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Thursday, June 28, 2012

As Public Campaign reported yesterday, the NRA PAC has already given nearly $300,000 to congressional candidates, 18% of it to Democrats. Which Democrats? Well 32 of 'em including the 5-- Peterson, Matheson, Barrow, Rahall, and McIntyre-- who already announced they're voting for contempt. Since the 2010 cycle this is how much the NRA has given the worst ConservaDems:
Jason Altmire (Blue Dog-PA)- $12,400
Joe Baca (Blue Dog-CA)- $5,500
John Barrow (Blue Dog-CA)- $13,900
Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)- $4,950
Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA)- $7,950
Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY)- $9,950
Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)- $6,950
Kathy Hochul (New Dem/NRA endorsee)- $1,000
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)- $13,400
Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)- $5,950
Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC)- $11,900
Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)- $6,000
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)- $7,950
Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)- $3,000
Nick Rahall (WV)- $7,950
Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR)- $10,000
Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)- $13,400
Tim Walz (MN)- $8,950

If you give even one dollar to the DCCC, most of it will be spent to support right-wing fake Democrats like these assholes. If you want to support Democrats who support your values and principles give directly to those candidates-- like these candidates-- and never through untrustworthy and systemically corrupt organizations like the DCCC.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Willard Romney lies again.

I don't see that this item posted today by Greg Sargent on his washingtonpost.com "Plum Line" blog requires any additional comment, except perhaps a restatement of the basic working principle that every word out of the mouth of every right-winger should be presumed to be a lie. (I'll allow for the possibility of exceptions, but if you bet the all-lies all-the-time line, the odds are mind bogglingly in your favor.)

Company at center of Romney’s latest attack didn’t move because of Obamacare

By Greg Sargent

Mitt Romney has debuted a new talking point on the campaign trail, arguing Obama is out of touch with the negative impact Obamacare is having on small businesses. This is designed to reinforce the larger case that Obama is detached from Americans’ economic difficulties.

Romney’s claim is based on a local interview Obama gave in Iowa, in which the president was told by a reporter that a local company had closed and was moving jobs to Wisconsin because of Obamacare. Obama reacted with incredulity, noting that the law’s provisions impacting such a company haven’t been implemented yet. That led Romney to remark that Obama “didn’t understand that Obamacare was hurting small business,” and “you have to scratch your head about that.”

ABC News did a good fact check of this claim, noting that Romney had distorted what Obama said. But it gets better still.

It turns out that the company didn’t close because of Obamacare at all, according to a company spokesperson. What’s more, the company sees lack of demand as the key problem — a lack of demand that is partly due to the drive to repeal or modify Obamacare, not to the implementation of the law itself.

The company in question is called Nemschoff Chairs, and it manufactures a whole range of health care furniture for waiting rooms and so forth. Around 100 jobs are being moved out of Iowa as part of a consolidation with another plant in Wisconsin, where around 50 of those jobs will be preserved.

But Obamacare’s implementation had nothing to do with the decision, Mark Schurman, a spokesman for parent company Herman Miller, tells me.

“We never said health care reform is the reason we’re closing and consolidating that operation,” Schurman said. “We never said it’s the result of the health care reform legislation.”

Schurman said that lack of demand for the product was a leading culprit. He pointed to a variety of factors that are inducing companies that buy Nemschoff’s health care furniture to hold off, including general economic conditions, the continuing bad news from Europe, and — yes — the drive to repeal or change Obamacare in Congress and the Supreme Court.

“The ongoing uncertainty surrounding what health care reform will take place has caused some health care provider customers and other related aspects of the industry to defer investments in their facilities,” Schurman said.

“The issue is not the administration’s proposed reforms,” he continued. “The issue is that there is no certainty as to what reform is going to look like. Is it going to be repealed or modified? Is it going to be decided in June by the Supreme Court, or the election? Or decided through a series of lawsuits?”

“The uncertainty is caused by the ongoing debate,” Schurman said. “Were there no ongoing debate, there would be no uncertainty.”

Nevertheless, the Incorporated Willard will get away with yet another whopper for the usual obvious reasons: (1) The infotainment noozemedia are either in on the con or too worried about ratings to blow the whistle on the oligarchs, and (2) the American people love lies, in fact demand the lies they've been stupid-ified into making believe constitute "reality" (emphatically in quotes) -- the same kind of "reality" they scarf down on their all-fake "reality" TV shows.

Meanwhile, standing up against the wall-to-wall lies and delusions of the Right is . . . well, hardly anybody of consequence. Remember how the Bush spin meisters used to ridicule any pundit hopelessly mired in the reality-based community? Give ABC News some credit for that "good fact check" Greg reports. But the fact check will be seen by practically nobody, and ABC News will continue to treat right-wing lies and delusions as valid points; all with a straight face.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Party Uber Alles

The evidence has been front and center for anyone who's wanted to look at it and many liberals and folks that pay attention, have been asserting it for more than two years but the media is finally starting to ask if the Republicans deliberately crashed the U.S. economy.

Saturday the most respected national newspaper in Britain, The Guardian went right to it with their columnist, Michael Cohen, asserting that "the GOP has blocked pro-growth policy and backed job-killing austerity-- all while blaming Obama." Democrats, he writes, are finally starting to say in public "what many have been mumbling privately for years-- Republicans are so intent on defeating President Obama for re-election that they are purposely sabotaging the country's economic recovery." Miss McConnell's infamous from two years ago is usually the jumping-off point for the argument: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

Friday, June 8, 2012

Is there something intrinsic in a job that makes a society value it financially, which has become what defines value in our world-- above other jobs?

Why do school teachers make a barely living wage while financial manipulators make billions?

Why does a family doctor make a comfortable living while an attractive soap opera actor make millions?

And that had a lot to do with the whole Wisconsin Recall failure. Call it the politics of envy. Conservatives have been using it to divide working people for centuries and clobbered us with it this week.

Billionaires like the Koch brothers, specifically the Koch brothers, don't think they should have to pay for the costs to run a civil society. Wealthy conservatives never have.

They can afford their own teachers why should they have to pay for someone else's teachers? They do not see the World the way regular people do. That's why there seems to be an observable tendency for billionaires to turn into sociopaths. The Kochs and their ilk own an awful lot of politicians; Scott Walker and Paul Ryan only being two of the most prominent-- who disagree with most of us..

And now we have Republicans trumpeting that the results in Wisconsin Tuesday are proof that it's safe for Republican state governments to go all in on the ALEC/Koch agenda of dismantling our democracy and eliminating the middle class..

Monday, June 4, 2012

Observable Rethug agenda.

Republican platforms and stated missions seem to be aimed at an apartheid form of society and government. Everything they espouse comes down to eliminating the middle class and creating two castes of people in our country: the rich and everybody else.

1. Eliminate Unions, which created the middle class and mitigated abusive working conditions and exploitative pay.

2. Eliminate Social Security, which people pay into their entire working lives, and that allows people to retire with enough to keep them from falling into abject poverty.

3. Eliminate Medicare, which allows people to get health care after PAYING INTO the system all their working lives.

4. Eliminate Affirmative Action, which offers people a road out of slums and inner cities, allows people a chance they otherwise would be denied as history clearly showed and helps to stop some of the most flagrant discriminatory acts by white business owners.

5. Eliminate child labor laws and lower the minimum wage, acts which would roll back 100 years of progress

6. Eliminate women's reproductive rights, which will deny women the ability to decide when they will have children, thus making it difficult for single mothers to work to support themselves.

Everything they stand for eliminates all humanitarian advancements and sends our country back toward the "Gilded age" of robber barons and company script, while all other Western industrialized nations move forward.