When the Republican Party moves on something it can never contain it’s burning desire to attack everything it hates, across the board.
I’ll leave the coup which turned Michigan into a right-to-work state to others.
Close on the heels of it is another bill, GOP authored, to curb the menace no one can see but the far right.
From the Detroit Free Press:
A Muslim rights group has urged Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to veto legislation designed to block use of Islamic law in the state should it reach his desk.
A House bill to bar use of “foreign laws that would impair constitutional rights??? was on Tuesday’s House agenda. Rep. Dave Agema, R-Grandville, sponsored the bill, which doesn’t specifically mention the Islamic legal code called sharia. However, the bill’s supporters have said they are concerned about the use of sharia spreading …
Pure and simple, it’s a bigot’s bill, another part of the Republican Party’s obsession with getting after people they hate.
And, nationwide, it has been common in red states since the election of Barack Obama, pushed by persistent lobbying by Islam-o-phobe groups in Washington, often associated with Frank Gaffney.
“The question now is whether Michigan Republicans can find time to deal with a nonexistent Shariah takeover when they’re so hard at work crushing unions and curtailing women’s rights,” comments a piece at Mother Jones.
It would be almost funny. But when you’re laughing the Republican Party, even though a minority, always manages to ram through toxic
legislation at the local level.
Back at the end of 2010 I enumerated a year end list — the biggest threats to the nation’s security. They were all internal and that old list is here.
All the threats still exist. But number 4 on the list — the Republican Party — has climbed to the top. And that is because since December 2010, the stakes have become higher, the disasters greater. Even less has been done.
At the time:
The Republican Party is a threat to security. And not solely because of its descent into right-wing extremism …
As the party that denies science, one that will put people in committee chairmanships overseeing science and technology issues in the House who are basically opposed to science whenever it contradicts their political views, the GOP poses a threat to America’s future.
You can’t have a forward-looking and capable nation with people in power who truly believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes.
During the past election, global warming was a third rail issue. The President would not speak of it.
In fact, about the only thing he would talk about with any connection to it was how avid a developer of fossil fuels he would be. And Mitt Romney made a joke of global warming it at the Republican National Convention.
And then came Sandy, a storm so violent it delivered notice that in the future there would be more of the same.
The nation’s lifelines — its roads, airports, railways and transit systems — are getting hammered by extreme weather beyond what their builders imagined, leaving states and cities searching for ways to brace for more catastrophes like Superstorm Sandy.
Even as they prepare for a new normal of intense rain, historic floods and record heat waves, some transportation planners find it too politically sensitive to say aloud the source of their weather worries: climate change.
Political differences are on the minds of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, whose advice on the design and maintenance of roads and bridges is closely followed by states. The association recently changed the name of its Climate Change Steering Committee to the less controversial Sustainable Transportation, Energy Infrastructure and Climate Solutions Steering Committee.
Still, there is a recognition that the association’s guidance will need to be updated to reflect the new realities of global warming.
In the immediate future, global warming is going to cost life. It means the continuing destruction of infrastructure on a national scale. We can only cope with it.
But at this time the gift of the Republican Party has made movement on the issue, except in sneaking inches by government agency, impossible. The GOP has successfully convinced almost half the nation to share in its dangerous know-nothing-ism, aided and abetted by reactionary mega-corporate interests, plutocrat money and the fossil fuel industries which choose to maintain a status quo at the expense of everyone else.
“[Several] climate scientists say sea level along New York and much of the Northeast is about a foot higher than a century ago, mostly because of man-made global warming, and that added significantly to the damage when Sandy hit,” wrote the AP.
Yet, “In conservative states, the term ‘climate change’ is often associated with left-leaning politics … Planning for weather extremes is hampered by reluctance among many officials to discuss anything labeled ‘climate change’ … The Obama administration has also shied away from talking publicly about adaptation to climate change. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s office refused to allow any department officials to be interviewed by The Associated Press …”
It is not a bipartisan issue. The Republican Party and its bankrollers are entirely responsible for paralyzing a national response to global warming and accurate assessment and preparation for catastrophic weather. Democratic politicians won’t address it because to speak of it immediately mobilizes millions of dollars against them in re-election campaigns, all furnished by the radical right.
If it were Switzerland, Luxembourg or Andorra perhaps this would not matter. But we are not those countries and it very obviously does matter.
And it should come as a source of great outrage to the American people that the Republican Party would appoint a science-denier, Lamar Smith of Texas, to chair that body’s science panel. One can look at it as purely a political step taken to help guarantee paralysis as a national response.
The paralysis also infiltrates security and mainstream pundits.
“The U.S. must meet challenges such as climate change … says Patrick Doherty,” reads the caption under a photo of wreckage.
“Climate change is already with us,” Doherty writes. “Superstorm Sandy, the Derecho, Arctic melting, and droughts in the Midwest, India, China, and Russia this past year confirm the scientifically proven trend.”
Nowhere in the piece does Doherty acknowledge the political obstacle, the Republican Party, which has made dealing with it, even in some small ways, virtually impossible.
In fact, Doherty points to a column from Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, as something which may carry good advice on meeting American challenges. His use is to imply how the US could mobilize business capital by, for example, giving a corporate tax break to America’s big multi-nationals. But the Blankfein column is more interesting for how anti-solving problems it is.
For the first time in several generations, it has become clear that abundant domestic energy resources are within our reach, and that we have the technology to responsibly and safely extract it. The government needs to work with the private sector to implement effective and far-reaching policies to develop these resources.
That’s what you call a gold-plated recommendation for expanded use and mining of fossil fuels. Call it the accelerate-and-exacerbate-global warming answer to the problem of climate change. Blankfein, of course, does not have to worry about this. When climate change turns the Manhattan neighborhood of Goldman Sachs into a skyscraper version of Stiltsville in the Biscayne Bay, he will be gone.
You also might not have noticed that we’re barreling toward a “world of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions.” Here in Washington, we’re too busy to pay attention to such trifles …
Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the legacy we pass along to future generations will be a parboiled planet.
But even Robinson can’t bring himself to write that it’s the GOP that has derailed the matter in the US.
To his credit he recommends the President do something:
And this is why President Obama should devote his next State of the Union address to climate change. He understands the science and knows the threat is real. Convincing the American people of this truth would be a great accomplishment …
The President has won re-election. There is no further political cost the GOP can extract from him. Telling the people about global warming in no uncertain terms is something he can do. Barack Obama can spell out who has blocked action, the very anti-science beliefs of the Republican Party, who supports them, and what the consequences have been at the federal and local level.
What was the Obama administration’s effort to battle climate change, or at least increase informed recognition of it, in the last year?
“Fueled by global warming, polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are now melting three times faster than they did in the 1990s, a new scientific study says,” reads a story, today, from the AP.
“Greenland is really taking off,??? National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Ted Scambos told the news agency. Scambos is a a co-author of the paper referenced by the AP and published in the peer-reviewed journal, Science.
So if many in our country think that putting a modern Republican in power is a way to move the place forward, to help it deal with the very complex global problems with which it is currently faced, they’re one with entropy, which is the falling apart of everything, from order to disorder, until there is nothing left. That’s a tragedy and we should not delude ourselves that such actions, behaviors or opinions defend anything worthwhile.
Pointed to by Paul Krugman, Reaganite supply-side economist Bruce Bartlett throws in the towel in a long essay for the American Conservative. It’s clear he wants to write another book about it. Presumably, it is meant to serve as a leader for offers.
The essence of it is the Republican Party is well and truly fucked, no surprise. And it purged him for not being of the body. And he’s clearly very upset that he was expelled, fired, blacklisted, and permanently crossed off the lists of former friends.
All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future …
The economy continues to conform to textbook Keynesianism. We still need more aggregate demand, and the Republican idea that tax cuts for the rich will save us becomes more ridiculous by the day. People will long remember Mitt Romney’s politically tone-deaf attack on half the nation’s population for being losers, leeches, and moochers because he accurately articulated the right-wing worldview.
Although Bartlett never says it rudely, he informs that all the shitting on everyone not white and nonsensical ideas about the economy have perhaps irreparably maimed the Republican Party in the electorate.
He suggests this could be ameliorated by trying to be more appealing to the black voter, since the Hispanic voter is totally lost.
Yeah, that’s going to happen.
Bartlett doesn’t actually go far enough. He concedes the GOP is doomed to be a blocking minority party, preserving power to interfere with things but not advance any national policy or people.
Because it has successfully proven itself to be suicidally capable of obstruction, it’s gone so far as to become a national security threat. Most notably, this in the area of advancing environmental disasters.
The GOP denies science and successfully derailed all action on global warming in the US at the federal level. It transformed actually trying to do something about a documented global problem into an electrified third rail.
Wait and see. Six months from now the GOP will have cooked up some crazy conspiracy theory and a raft of fake facts to argue that Sandy was normal. And on their tv, web sites and radio they will laugh and titter at everyone else so stupid as to believe what they witnessed just before the election.
I moved here in 1991 when the San Gabriel Valley was essentially conservative GOP. In the following years it turned blue.
From the time I arrived until 1998, Republican Pete Wilson was governor. And as part of the GOP, he implemented the party’s war on Hispanics with the horrible Proposition 187 to deprive illegal immigrants of any social, health or educational services in California.
Although it was passed by a reactionary white referendum its eventual effect was to permanently turn a substantial part of the state electorate against the GOP.
And now it has finally changed, irreversibly. California is a one party state. But not without cost. The GOP, as a blocking party, assiduously wrecked the place for two decades.
It is not right to coddle the beliefs of idiots or encourage their manias. Doing it puts you on the side of evil, even if it’s just television and you need the money.
Larry doesn’t want “possible marauders??? stealing his stuff in a post-apocalyptic free-for-all, so he’s doing what any sane individual would do: He’s building an entire condo building underground, fourteen stories embedded in nine feet of concrete. When it’s finished, Larry says this luxurious bunker will have a swimming pool, exercise rooms, and a movie theater …
You see, citizens, the cliff would dramatically cut the deficit, but it would do so by cutting Pentagon spending–
Which through the mysteries of Newly Frugalness, is huge government spending that is amazingly not socialistic!
We all know true deficit reduction can only come from cutting pinko social programs like schools, health and welfare!
The Fiscal Cliff also threatens to blow up the Bush tax cuts and devious Spendocrats want taxes for the rich to return to what they were during the dark days of Clinton, back when the economy was, was, well . . . never mind.
If you wrote about computer viruses and the anti-virus software industry in the late Eighties and early Nineties, you dealt with John McAfee, the founder of McAfee Associates.
To the many people who crossed his path on a tropical island in Belize, it was apparent John McAfee’s life had taken some bizarre turns in the last few years.
The anti-virus software guru, who started McAfee Associates in 1989, has been in hiding since police said they wanted to question him about the weekend murder of his neighbor, fellow American Gregory Faull, with whom McAfee had quarreled.
Despite his disappearance, McAfee, 67, has remained in contact with the media, providing a stream of colorful bulletins over his predicament, state of mind and his claim that Belize’s authorities want to kill him.
Residents of the Caribbean island of Ambergris Caye and others who know him paint the picture of an eccentric, impulsive man who gave up a career as a successful entrepreneur in the United States for a life of semi-seclusion in the former pirate haven of Belize, surrounded by bodyguards and young women.
The anti-virus industry was started by individuals you might gently call “idiosyncratic,” like McAfee.
The publisher of Virus Creation Labs, my book on that world, also fled to Belize over a decade ago.
Mitt Romney said Wednesday that his loss to President Obama was due in large part to his rival’s strategy of giving “gifts” during his first term to three groups that were pivotal in the results of last week’s election: African Americans, Latinos and young voters.
“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Romney told hundreds of donors during a telephone town hall Wednesday …
The Los Angeles Times listened in to the Wednesday call, but Romney did not appear to be aware of the presence of reporters.
Oops.
It was the gifts — free stuff they did not deserve — to those 47 percent in the national moochers club, apparently:
“With regards to African American voters, ‘Obamacare’ was a huge plus — and was highly motivational to African American voters. You can imagine for somebody making $25—, or $30—, or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare — particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 a family, in perpetuity, I mean this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus.”
A leading Republican governor sharply rebuked Mitt Romney for his view that President Obama owed his reelection to “gifts??? his administration gave to various demographic groups, saying the sentiment was not representative of what the Republican Party believes.
At a post-election gathering of the Republican Governors Assn., Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Romney’s comments just hours earlier in a conference call with top donors were “absolutely wrong.???
“We have got to stop dividing the American voters …”
Can’t we all get away from The Stench? Not so fast, it would seem.
Lee Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.??? By 1968 you can’t say “nigger???—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.…
What Mitt Romney is now complaining about is the horrifying reality that many people who aren’t black see themselves as victims of those “economic things??? — and as a result anti-government rhetoric is turning into a way to lose elections rather than win them.
And I don’t think the Republican party as currently constituted can change this: after 45 years of the Southern strategy, this stuff is what defines the party’s soul.
A few years ago Atwater was the subject of a documentary called Boogie Man.
It was a comprehensive dissection, exposing the famous dead man’s tactics during the elder Bush’s first campaign.
Wholly bizarre and sickening, Lee Atwater was a bigot like Ted Nugent in that he and his pals insisted he wasn’t one while simultaneously exploiting race division.
He also played guitar and chummed around with old black blues artists who seemed to tolerate him even though they knew what he was about. Atwater apparently felt that such associations, like many so afflicted, proved he couldn’t possibly be a racist.
Then Atwater came down with an aggressive brain tumor. In a losing struggle for life portrayed in Boogie Man, he goes on a piteous self-examination trip, coming to the agonized conclusion that he was a horrible human being, one of the real bad men.
Atwater begs and talks as if he’s afraid of what’s in store. When I was watching it I was glad he perished. That seemed fair.
Atwater made a mockery of decency. From the venomous political propaganda that was his invention and the antic little white man clown guitar playing routines at GOP victory parties to the leeching on to famous blues musicians by offering them opportunity to rub elbows with famous politicians, Boogie Man continually makes you vaguely nauseous. It is the biography of slime. And the cruel animal atavism shown in it is the backbone of the crazy Republican Party.
“People work their asses off to get where they are, and they get punished,??? [a hedge fund manager] said. “I wanted to fly my friend to Davos this year, and people were like, you’re not going to fly the jet to Davos, are you? How will that look to the Occupy people? I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about? I worked hard for this!???
The supposed victimization of America’s financial elite in the last few years has been almost entirely self-imagined … —NY Mag
“We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity,??? Peter Morrison, a Republican Party of Hardin County (Texas) treasurer, wrote. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.??? –TPM
“Dear Lord:
“The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals [sic] of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance.
“We are a Country in favor of redistribution, national weakness and reduced standard of living and lower and lower levels of personal freedom.
“My regret, Lord, is that our young people, including those in my own family, never will know what America was like or might have been. They will pay the price in their reduced standard of living and, most especially, reduced freedom.
“The takers outvoted the producers. In response to this, I have turned to my Bible and in II Peter, Chapter 1, verses 4-9 it says, “To faith we are to add goodness; to goodness, knowledge; to knowledge, self control; to self control, perseverance; to perseverance, godliness; to godliness, kindness; to brotherly kindness, love.???
“Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build. We ask for your guidance in this drastic time with the drastic decisions that will be made to have any hope of our survival as an American business enterprise.
A snapshot, today, of a sampling of news stories and letters using the takers and makers shtick, most from the right:
A month or so ago I broke out an old copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Struggling, I made it through to about 750 pages, around the time where Dagny Taggart is stranded in Galt’s Gulch and being shown the marvelous perpetual electricity machine that extracts power from thin air. She cannot get into the room housing it, John Galt tells her, because she is not yet ready. The machine’s room is guarded by a special, almost mystical lock, that will only open when the person trying to get in is of the right Objectivist mind and can utter the appropriate incantation. Any attempt by infidels to force entry will result in the destruction of the building.
Right then I quit.
For hundreds of pages, Rand’s characters do not converse. They exist as props to make the woman’s speeches and rants about the virtues of selfishness and the perfidy of government parasites sucking off the talents of a handful of gifted industrialists.
To be fair, the characters are not as cartoon awful as anyone now on public display in the Republican Party. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are occasionally even likable. And there is no blowtorch hatred aimed at non-white people.
All the good characters are stern, tall, and strong Teutonic hero types. All the bad are ugly weasels. The portrayals often seem unintentionally laughable.
Atlas Shrugged is so screwed up, so turgid, it’s difficult to imagine many of the denizens of WhiteManistan getting through it. The Tea Partiers, for instance, have never struck me as readers with the necessary determination to crawl through interminable books not written by Stephen King or Tom Clancy.
I suspect Rand has been the beneficiary of a cultural abridgment in story-telling. That is, a condensed version of Atlas Shrugged has been communicated verbally to the many in WhiteManistan.
And in so doing it has become a corrupted lore, all twisted up into whatever they have wanted to make of it, a rationale for being a gold bug (gold only shows up a few times in the thousands of pages, once as a solid bar and as the only accepted currency in Galt’s Gulch), a resonance with the paranoid feeling that your precious cash money and economic purity of essence are being siphoned away by moocher-takers, and the childish belief that the world is so dependent on the genius of American business and industry that the withdrawal of 50 engineers, tycoons and some of their assistants will bring on world collapse.
Even a bum portrayed in Rand’s book becomes a convert to the cause.
The bum has lost his job because he joined a parasitic union, which caused the company he worked for to go under. And in his bumming around the country, he has come to see the error of his ways. When he finally meets Dagny Taggart on a train, the repentant bum recites a long denunciation of the bloodsucker class and his lapses in judgment. In reward, he is redeemed and Taggart makes him a conductor on her train.
Everything the followers of Galt produce is superior, even the cigarettes. Marked by a silver dollar sign, they are the most exquisite smokes in the world.
Anyway, if you hacked 750 or so pages out of Atlas Shrugged it could probably be made into a decent piece of accidental satire.
It is trash and it’s hard to imagine anyone not thinking so, even when it was published in 1957. Alan Greenspan was apparently one person who thought it was fabulous. Matt Taibbi, much more recently, called Greenspan “The Biggest Asshole in the Universe” in his book, Griftopia. So there’s that.
The ROTFLMAO nature of Atlas Shrugged is best represented by a short speech given by Ragnar Danneskjöld, a pirate who robs from the poor to give to the rich:
Ragnar Danneskjold: But I’ve chosen a special mission of my own. I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.
Hank Rearden: What man?
Danneskjold: Robin Hood …. he is not remembered as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became a symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures – the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich – whom men have come to regard as the moral idea … Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.
Danneskjold then gives Rearden, who is already fabulously wealthy, a gold bar.
“I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books …” Rand writes in one of two end notes to the reader.
“If you are the kind of reader who knows that for 1084 pages he has lived in the atmosphere of John Galt’s world — if you now feel regret at the necessity of returning to the gray hopelessness of a culture that is truly bankrupt …” she continues in end note #2.
Here in the heart of Red America, Beth Cox [of Hendersonville, TN] and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign …
Now, in a single election night, parts of her country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline??? …
Nashville itself had gone for Obama, and 400,000 more people in Tennessee had signed up for food stamps in the last five years to further a culture of dependency. The ACLU had sued her school board for allowing youth pastors to visit middle school cafeterias during lunch. Some of her friends had begun to wonder if the country was lost, and if only God could save it.
From the social conservative point of view, the election results were bad. Really bad. That does not mean bad for social conservatives, though. It means bad for the country …
By far the most problematic result of the election for social conservatives was two states’ legalization of homosexual “marriage??? by popular vote for the first time in our nation’s history. But once again, that is not problematic because of some perceived loss of power or influence with the electorate. The other side’s victories are minute compared to our record on the issue. The problem comes from the pain that inevitably will follow from those states’ decisions.
Forty years ago, from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, after Richard Nixon stomped the South Dakota Democratic senator, George McGovern at the height of the Vietnam War:
Senator McGovern had hoped too that Americans would share his concerns that the Nixon administration was ignoring the interests of the people and consorting only with industrial giants, the special interests of the super rich and generally sacrificing the welfare of the country at large.
Nothing that Mr. McGovern had to say on these questions got through to the people sufficiently to persuade them to vote for him …
[McGovern campaign manager] Frank Mankiewicz and I spent about three hours in a roadside hamburger stand talking about the campaign. Three weeks earlier, just after the election, he had said that three people were responsible for McGovern’s defeat: Tom Eagleton, Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Bremer — but now he seemed more inclined to go along with the New York Times Yankelovich poll, which attributed Nixon’s lopsided victory to a rising tide of right-bent, non-verbalized racism in the American electorate.
Forty years later verbalization of “right-bent racism” became one of the motivational tools in the Romney bid for the White House. More than half turned away.
The WhiteManistan roflbot art is viewable and freely usable in much larger form. It is here.
It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. — William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
