The Three Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Poverty

Rather than confront poverty by extending jobless benefits to the long-term unemployed, endorsing a higher minimum wage, or supporting jobs programs, conservative Republicans are taking a different tack.
They’re peddling three big lies about poverty. To wit:
Lie #1: Economic growth reduces poverty.

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“The best anti-poverty program,” wrote Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, in the Wall Street Journal, “is economic growth.” Wrong. Since the late 1970s, the economy has grown 147 percent per capita but almost nothing has trickled down. The typical American worker is earning just about what he or she earned three decades ago, adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans in poverty remains around 15 percent. That’s even higher than it was in the early 1970s.
How can the economy have grown so much while most people’s wages go nowhere and the poor remain poor? Because almost all the gains have gone to the top.

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Beyond Fox News: The GOP is realizing it needs to talk to the rest of the media too

Interesting piece in Buzzfeed about the Republicans starting to wake up to the fact that they need to start appearing on other news outlets – real news outlets – than just Fox News.

The thing is, going before real journalists can be hazardous to your health.  Not often.  But it’s certainly more risky than having Hannity brown-nose you for ten minutes.

The argument some conservatives are giving is that they’re only preaching to the choir when they go on Fox.  Yes, but.

It’s a complicated question as to when its useful to go on a show that might as you tough questions.  For the left, there really isn’t an alternative kind of show.  Only lately MSNBC has been trying to fill Fox’s shoes – and MSNBC does it with fewer lies and less party loyalty.  But before then it was either go on CNN and the other networks, and face tough questions, or go on Fox and be treated like a subhuman.

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10 Million Hispanic Citizens May be Disenfranchised Thanks to GOP Voting Suppression

Voter purges and ID requirements being enacted in over 20 states could disenfranchise at least 10 million Hispanic citizens.

A new study by the Advancement Project  estimatesthat voter purges and ID requirements being enacted in over 20 states could disenfranchise at least 10 million Hispanic citizens. The analysis found about 6.3 million Hispanic citizens were not registered to vote in 2010, while 10.8 million, about half the voting bloc, said they did not vote. The number is bound to swell as new efforts to limit the vote in states with large Latino communities use outdated information to remove suspected noncitizens: 

Those states are home to nearly 5.5 million registered Latino voters, and 1.1 million naturalized citizens from Latin America. Colorado and Florida identified voters for possible purging by comparing their voter registrations with driver’s license databases that show which voters indicated they were immigrants – thereby creating a problem, the report said.

“Naturalized citizens typically received their driver’s licenses when they were legal immigrants but before becoming naturalized citizens (and before registering to vote); therefore, this method generates lists of voters to be checked that targets naturalized citizens,” the report said.

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Study: Conservatives’ Trust in Science Has Fallen Dramatically Since Mid-1970s

Trust in Science Has Also Declined Among People Who Frequently Attend Church  


While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to new research from Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

“You can see this distrust in science among conservatives reflected in the current Republican primary campaign,” said Gauchat, whose study appears in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. “When people want to define themselves as conservatives relative to moderates and liberals, you often hear them raising questions about the validity of global warming and evolution and talking about how ‘intellectual elites’ and scientists don’t necessarily have the whole truth.”

Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to self-identified moderates and liberals, and ended the period with the lowest.

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Suppress the Vote!

Ohio Republicans want to disqualify voters’ ballots for the mistakes poll workers make.

So much ink has been spilled on how vote suppression will affect the 2012 presidential election, one hesitates to write another word. Ari Berman has done terrific work uncovering the ways in which the new voting laws have aimed at suppressing the votes of elderly, minority, student, and other voters—particularly in swing states—who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice has an indispensible primer on the 22 new laws and two executive actions that will severely restrict voting in 17 states in November. These laws, often modeled on draft legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of conservative state legislators, will have the effect of disenfranchising millions of voters, all in order to address a vote fraud “epidemic” that should be filed somewhere between the Loch Ness Monster and the Tooth Fairy in the annals of modern fairy tales. As Weiser notes, none of this is casual or accidental: “If you want to find another period in which this many new laws were passed restricting voting, you have to go back more than a century—to the post-Reconstruction era, when Southern states passed a host of Jim Crow voting laws and Northern states targeted immigrants and the poor.”

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Republicans Retreat on Domestic Violence

Even in the ultrapolarized atmosphere of Capitol Hill, it should be possible to secure broad bipartisan agreement on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, the 1994 law at the center of the nation’s efforts to combat domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. The law’s renewal has strong backing from law enforcement and groups that work with victims, and earlier reauthorizations of the law, in 2000 and 2005, passed Congress with strong support from both sides of the aisle.

Yet not a single Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor last week when the committee approved a well-crafted reauthorization bill introduced by its chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, and Senator Michael Crapo, a Republican of Idaho, who is not on the committee.

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This is a New York Times editorial. Tom

GOP Seeks Big Changes In Federal Prison Sentences

Every year, federal judges sentence more than 80,000 criminals. Those punishments are supposed to be fair — and predictable. But seven years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court threw a wrench into the system by ruling that the guidelines that judges use to figure out a prison sentence are only suggestions.

Republicans in Congress say that has led to a lot of bad results. They're calling for an overhaul of the sentencing system, with tough new mandatory prison terms to bring some order back into the process. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, brought up the subject at a recent hearing.

"A criminal committing a federal crime should receive similar punishment regardless of whether the crime was committed in Richmond, Va., or Richmond, Calif., and that's why I am deeply concerned about what's happening to federal sentencing," Sensenbrenner said.

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North Carolina GOP Lawmaker Calls For Bringing Back Public Hangings, Starting With Abortion Providers

The last legal public hanging in America took place in 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. The “event” attracted 20,000 people and turned into such a sickening spectacle that many credit it with ending the practice in the U.S.

But one North Carolina Republican believes that as a country we’ve grown soft since banning public hangings and is calling for them to reinstated as a deterrent to crime. If Rep. Larry Pittman had his way, “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers” would be first in line for the gallows:

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U.S. politicians getting scarier and scarier. Tom

New Batch Of Ron Paul Newsletters Just As Racist As The First

A brand new batch of Ron Paul newsletters raises questions for the libertarian Republican — as well as a host of embarrassing fresh passages to go along with such classics as “the coming race war” and “the federal-homosexual cover up on AIDS” from earlier reports.

Ron Paul claims “probably ten sentences out of 10,000 pages” were objectionable in his long-published newsletter series, even as he denies having ever written the content in question (or even having seen most of it). But, as TPM has reported and a new collection of Ron Paul newsletters posted by The New Republic confirms, racism, homophobia, and fringe conspiracy theories seem more like the newsletters’ raison d’etre than a rare aberration. In fact, even short promotional letters for the publication name-checked many of the most toxic passages.

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Republican Gomorrah: The Shattered GOP, Taken Over by Authoritarian Radicals, Is Incapable of Compromise

This is a long interview with Max Blumenthal author of "Republican Gomorrah". I've highlighted a couple of sections. If you're interested in the social/religous context of the "official opposition" in the U.S., it is worth browsing the whole thing. - Tom

"R.J. Rushdoony was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, who came to this country and became a theologian. He's the descendant of six generations of high priests, and he laid out a plan in several tomes for replacing the federal government, the secular government, with a totalitarian theocracy in which functions like road building and medical care and schooling would be provided by the church. The criminal justice system would be turned over to the church and run according to Leviticus case law, so disobedient children, adulterers, loose women, etc., would all be executed.

And, of course, you know, many of the people he influenced didn't take it as literally as Rushdoony did but he, as I said, provided the Christian right with a blueprint of the society they hoped to create."

And this:

Blumenthal: "Sarah Palin was campaigning that day and Bishop Muthee, the self-proclaimed witch hunter from Kenya, who had anointed Sarah Palin in 2005 as she was running for governor against the spirit of witchcraft, was there at a small house in Wasilla. It was pouring rain outside and I stumbled in and the entire congregation was speaking in tongues. And I had heard from other reporters that no media would be allowed, that taking notes was forbidden, that filming was strictly forbidden, so I began speaking in tongues. I'd never done it before so I just started rattling off the names of the Jackson siblings.

And insinuated myself into the congregation and watched Bishop Muthee as he, you know, referred to Sarah Palin as the biblical Queen Esther and then began leading the crowd in a really intense prayer to cast out the spirit of witchcraft."

Beginning of interview:

Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, argues the right is incapable of anything but scorched-earth politics, and are trying to delegitimize the Obama presidency.

Terry Gross: ... The right is trying to de-legitimize the Obama presidency, according to my guest, journalist Max Blumenthal. There's the movement of people who claim Obama isn't even an American citizen, and others who accuse him of being a Hitler or a Stalin. In Blumenthal's new book, "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party," he writes that the Republican Party has gone from a big-tent philosophy to being fully in the grip of its right wing. Blumenthal has been covering the Christian right for six years, attending dozens of its rallies and conferences, listening to its radio programs, and sitting in movement-oriented houses of worship.

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How a Former Prisoner Took Down a Big Shot from the Private Prison Industry (and Cheney Pal)

By Paul Wright, CounterPunch. Posted June 9, 2009.

Gus Puryear had his judicial nomination scuttled by a former prisoner turned criminal justice advocate.

On June 13, 2007, former President Bush nominated Gustavus A. Puryear IV, 40, for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. While you've likely never heard of Gustavus Puryear, you may be familiar with the company he works for: Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest for-profit prison firm. CCA is conveniently located in the Middle District of Tennessee and Puryear serves as the company's general counsel -- its top attorney.

Puryear's judicial nomination did not go unnoticed; it drew the attention of a former CCA prisoner turned criminal justice advocate who opposes private prisons. By conducting extensive research, securing widespread media attention, contacting members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and recruiting organizational allies, he coordinated an opposition campaign that managed to stall -- and ultimately scuttle -- Puryear's nomination.

Further, the ex-CCA prisoner who took down CCA's general counsel, denying him a federal judgeship in a humiliating defeat, happens to be employed by Prison Legal News.

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Does America Face the Risk of a Fascist Backlash?

By Robert Freeman, AlterNet. Posted March 19, 2009.

The Right's ability to capitalize on people's sense of grievance must not be underestimated.

In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the "Weimar Republic." They succeeded.

The U.S. faces a similar "Weimar Moment." The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.

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Just look at all the fascists on tv and in the media. Or listen to right wing radio. Fascists already are routinely treated like the mainstream in America. Tom

Republican Voter Suppression: A Guide

By Kate Klonick and Zachary Roth - October 29, 2008, 7:19PM

There are so many Republican gambits designed to make voting more difficult -- specifically for Democrats, of course -- that it can be hard to keep track of them all. So here's a handy -- and by no means comprehensive -- guide to what's happening in some of the key swing states.

Ohio
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month denied a bid by the state GOP to force Democratic secretary of state Jennifer Brunner to provide local election officials with lists of new voters whose registration information did not match that on other government documents. Voting-rights advocates had feared that making Brunner hand over the lists could lead to a slew of GOP challenges, forcing hundreds of thousands of voters to cast provisional ballots. Republican leader (and Ohioan) John Boehner -- with help from the White House -- has asked the Department of Justice to step in, but few observers expect DOJ to take any action so close to the election.

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When voter suppression is the centrepiece of your campaign you know the campaign is in trouble. Unfortunately it was very effective in 2000 and 2004. Tom