone who wants to expedite their removal -- a disturbingly inhumane and unnecessary policy -- must first provide more courts, judges and lawyers. And anyone who wants a decent policy, which includes action against the drug warlords who are threatening and killing these innocents, must be prepared to spend more than the cost of an Orbitz ticket.

Some Republicans, notably Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., are urging the president to include their pet projects, such as electronic verification requirements for employers and at border crossings, in his spending bill. And many GOP lawmakers, having demanded action on the border issue from Obama, are equally adamant that the funding must be "offset" by cuts in other programs.

None of these geniuses appears to realize all their barking, carping and moaning are frustrating the president's attempt to address the "crisis" that is agitating them so fiercely. Or more likely, they know exactly what they're doing -- and the point, as usual, is to embarrass Obama.

But not every Republican talks total nonsense about the border and immigration. Alfonso Aguilar, who headed the Office of Citizenship under Bush, recently wrote: "Contrary to the narrative of some opportunistic politicians and pundits, this unfortunate situation is not the result of the Obama administration failing to enforce the law. In reality, most would-be-migrants believe that crossing the border has become much more difficult, and in the last decade, the U.S. government has greatly strengthened border security and interior enforcement."

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans is increasingly repulsed by the primitive nativism and partisan opportunism of Republican leaders on immigration. Democrats, independents and even many rank-and-file Republicans want a more decent and constructive policy. Ultimately, voters must grasp that the GOP is the greatest single obstacle to every vital reform. That day cannot come too soon.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com. To find out more about Joe Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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Have you ever wondered why Republicans are so interested in encouraging people to volunteer in their communities?

It’s because volunteers work for no pay.

Republicans have been trying to get people to work for no pay for a long time.

George Carlin

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Tennessee: Ayn Rand’s vision of paradise

The southern state ranks dead last in per capita tax revenue, and its low-income families are paying the price

Les Leopold, AlterNet

(Credit: PhotosbyAndy via Shutterstock)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

If you’re worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. Its lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you believe deeply in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It’s what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

Tennessee starves what little government it has, ranking dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest among all states as a percent of total tax revenues. (For more detailed data see here.)

As you would expect, this translates into hard times for its public school systems, which rank 48th in school revenues per student and 45th in teacher salaries. The failure to invest in education also corresponds with poverty: the state has the 40th worst poverty rate (15%) and the 13th highest state percentage of poor children (26%).

Employment opportunities also are extremely poor for the poor. Only 25% have full-time jobs, 45% are employed part-time, and a whopping 30% have no jobs at all.

So what do you do with all those low-income folks who don’t have decent jobs? You put a good number of them in jail. In fact, only Louisiana, Georgia and New Mexico have higher jail incarceration rates.

From the perspective of Tennessee legislators, it’s all about providing the proper incentives to motivate the poor. For starters, you make sure that no one could possible live on welfare payments (TANF: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Although President Clinton’s welfare reform program curtailed how long a family can receive welfare (60 months) and dramatically increased the work requirements, Tennessee set the maximum family welfare payment at only $185 per month.

(That’s how much a top hedge fund manager makes in under one second.) As a result, the Volunteer State ranks 49th in TANF, just above Mississippi ($170).

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Kick ‘em when they’re down or tough love?
In the Randian universe, it’s not enough to starve public education and the poor. You also must blame the poor both for their poverty and for the crumbling educational system. If a poor child is failing it must be the fault of low-income parents. So how do you drive the point home? You take away their welfare checks if their kids don’t do well in school, which is precisely what the Tennessee House and Senate are about to do. The KnoxvilleNews.com reports:

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance  Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

More amazing still, the bill originally applied to all children of TANF parents, even if they were severely disabled. Realizing that they had gone too far, the bill was amended so that, “it would not apply when a child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes steps to try improving the youngster’s school performance — such as signing up for a parenting class, arranging a tutoring program or attending a parent-teacher conference.”  (Imagine the uproar if those provision were applied to upper-income parents, assuming any still use the public school system.)

Dennis told the House Health Subcommittee the measure now only applies to “parents who do nothing.” He described the measure as “a carrot and stick approach.”

Obviously, this is insane, right? Not if you’ve already started down the road of whipping the poor into shape. The proposed draconian cuts are just an extension of previous policies that already made welfare contingent on school attendance. As Travis Waldron reports in ThinkProgress:

When Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have “gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in school. “That’s child abuse to me,” he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education  by mandating a 20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards, but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance if they don’t keep up in school.

By the way, the Tennessee legislature is lily-white: One percent is Latino, 6% African American and 91% Caucasian. But the complexion of poverty is darker. Nearly 80 percent of Tennessee’s poor children are black and brown.

Attacking the poor as the answer to the Wall Street crash?

These attacks on the poor, rather than on poverty, are not peculiar to Tennessee. In fact, similar concepts circulate among political and policy elites in Washington. For Ayn Rand acolytes, Wall Street’s reckless, greedy casinos couldn’t possibly be the real reason the economy crashed. After all, the rich get rich because they are terrific at what they do. We should reward these creators, not blame them for their foresight, their ingenuity and their obvious success. The blame instead should fall on the poor — the takers — and on the collectivist government liberals who cater to them. Didn’t the government force banks to put unqualified poor people in homes they couldn’t afford? (It doesn’t matter that the data shows that low-income buyers who gained loans through the Community Readjustment Act didn’t default in higher numbers than anyone else. The idea of blaming the poor has power.)

Blaming low-income people for chronic unemployment is the next move. As the rate stays stubbornly high (precisely because all Republicans and even a few Democrats don’t want the government in the business of job creation) we hear talk of “structural” unemployment. That’s code for the jobs would be there if only the workers were qualified. But you know, those lower-income workers just don’t have the skills and work habits to compete in our globalized economy. Even older middle-class workers are hopelessly out of date. So there’s really nothing government can do about it.

The final twist is to claim that the richest country in human history doesn’t have the means to eradicate poverty. Instead, we are told, rising debt is forcing us to tighten our belts — rather, we need to tighten the belts of the poor by taking away a few more dollars from Medicaid and Social Security.

How to justify meanness?

It’s not easy to be cruel to someone who is down and out. After all, most of us feel ashamed when walking by a homeless person or watching kids crammed into over-crowded classrooms. It requires several psychological twists and turns to make life even harder for low-income Americans.

• You have to blame low-income parents for their own economic problems. Even if the unemployment rate is sky-high it must be the poor person’s fault.
• You need to feel superior — that somehow you got to where you are today not by an accident of birth but rather by your own hard labors. Anyone not as successful as you, by definition, is inferior.
• You have to believe that meanness really is tough love — that by taking benefits away from the poor you are actually helping them on the road to self sufficiency.
• It’s helpful to have access to the broader Randian/libertarian philosophy that argues all forms of collective government action are an attack on freedom. In this view, altruism is seen as a curse that justifies collective government programs which essentially steal money from the makers and to waste on the takers. All collective caring by the state, therefore, is evil, so that all support for the poor via government is evil as well.
• It’s psychologically crucial to have your prejudices confirmed by charismatic alchemists like Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan who peddle selfishness as the highest form of morality (although only Ayn Rand had the guts to say it so bluntly).

Is Washington locked into increasing inequality?

While the Republicans in Congress are committed to supporting the rich and crushing the poor, smug Democrats can too easily look down upon the bumbling Tennessee legislators. Tie welfare to school success? How crude. But many of these same Democrats also are totally in sync with the Wall Street hucksters who have, for a generation, siphoned off America’s wealth into their bottomless pockets. In fact, both parties again are in competition for Wall Street campaign cash as if nothing much has happened. And both parties clearly are unwilling to break up the big banks, cap obscene financial incomes, or create public banks to serve the public interest.

Washington politicians and pundits from Obama on down (with very few exceptions) are enthralled by Wall Street wizardry. Making a million dollars an hour no longer seems strange or repugnant. Too big to fail, jail and regulate are just the natural order of things. In fact, more than a few public servants can’t wait to race through that revolving door to get in on the big casino games.

This should tell us that the path to social justice requires a new political movement that operates outside the two great corporate parties.

Is it too late?

I ran into a young woman who is very concerned by the enormous gap she sees between life on campus and the hardships of the low-income people. She wants to know what she can do with her life to really change things.

What can we say? I look back over a lifetime in the cause of social justice and I don’t have much to show for it — more war, more poverty, more inequality, more disinvestment in critical human infrastructure. Yes, we’ve made great strides on gender, sexual preference and overt racial discrimination compared to a generation ago. But how can we explain why America has the world’s highest incarceration rates? Why couldn’t we prevent a criminal justice system from sending 40% of young black males to prison? How, on our watch, did our relatively egalitarian country develop the most obscene wealth gap in the world? How is it possible that so many of our cities are in worse shape than a generation ago? It’s almost to impossible to comprehend, and even harder to change.

But that young woman already senses that we have no choice but to try. And that requires building a movement that targets the core of the problem — the systems that allow the economic royalists and their political minions to hijack our country.

It’s a long-term project. After all, it required almost two generations of painstaking work for the Ayn Rand right to take over the national debate. It may take just as long to recapture it. Let’s hope there are enough caring young women and men who still have a sense of the common good. Altruism may have died in Galt’s Gulch, but it’s still alive and well in the hearts of those who share a passion for justice, even in Tennessee.

She's pretty, but she's a misogynist snake...

Typical for FOX Noise--a beautiful blonde woman who tells men it's ok to hate and abuse women is conservative man's wet dream.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/11/1313219/-Megyn-Kelly-explains-why-Nancy-Pelosi-is-sexist-and-Hobby-Lobby-is-not?detail=email

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Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest.

 

As for the poor, they tell us
they've lost all incentive
because we've given them too much money.

 George Carlin

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Another country heard from...

One of my readers sent me the link below, saying, "I knew that the Bush tax cuts were to blame for the continued tanking of the economy, but, not being an economist, I couldn't put my finger on why except for loss of capital for the gov't to use. Turns out there's a very simple explanation: if your tax rates are higher, you (as industry) have to invest more in your company to keep its economic engine running; if your taxes are lower, there's no disincentive to pull your money out whenever you can."

 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/13/1313738/-Democrats-struggle-to-understand-how-Bush-Tax-Cuts-wiped-out-6-6-trillion-in-personal-income