Little Rick Santorum Hangs Out With Wacky Black Supremacist and Former Cult Member Who Thinks Democrats Are Nazis

Little Rick Santorum Hangs Out With Wacky Black Supremacist and Former Cult Member Who Thinks Democrats Are Nazis

In a state known for its questionable contributions to national politics, Rick Santorum is really bringing the heat. The GOP candidate tried to court South Florida African-Americans on Sunday by aligning himself with an outspoken pastor who fell from grace with fellow conservatives and a former cult member once charged in two grisly murders -- and who announced Sunday at a Santorum event that Democrats are akin to Nazis.

"The Democrats, they're the worst thing that ever happen to the black man," Michael the Black Man told a Santorum rally in Coral Springs. "They're the slave masters."

The activist born Maurice Woodside is no stranger to headlines as a current tea party-loving pirate radio host who regularly claims "one-third of the black women is the devil," famously disrupted an Obama campaign stop in protest of Oprah Winfrey's (alleged!) plot to destroy the earth through Barack Obama, and in 1990 escaped murder charges leveled at himself and other then-members of Miami's notorious Yahweh Ben Yahweh cult, whose leader was convicted of conspiring to kill white people as an initiation rite.

After the rally, Michael expounded on his view to the Daily Caller, again comparing Democrats to Nazis:

    "Republicans were the ones that freed the black man," he said..."Democrats were totally against us. They were the slave masters. Why in the hell would I vote -- not one good, righteous Jewish would ever vote for any German from the Nazi Party... And no black man under any condition should work with any white man that's a Democrat -- under no condition."

View Michael's intro at Santorum's Coral Springs rally below: at link.

Michael the Black Man wasn't Santorum's only controversial African-American ally of his Sunday stops in Florida. After the candidate's morning visit to his Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, the Rev. O'Neal Dozier told the Palm Beach Post candidate Mitt Romney won't garner black votes as Mormons are racist:

    "Blacks are not going to vote for anyone of the Mormon faith," Dozier said. "The book of Mormon says the Negro skin is cursed."

Dozier, who has been an outspoken critic of homosexuality, Islam, and abortion, was removed from a Jeb Bush-appointed position on a Broward County judge-nominating commission and the campaign committee of former Gov. Charlie Crist after referring to Islam as a 'dangerous religion' and 'cult' in 2006. In 2004, he famously said homosexuality was "something so nasty and disgusting it makes God want to vomit." Though fellow conservatives Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist and Herman Cain have all distanced themselves from the controversial pastor, Santorum not only attended WCC on Sunday morning but spoke about the moment he "laid eyes on his wife" in a message from the pulpit that focused on family values.

    Dozier believes Santorum's sermon at the Worldwide Christian Center was a step toward making him the preferred choice of black conservative voters.

    "He came to a predominately black church, and he began his campaign at the most impoverished, HIV-invested area of South Florida," Dozier said. "That will be a big boost to blacks Americans. The conservative blacks want a man who is principled."

 Neither one of Santorim's friends seem to have read any news or followed any politics that occurred after 1929. There has been a major realignment of political parties since then. Conservative Republicans have become the regressive party that holds democratic republicanism in contempt. Democrats have largely become the party of Lincoln and progressiveness. Both parties used to have conservatives and liberals. Democrats had southern right-wing Dixiecrats and Republicans had liberals like Nelson Rockefeller. Both of these radical right-wing nuts definitely belong in the conservative movement - they have beliefs based on hate, ignorance and hate for the liberal democracy established by our Founders.

If Newt Gingrich is Fundamentally Anti-Democratic Republic, What Does That Say About The Conservative Base

If Newt Gingrich is Fundamentally Anti-Democratic Republic, What Does That Say About The Conservative Base

“I’m not sure I understand how that works,” Bob Schieffer, of CBS, said to Newt Gingrich on “Face the Nation.” Gingrich was explaining how he would handle, or manhandle, judges who didn’t agree with him. In a debate a few days earlier, on Fox News, he had called America’s courts “grotesquely dictatorial”; he said that he had “warned” Supreme Court Justices to their faces that if “you keep attacking the core base of American exceptionalism, and you are going to find an uprising against you which will rebalance the judiciary.” He told Schieffer that he was ready to send the Capitol police to bring judges to Congress to explain their decisions, to abolish entire courts, and, as President, to put his hands over his ears and pretend that he didn’t hear rulings that he didn’t like.

Gingrich expounds on various theories so often and so grandiosely that it can be hard to know whether he is stating a policy or just making things up. But he seemed as serious about this as about anything. “Your folks said to me be sure and ask him about judges so I know this is something you want to talk about,” Schieffer said at the beginning of the segment. Gingrich also directed viewers to a paper they could find at Newt.org, which he’d put together

    because I knew I was launching a topic that no other presidential candidate in modern time has launched. And I knew it had to be intellectually defensible.

The paper, which is more than fifty pages long (pdf), is much like Newt: skewed and self-important, its danger mitigated only by its lack of discipline, and seemingly constructed in the belief that anything will sound “intellectually defensible” if you add enough quotes from the Federalist Papers. (It’s also a bit hard to find on Newt.org, where the “Learn More” tab sends a person off to buy things at gingrichproductions.com.) Basically, he argues that the Supreme Court is is acting in a close to criminal way when it disagrees with anything the Congress and President agree on, or rules on matters of national security or public safety, or arrives at a decision that is unpopular or against “the culture.” The same is true of the lower federal courts, in his view.

Gingrich’s list of what he calls “constitutional steps” to take against judges includes several questionable measures, like abolishing unaccommodating courts, but one item stands out: “Ignoring a judicial decision.” This is the one that most confused Schieffer. “How do you decide, how does the president decide what’s a good law and I’m going to obey the Supreme Court or what’s a bad law and I’m just going to ignore it?” he asked.

This may be the place to pause and note that Gingrich’s scheme makes little practical or legal sense, that it has been rejected by Republicans like Mike Mukasey, George W. Bush’s former attorney general (“It would lead us to become a banana republic, in which administrations would become regimes, and each regime would feel it perfectly appropriate to disregard decisions of courts staffed by previous regimes,” Mukasey told the Times; “That’s not what we are”); that he mangles key cases, from Dred Scott to Cooper v. Aaron (which he argues is the ur-text for the judicial usurpation of Presidential and congressional power, although, as PolitiFact notes, in rating Gingrich’s statement’s on “Face the Nation” “Mostly False,” it’s actually about state officials); that he cites an order Lincoln gave that is news to Lincoln scholars; that his whole approach is about as un-conservative as one could get, in terms of its scorn for the eleven score years of effort that has gone into the still unfinished project of perfecting our union and securing our liberties; and that there is a serious argument to be made that one shouldn’t drive oneself mad figuring out what this is all about, because Newt’s whole judicial plan is just a vector for code words to excite Republican primary voters (prayer in schools, pornography, gay marriage), and his campaign is going to implode anyway. (Dahlia Lithwick, eloquently containing her impatience, wonders if beating up on judges, who can’t fight back, simply appeals to him as a bully.) Given all that, why worry about Newt?

There are a few reasons. One has to do with those code words: it’s worth figuring them out, and engaging in the conversation to which Gingrich’s meanderings may only be an allusion. Iowa, after all, is a state in which three judges lost their jobs in a recall campaign after ruling in favor of gay marriage. Was it just historical clumsiness that led Gingrich to cite Cooper v. Aaron, which was decided in 1958, in a period of the Court’s great civil-rights cases, as the moment when the principle of judicial supremacy was arrived at, rather than Marbury v. Madison, or any of several landmark cases in between? Many of his lines about judicial “oligarchs” and the dictatorship of the “lawyer class” echo those heard in Southern statehouses in the fifties and sixties.

And then there is the question of history and its uses. What is notable about Gingrich’s foraging in our country’s annals is that he treats what some might view as low or at least troubling moments, such as Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus or Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme, as prizes—sources of comfort and encouragement. What should be admonitions are inducements, not just precedents but lodestars. That should give pause to any President—including the current one, in his countenancing of the National Defense Authorization Act, with its provisions on indefinite detention—who thinks that the situation he faces is a truly unique crisis that allows for a dodge of the rule of law. It might be useful to picture a Gingrich-like figure a hundred and fifty years for now, in a silvery jumpsuit or whatever they’re wearing then, bringing up Guantánamo as he defends the military commissions on Gliese-581d.

Gingrich’s second-favorite example of judicial overreach, after the Ninth Circuit rulings on religious speech in public institutions (overturned, incidentally, by the Supreme Court) is Boumediene v. Bush, which recognized that habeas corpus ought to be available to prisoners at Guantánamo. One of the spectres, in the discussion around Boumediene and other Bush-era detention cases, was the court’s decision, in Korematsu v. United States, deferring to an executive order for the internment of Americans of Japanese dissent. (In an example of the plasticity with which he treats facts, Gingrich cites Korematsu, a case in which the Court did just what he says it should, as an example of the danger of unchecked judges.) A part of Korematsu that has endured is the passage, in Judge Robert Jackson’s dissent, in which he warned that, by going along with the argument of military necessity, the court was establishing a principle:

    The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

Gingrich picks up those loaded weapons, wherever he can find them, and adds on sniper scopes and Teflon bullets. He also, in his distortions of the past, covers toy water guns with shoe polish and pretends that they are real. But sometimes a person armed with a fake still manages to rob a bank. And Newt is still in the race.

Newt is just your average conservative. He hates the basic framework of the Constitution and the freedoms, and checks and balances it guarantees. So like the average conservative he has a point of view he pulled out of who knows where and uses mangled bits and pieces of the law and history to justify his deeply Anti-American beliefs and those of his knuckle dragging followers.

What Liberal Media - Herman Cain Could Be a Sexual Predator and The Press Avoids the Issue

Sexual Harassment Versus Sexual Assault: How the Mainstream Media Keep Screwing Up the Herman Cain Story

Yesterday’s New York Times once again reports on “sexual harassment accusations” against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. But nonconsensual and forced groping is not harassment--it’s sexual assault. Plain and simple. We don’t know what happened between Cain and these women, but the content of the allegations is clear: they allege harassment and, more seriously, assault.

Sexual assault, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime, includes “when someone touches any part of another person's body in a sexual way, even through clothes, without that person's consent.”

Sexual harassment, according to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, is a broader category, that includes “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature” that “affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.”

On Monday, the Times reported that accuser Sharon Bialek put “a face and a name for the first time to accusations of sexual harassment” after alleging that Cain “ran his hand up her skirt, ‘reached for my genitals’ and pulled her head toward his crotch.”
Each clause of that accusation alleges sexual assault. And the Times is far from alone in missing this. The Washington Post noted that Bialek “accused Cain of groping her and trying to force her into a sexual act” and then went on to describe her as the “first woman to publicly accuse Herman Cain of sexual harassment.” Again: no mention of assault.

The media wall of obfuscation does have some cracks: The Wall Street Journal referred to the “stream of accusations of sexual assault;” and the Times did quote Robert D. Lipman, a lawyer who represents victims of sexual harassment and assault, in an online article as describing Bialek’s accusations as “more of a sexual assault.”

The story nonetheless continues to be one overwhelmingly framed as being about sexual harassment. Yet in a separate article on a series of incidents in Brooklyn, the Times describes unwanted groping as “assaults.” Refusing to call sexual assault by its name is a means of denying its existence or limiting it to cases of out-and-out rape.

But if conservatives ignore sexual assault, they boldly deny the very existence of sexual harassment, as Dahlia Lithwick points out; dusting off the Clarence Thomas playbook, set to assassinate the character of all accusers, and something more. (Cain, unsurprisingly, has already channeled Thomas’ charge of a “high-tech lynching.”) We have entered the “era of gender harassment denialism. The harassment skeptics claim that harassment, like racism, used to exist but is now over. Twenty years ago, when charges were leveled at Clarence Thomas, supporters of the accused refused to take the accuser seriously. Now supporters of the accused refuse to take the accusation itself seriously. We have gone from not knowing what sexual harassment is to not believing it still happens.”

This is a two-step process to rob victims of justice: first, the very notion of sexual harassment is belittled as the self-serving and greedy complaints of humorless women. Then, when sexual assault allegations arise, they are downgraded to this “harassment” category that conservatives have declared to be meaningless.

As Emily Hauser writes at Feministe, “Every woman I know can tell a story of harassment or assault...Sexual threat or violence, or fear of same, is a constant in the lives of all women and girls. Full stop.” Ignoring sexual assault and downplaying sexual harassment is an attack on women. This is about more than the (allegedly predatory) clown named Herman Cain, and the mainstream media’s language should take that into account.

We've seen this time and time again. A conservative is exposed as a pervert, a predator, certainly someone lacking common decency and values and Republicans turn on the victims instead of the perpetrator. What kind of values do conservatives stand for. Apparently some of humanity's darkest values.

Just Like Stalin and Hitler American Conservatives Are Creating Their Own Reality With Their Own "News" - The Franklin Center

Just Like Stalin and Hitler American Conservatives Are Creating Their Own Reality With Their Own "News" - The Franklin Center

As newsrooms across the country shave off staff due in part to slipping ad revenue and corporate media conglomeration, The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, is rushing to fill the gap. The group has 43 state news websites, with writers in over 40 states. Its reporters have been given state house press credentials and its news articles are starting to appear in mainstream print newspapers in each state. Who funds Franklin and what is its agenda?

The websites started sprouting up in 2009. Some of these new sites go by the moniker "Reporter" as with the Franklin Center's Wisconsin Reporter that was launched in January as a website and wire-like service. Others have taken the shared name of "Watchdog.org," or "Statehouse News." The websites all offer their content free to local press -- many of the news bureaus send out their articles to state editors every day. The sites also offer free national stories that media can receive daily by subscribing.

The websites are coordinated and funded by a new non-profit group that calls itself the "Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity." The Franklin Center told the Center for Media and Democracy that it does not disclose its funders, but some of its funding can been uncovered from foundation reports. Franklin acts as a hub that distributes funding that it receives from right-wing institutions such as the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance. The North Dakota and DC-based center works with reporters embedded in conservative think tanks and others who have their own news bureaus.

According to Media Transparency, a media watchdog group that was acquired by Media Matters Action Network in 2008, the Bradley Foundation's clear political agenda and network has allowed it to have extensive influence on public policy. The media group notes that while the Foundation's "targets range from affirmative action to social security, it has seen its greatest successes in the area of welfare 'reform' and attempts to privatize public education through the promotion of school vouchers." The Bradley Foundation gave the Franklin Center $190,500 last year.

The Franklin Center was launched with the help of Sam Adams Alliance, which calls itself "SAM." The CEO of SAM, Eric O'Keefe, has been featured at events funded by David Koch's right-wing group called "Americans for Prosperity" (AFP). As the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch.org has previously noted, O'Keefe frequently and positively profiles the Tea Party and attacks health care reform and other progressive ideas. He also helped launch the "American Majority" group which trains conservatives to run for office. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Club for Growth Wisconsin, which ran divisive ads in support of Scott Walker's radical overhaul of collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin workers. He previously worked for David Koch's AFP predecessor group named "Citizens for a Sound Economy," among other roles.

O'Keefe's latest enterprise, SAM, gets part of its funding from the State Policy Network (SPN), which is partially funded by The Claude R. Lambe Foundation. Charles Koch, one of the billionaire brothers who co-own Koch Industries, and his wife and children, along with long-time Koch employee Richard Fink, comprise the board of this foundation. SAM is named after Founding Father Sam Adams, one of the leaders in the Boston Tea Party tax protests.

In its first year, the Franklin Center had a budget of $2.9 million, much of it from O'Keefe's SAM.
"Franklin Center" Staffed by Right-Wing Activists

Many Franklin staffers have ties to conservative activist groups and the GOP. The Franklin Center’s president, Jason Stverak, is the former Regional Field Director for SAM, and former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party.

In late July, Erik Telford, the Director of Membership Online Strategy for Koch's AFP, announced that he would take on the position of Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Outreach for the Franklin Center. He had worked at AFP for four and a half years. In his farewell letter, he minced no words in explaining the activist role he will play in his new position, "As I move on to a new challenge, I look forward to staying involved with AFP, but now in an even more important capacity: that of a member and grassroots activist."

The Franklin Center's Director of Donor Relations, Matt Hauck, is a former Associate at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. The center's Chief of Staff, Gwen Beattie, is the former Director of Development and Operations at America's Future Foundation, an organization committed to "identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders." The Franklin Center's 2009 IRS 990 form lists Rudie Martinson as director and secretary. He formerly worked as the assistant state director for North Dakota's chapter of Koch's Americans for Prosperity.

The Franklin Center was one of the sponsors of the Western Republican presidential candidate debate in Las Vegas this month, along with Americans for Prosperity and other right-wing groups.

Interestingly, unlike traditional journalistic outlets, the screening process for writing for websites like the Wisconsin Reporter asks applicants ideological questions. As the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based school and resource for journalists, has reported, Wisconsin Reporter applicants must answer questions like: “How do free markets help the poor?” and “Do higher taxes lead to balanced budgets?” Such queries likely have optimal answers to a group like the Wisconsin Reporter, just as some of its stories have been criticized for being results-oriented in ways that are consistent with its funders' world view.

Who wrote that news article you read today. Was it fact based or based on the preconceived views of a right-wing conservative "reporter" who shaped the narrative to fit the extreme views of the conservative Right.

Gov. Rick Perry's beneficence to his donors might be our ticket out of this financial mess

  Gov. Rick Perry's beneficence to his donors might be our ticket out of this financial mess

I've got just the ticket for getting America back to work. It's pretty simple, actually! All we need to do is get every unemployed person in the country to cut Rick Perry a check for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Next stop: A new age of prosperity!

Lots of people have a pretty cartoonishly oversimplified idea of how money corrupts politics, so it's nice when that cartoonish oversimplification turns out to be totally 100% accurate, as it is in the case of Mr. Perry and the 150 Texans who have given him $37 million over the last decade. The L.A. Times reports what those "megadonors" got for their money:

    "Permission to build a low-level radioactive waste disposal site in Texas" for $1.12 million.
    "$25 million a year in subsidies" for a Formula One racetrack for the low price of $400,000
    "Multiple transportation contracts" and a University of Texas board of regents appointment for "more than $320,000."
    A $500,000 grant for a chicken hatchery and processing plant for $165,000

"They get the same thing that all Texans get," Perry spokesman Mark Miner said to the Times. (Enjoy your lucrative government contracts, everyone in Texas!)

The radioactive waste disposal site was by far the biggest coup. It required approval from multiple Perry-controlled commissions and a new law allowing private companies to own radioactive waste disposal licenses (followed by a law saying only one private company could do so). A team of geologists and engineers even recommended that the license be denied, but the state eviromental agency executive director ordered that the license be granted anyway. That executive director is now a lobbyist for the company that won the license.

As you can see, everyone wins, besides the people getting cancer after the radioactive waste seeps into the groundwater, as the geologists predict it will. (But that is a job-creator, for doctors?) In this unstable world, it looks like sending huge amounts of money to Rick Perry is one of the few reliable investments we've got left. If I had any money to invest, I'd send it to the Perry campaign! (And move to Texas and start a waste disposal company?)

So why not apply that principle nationally? Rick Perry will make the government work for you, as long as you send him money!

If you've lost your job and you're underwater on your mortgage, just scrape together $400,000, send it to President Perry, and you just might end up with a sweet government grant! Or even a job!

Americans, after all, hate the idea of giving a "free ride" to people who don't work hard and play by the rules. So what could be more fair than restricting government assistance to those who both need it and can afford to pay for it?

That is, probably, what our Founding Fathers intended.

So when conservatives talk about regulation what they are really saying is that the United States should conduct it's business and regulation like corrupt thugs in Russia. That will ultimately be good for? The rich who can live in clean gated communities. The rest of us can live in the wastelands ruled by the plutocrats.

Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry’s Politics Betray The Teachings of Christ

Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann advertise themselves to supporters and prospective voters as devout Christians who seek to change the nature of government to reflect “Christian family values,” but if voters take the time to compare their actions with the tenets of Christ’s teachings, they will find both candidates are the antithesis of a follower of Christ. First, it is important to review one very important commandment Jesus gave his followers that encapsulates nearly all of the Ten Commandments that do not deal with worshipping god, and it is the one bible verse that all Christians learn from a very young age. Jesus’ disciples asked him what was the most important commandment in the Mosaic Law and he replied, “You must love god with all your heart,” and “You must love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments the whole Law hangs” (Matt.22:37-40).  Loving god is a personal dysfunction that is irrelevant to this discussion, but loving your neighbor is important because as Jesus alluded, it covers the parts of the Ten Commandments and Mosaic Law that deal with stealing, covetousness, adultery, and the various rules regarding interactions within society.

Bachmann and Perry have demonstrated that not only do they not love their neighbors, they hate anyone who does not adhere to their twisted religious views and neo-conservative agenda; more importantly, they hate people who need assistance. Both of the false Christians have shown their contempt for the poor by cutting programs that are specifically meant to feed and house the poorest among us. Each of the fakers claim that spending cuts are necessary because the government is too big and the country cannot afford to help poor mothers and disadvantaged children, but they have no problem giving the wealthy tax breaks and corporations entitlements. Their religion’s namesake said, ”If you want to be perfect, go sell your belongings and give to the poor” (Matt. 19:21).

What Is Judicial Activism? Just Watch The Conservative Supreme Court Kiss Corporate Ass and You'll Know

What Is Judicial Activism? Just Watch The Conservative Supreme Court Kiss Corporate Ass and You'll Know - How a Corporatist Supreme Court Cabal Joined Forces With Right Wing and Kochs to Quietly Sell Out Our Democracy

Bill Watterson is Mark Twain--with a drawing pen. He is a master cartoonist, but also a sharp-witted observer of the absurd, with an impish sense of humor. From 1985-1995, Watterson penned "Calvin and Hobbes," the truly marvelous comic strip that featured six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In Calvin's inventive and iconoclastic mind, Hobbes was a genuine tiger (and his best friend) and they shared boundless adventures that challenged conventional thinking and defied authority, often crashing right through the prescribed social order of the 'real' world.

A recurring theme in the strip was a two-player baseball competition in which both the kid and the tiger simply made up the rules as they went. In one strip, Calvin has hit the ball thrown by Hobbes, and he's scampering toward home plate:

Calvin: Ha Ha! A home run!
Hobbes: You didn't touch all the bases!
Calvin: I did, too.
Hobbes: No, you didn't. You didn't touch seventh base.
Calvin: Yes, I did! I touched the water barrel right after the front porch.
Hobbes: That's not seventh base. That's twelfth base!
Calvin: I thought the garage door was twelfth.
Hobbes: The garage door is twenty-third base. You touched them all out of order, and you didn't touch the secret base.
Calvin: The secret base?? What's the secret base?!
Hobbes: I can't tell you. It's a secret.

That exchange between a six-year-old and a stuffed tiger pretty well sums up the nonsensical political gamesmanship being played out today by the five-man lineup of corporatists on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. They are on an unrestrained ideological tear, making up their own rules to score big points for corporate power. Reasoning? Try twenty-third base! Precedent? Throw it out! History? Rewrite it! The Constitution? Slide by it! Judicial restraint? Only for liberals! Logic? That's a secret! The rule of law? The law is us!

Only, this isn't a game. Barely six years into Roberts' tenure, he and his narrow majority have thoroughly politicized the Court. The one branch of our national government that was intentionally designed by the Founders to set the rule of law above politics has been turned into another political front group to advance corporate rule. The Constitution granted life tenure to the justices specifically so they could feel free to stand up to wealthy wrongdoers--particularly those avaricious business schemers who wanted to endanger the people's rule by establishing, as Jefferson put it, "the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations."

Hiding under robes

"Leveling the playing field can sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game." --Chief Justice John Roberts, fumbling a sports metaphor in a June ruling that does, indeed, tilt the political field to assure that corporate-backed players win the crucial money game.

In case after case, the five hard-core Republicans of the Roberts Court have been chopping furiously at the hard-earned legal rights of workers, consumers, voters, and others who dare to challenge the power of big business elites to reign over us, both politically and economically. There has been way too little public attention focused on (much less a sustained political challenge to) what has become a spectacular abuse of government power. A survey last year by the Pew Center found that nearly three-fourths of Americans have no idea who John Roberts is. Eight percent named Thurgood Marshall as the chief justice (and I certainly wish he was, even though he's been dead for 18 years).

It's not that the public is stupid, but that the Court deliberately hides itself. No C-SPAN or other television cameras are allowed, even in the relatively few times the justices convene in public session. The bulk of the justices' official policy-making work takes place behind closed doors. They practically never have press conferences or give interviews, and some have even refused to let the media cover their 'public' speeches.

Curiously, mass media outlets show little journalistic curiosity about the doings of this tiny but enormously powerful third branch of our national government. If Obama so much as sneezes, newscasters and pundits are all over it, and hordes of reporters and analysts constantly poke into the back rooms and dark corridors of Congress. Yet, nine black-robed mandarins--with the power to overturn the decisions of the two elected branches, as well as decisions by state governments and even of the voting public-- sit in splendid obscurity in an imposing, white marble bunker, periodically tossing out rulings that essentially make law.

When the mass media do cover the Court (usually only when a new justice is named or a major edict is handed down), the reporting is superficial, even lazy. Two months ago, for example, the New York Times ran an"analysis" of decisions in the 2010-2011 term, concluding that the hallmark of the Roberts Court is "defending free speech." Never mind that it is corporate speech that they have radically enhanced, to the detriment of your voice and mine. But the Times didn't probe.

It's time for you and me to probe, because the Roberts-Alito-Kennedy-Scalia-Thomas cabal is openly aligning itself with the all-out political push by such far-right billionaires as the Koch brothers to impose a corporate plutocracy over America (see February 2010 and June 2011 Lowdowns). "Come on, Hightower," you might say, "such learned jurists wouldn't be engaged in such extremism." Oh? Remember Bush v. Gore in December 2000? In that case, five justices abruptly shoved their way into totally unprecedented, overtly partisan territory to dictate who would be America's president. With no need to do so, they imperiously interrupted a recount of the people's vote in Florida, usurped jurisdiction from state courts, invented a legal theory out of thin air, and arbitrarily seated corporate-favorite George W in the White House.

This was so far beyond the bounds of the Court's role, such an arrogant act of magisterial extremism, that none of the usurpers were willing to claim the decision as their own. None put their name on the opinion. Also, in an extraordinary confession, the opinion itself concedes its legal shoddiness by saying that it's a one-of-a-kind decision that should not be cited as a precedent for any other case. Tellingly, it hasn't been.

Eleven years later, three of those five Bush v. Gore judicial extremists--Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas--are still on the bench, forming a solid core of today's corporate cabal.

Also, while it's not widely known, Roberts himself was a key member of Bush's election-stealing team in Florida. A protege of Republican attack dog Kenneth Starr, Roberts was a corporate lawyer in Washington at the time (becoming a multimillionaire by helping such clients as Big Coal defend the abominable min-ing method of mountaintop removal). He was flown to Florida to polish legal briefs and do a dress rehearsal to prepare Bush's lead lawyer for getting the Supremes to seize the election for the Republican.

In 2005, George W returned the favor by entrust- ing the top spot on the nation's highest Court to this radical corporate activist. With the addition of Alito in 2006, Corporate America had its slim ideological majority in place.

Not only did pro-corporate decisions begin to flow, but the cabal also became brazen about its alliance with the right-wing Republican network that's now pushing aggressively in Washington, state capitals, and all of America's courts to rewrite laws so an "aristocracy of our moneyed corporations" can rise above the American people's democratic rights and authority. Jeff Shesol, author of Supreme Power (a history of FDR's fight with the Court), wrote a June New York Times op-ed about this "flurry of judicial fraternization," warning that it threatens to destroy the Court's credibility as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. Here's a sampling of their fraternization:

In 2010, Scalia was a featured participant in the Koch brothers' annual political retreat, joining assorted billionaires and GOP operatives as they plotted strategy and raised money for defeating Democrats. And this January, when tea party Republicans marched triumphantly into Washington to take their seats in Congress, they were welcomed by Scalia, who presented a constitutional tutorial to the newly minted partisans.

In 2008 and 2010, Alito lent his supreme prestige to the fund-raising efforts of the right-wing, anti-Democrat mag, American Spectator. He served as chief draw and keynote speaker at the group's 2008 fund-raiser, where he regaled wealthy funders with Joe Biden jokes. In 2009, he headlined a fundraiser for the Koch-backed Intercollegiate Studies Institute(which boasts the right-wing video trickster and criminal activist James O'Keefe among its alumnae). Also, in 2010, Alito was the chief sparklie at a high-dollar event for the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute.

Thomas, too, has put his judicial imprimatur on the Koch boys' annual plutocratic political gathering. He addressed their 2008 getaway at a Palm Springs resort, apparently enjoying four days there on the tab of the Koch-funded Federalist Society. He also is closely tied to the Heritage Foundation, which is richly financed by the Kochs. In 2009, he was the featured draw at a fundraiser for the group, which often takes part in Supreme Court cases--and which employed Thomas' wife, Ginny, from 2003-2007, paying her $686,000 that the justice "inadvertently omitted" from his financial disclosure filings. In addition, Thomas is corruptly entangled with Dallas real estate billionaire and right-wing political funder Harlan Crow. Even though Crow's financial and political interests are directly affected by the high court's rulings, Thomas has been injudiciously accepting a steady flow of gifts from the tycoon, including: a $175,000 donation from Crow to a Georgia library project dedicated to Thomas; a $2.8 million gift for an historic preservation project being developed under Thomas' supervision near his childhood home; and a $500,000 donation to Thomas' wife, Ginny, last year so she could start a tea party lobbying and political group (which, by the way, takes an aggressive partisan stance on legal questions that will soon come up for Justice Thomas' consideration, including Obama's health care law).

Good grief! Is there no code of ethics outlawing such rank conflicts of interest for federal judges? Yes. But, conveniently, Supreme Court justices have been exempted from the code.

Soiling clean elections

The Lowdown has periodically exposed the Court's slaphappy extremism and its make-up-the-rules activism as found in such now-infamous cases as Citizens United (see Sept. 2009, March 2010, and Feb. 2011 issues). In that 2010 ruling, using contorted language that even Orwell could not have dreamed up, the five actually re-wrote the laws of nature, decreeing that lifeless corporate entities are "persons" with a constitutional right to "speak" in every American election. These necromancers then invented a "voice" for corporate-speak: money. They ruled that top executives of these inanimate for-profit constructs are entitled to spend unlimited sums of corporate cash (money that belongs to shareholders, not to them) to run secretly funded campaigns for or against anyone they choose.

Interestingly, none in this bloc of five has ever run for office, much less won. So they have no real- life experience with the way big money suffocates democracy, both in politics and in the close confines of government decision-making. Worse, all of them express an uncommonly deep contempt for a truly democratic process, in which the people would reign over corporations, allowing grassroots human endeavor and ideas to trump the blunt force of money.

They really should talk to their shrinks about this psychosis. But, meanwhile, they keep working out their contempt on us, not only by jacking up the clout of corporate players, but also by slapping down grassroots efforts to give people power a path around the ever-rising money barrier:

2006. Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas vote to overturn limits that the people of Vermont placed on campaign contributions.
2007. The same five throw out Wisconsin's effort to keep corporations from swamping their elections with last-minute ad blitzes.

2008. The same five strike down the "millionaire's amendment," a part of the McCain-Feingold election finance reform passed by Congress in 2002; this provision had allowed candidates who were confronted by self-financed millionaire opponents to raise more money than otherwise allowed in order to level the playing field.

June 27, 2011. The same five kill the "matching funds" provision of Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections Act--a provision that was key to making the state's extremely popular and successful public financing system work.

The Arizona ruling was a stinging slap in the face to the conscientious citizens of that state. Arizonans have labored diligently to free their politics from the corruption of big money, while also opening the possibility of holding office to those who don't have piles of money or don't want to be beholden to those who do. Nauseated in the 1990s by an epidemic of gubernatorial and legislative scandals, the people themselves launched a grassroots initiative to get the democracy-destroying corrosion of special-interest political contributions out of their elections. In 1998, Arizona voters emphatically said, "yes."

Their Clean Elections Act established a voluntary public financing system that gave office-seekers of all parties and all economic classes an alternative, no-strings-attached way to finance their campaigns. By agreeing not to take any special interest contributions, these candidates received a fixed sum of public money--enough for them to be competitive under normal campaign conditions and have their voices heard. However, abnormal happens. So, if clean-running contenders found their voices being drowned out by a flood of special interest cash flowing to a rival, the "matching funds" provision allowed them to get a limited level of extra money from the public fund to help counter the free-spending opponent's unfair advantage.

It is this matching mechanism that the mammon-worshipping Supremes went after. Why? Because it works. Former Governor Janet Napolitano, for example, says she could not have even considered running for Arizona's top office without the availability of this funding alternative, but with it she won two terms. A majority of all parties' candidates use the Clean law, and it is enormously popular with the public.

But the corporate powers hate, hate, hate it, for it diminishes their political control. Having failed again and again to repeal it at the state level, they turned to the vipers nest of Koch-funded, right-wing policy fronts to find a way for the federal courts to inter- vene and do their dirty work. With support from the American Legislative Exchange Council (see Feb. 2011 Lowdown) and the Institute for Justice, this clique developed a perversely-novel theory of law, framed it into a lawsuit, and had the Republican leader of the state house, John McComish, sign on as plaintiff.

The Roberts quintet happily swallowed the perverse legal theory fed to them in the case, known as Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett. Turning both common sense and the Constitution topsy-turvy, the Court found--get this--that Arizona's matching provision gives cash-poor candidates an unfair advantage over those flush with money. Huh?

Well, explained the five, money speaks in politics, and the speech of the rich is inhibited if they know that their money-raising can result in "counterspeech" from opponents. Corporatespeak, good; counterspeak, bad. In a twisted and overwrought opinion for the majority, Alito wrote that public matching funds impose an "unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises [the First Amendment right to buy an election]." Okay, I edited-in that last bit, but that's precisely what the Court's majority (and the Koch brothers) are actually saying. Not only are they freeing big money to shout as loud as it wants in our elections, but the Court has now allowed the money interests to quash the political speech of others. The good news is that Roberts & Company only nixed the matching provision, not the Clean Election Act itself. At least not yet. As Roberts wrote: "We do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing."

Stop them before they rule again

These guys are a clear and present danger to our democratic rights, not only in election cases, but also in a rising flood of upside-down economic rulings--including their shameful June decision involving Walmart's discrimination against women employees and their ridiculous ruling in April allowing AT&T to defraud customers. Both of these court opinions eviscerate the people's right to hold corporations accountable by filing class-action lawsuits. The Roberts Five are not objective and reasoned judges. They are crass political operatives disguised in robes of authority, deliberately contorting the law to transfer huge chunks of the people's power to corporate suites.

Roberts. Alito. Kennedy. Scalia. Thomas.

Memorize these names, for they are thieves. Put their names and deeds into every political discussion. Spread their infamy. Distribute wanted posters! Make bumper stickers. Send emails and letters-to-the-editor. Chastise Republicans for coddling them, Democrats for doing nothing, and tea partiers for giving these ultimate Big Government authoritarians a pass. It's up to us.

One of the big generalizations about the Constitution is that it exists in large part to protect the people from tyrannical government (some people say just "from government". That is an erroneous interpretation. Government itself must exists to act as a kind of referee). The only function of the Constitution is to protect citizens from powerful special interests. The right-wing Roberts Court does does see it that way. The conservatives on the Court -   Roberts. Alito. Kennedy. Scalia. Thomas. - think they should be looking out for the interests of corporations.

The Question Conservatives Can't Answer - Why Working Hard in America No Longer Pays, Welcome to Corrupted Capitalism

The Question Republicans Can't Answer - Why Working Hard in America No Longer Pays, Welcome to the Land of Corrupted Capitalism

The following fact was sent to numerous conservative pundits, politicians, and profitseekers:

    Based on Tax Foundation figures, the richest 1% has TRIPLED its share of America's income over the past 30 years. Much of the gain came from tax cuts and minimally taxed financial instruments. If their income had increased only at the pace of American productivity (80%), they would be taking about a TRILLION DOLLARS LESS out of our economy.

And a question was posed:

    In what way do the richest 1% deserve these extraordinary gains?

This question was not posed in sarcasm. A factual answer is genuinely sought. It seems unlikely that 1% of the population worked three times harder than the rest of us, or contributed three times as much to American productivity. Money earned from tax cuts and minimally taxed financial instruments is not productive income. And while some big earners have developed innovative ideas and leading-edge businesses, it seems fair to say that taxpayer-funded research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the Internet), the National Institute of Health (pharmaceuticals), and the National Science Foundation (the Digital Library Initiative) has laid a half-century foundation for their idea-building.

So I asked anyone out there to explain, defend, or justify the fact that over 20% of our country's income (it was 7% in 1980) now goes to the richest 1% of Americans.

Very few responses were forthcoming. To his credit, renowned economist and writer Thomas Sowell took the time to respond. Unfortunately, his response relied upon classical economic theory: "Most people are paid voluntarily by others to whom they supply goods and/or services, and only to the extent that others value what is supplied enough to part with their own hard cash."

Mr. Sowell is also a believer in economic mobility, claiming that people often move from one earnings quintile to another over time. While there's some truth in this, Treasury Department figures show that nearly 9 out of 10 of those in the top 1% remained in the top quintile of earners over a ten year period.

A few other conservatives responded to my question, with varying degrees of coherence in their arguments. Reference was made to the "Pareto Efficiency," a situation in which an allocation of resources makes at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off: the result is said to be a net improvement overall. But this does not address the resulting contribution to inequality, which is the main point.

Another respondent claimed: "What we found is that the rich did get richer over the last 30 years, but so did the middle class, the working class and the poorest."

But based on 1980 dollars and IRS data, this is how U.S. income has been redistributed since that time:

    Incomes for the top 1% have gone from $148,000 to $450,000
    Incomes for the next 9% have gone from $46,000 to $50,000
    Incomes for the next 40% have gone from $17,500 to $15,000
    Incomes for the bottom 50% have gone from $5,400 to $3,750

As it stands, the question remains unanswered. Maybe if we offer a prize...?

The very rich take the money of other rich people and use hedge funds to create vast wealth. Other wealthy Americans take a huge share of the value added to products and services by cheap labor to make far more money than any work or intellectual value they added. The first, but especially the second way of keeping wealth and making even more from the mere fact of being wealthy, is a kind of pimpdom. The very wealthy have become pimps who live off the work of others. How fair is it that of all the capital created by labor that the pimps take 75%. It is certainly not the kind of free market society that Republicans say we live in. It is a severely corrupted capitalism that punishes work and rewards wealth.

The chart above is related to this article - How the Deficit Got This Big 

Despite what antigovernment conservatives say, non-defense discretionary spending on areas like foreign aid, education and food safety was not a driving factor in creating the deficits. In fact, such spending, accounting for only 15 percent of the budget, has been basically flat as a share of the economy for decades. Cutting it simply will not fill the deficit hole.

The first graph shows the difference between budget projections and budget reality. In 2001, President George W. Bush inherited a surplus, with projections by the Congressional Budget Office for ever-increasing surpluses, assuming continuation of the good economy and President Bill Clinton’s policies. But every year starting in 2002, the budget fell into deficit.

Flip-flop Republicans Were For Raising The Debt Ceiling Before They Were Against It

Flip-flop Republicans Were For Raising The Debt Ceiling Before They Were Against It

There was a time when House Republicans chose not to threaten the nation with default to get their agenda passed.
White House and congressional negotiators are currently in the process of striking a deficit reduction deal, as most Republicans in Congress are refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling without deep cuts to public investments and social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare. By doing so, these Republicans are essentially holding the country hostage, threatening the United States with default unless Democrats agree to these cuts.

Yet these Republicans were not always demanding hostages in exchange for allowing the country to pay its own bills. In November of 2004, Congress voted in both the House and Senate to hike the U.S. debt limit by $800 billion, which raised the total ceiling to $8.1 trillion.

A ThinkProgress review of the votes in both the House and Senate finds that a whopping 130 congressional Republicans voted to hike the debt ceiling that November that remain in the U.S. Congress today (either in their same seats or by coming to the Senate). These members of Congress did not demand draconian cuts in public investment that would’ve driven up unemployment and threatened the economy in return.

Of course, there was one other difference between then and today. President George W. Bush was in the White House, and Republicans did not have an incentive to try to politically damage him by holding the debt ceiling hostage. In 2002, during another hike in the nation’s debt limit under Bush, his press secretary Ari Fleischer said it was important to raise the debt ceiling because it was not the time “to engage in activites that could in any way raise questions about the full faith and credit of the United States”:

    MR. FLEISCHER: The Senate passed, 68-29, a clean increase in the debt limit. The President praises the Senate’s action. The debt limit is a very important issue. This is not the time to play any — this is not the time to engage in any activities that could in any way raise questions about the full faith and credit of the United States. And the President urges the House to follow the Senate’s action on this matter.

These votes also prove that these Republicans, when faced with the default of their country, are willing to vote to raise the debt ceiling; this indicates that it is perhaps unnecessary to strike any sort of deficit reduction deal at all to win their votes. If Republicans and Democrats want to strike a grand bargain on deficit reduction, they can certainly do that in the context of the budget appropriations process rather than holding the debt limit hostage.

The current crop of fanatical conservatives had a choice to make. They could join in and help President Obama pull the country out of the recession they caused or they could act on their hatred of the president and do everything they could to make him look bad, even if it means making the recession they started even worse. They chose to further cripple the economy. Republicans are hoping to avoid blame for taking the country hostage because they claim taxes are too high and the gov'mint is spending too much. Taxes are the lowest they have been since 1950. Government spending as a percent of GDP ( the standard measure) was above average in 2009, but has come down to the same average yearly spending of the last fifteen years. We have a revenue problem in other words.

Rick Perry Doubled Texas’ Debt, Then Balanced Budget Through Accounting Gimmicks

Cowardly Proto-facist Rep. Allen West(R) Unloads On ‘Vile, Unprofessional, and Despicable’ Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

James O'Keefe's Latest 'Terrorist' Medicaid Sting Goes After Woman For Following Law

The victimhood myths of Palin fans - The reaction of her devoted fans to a blog post about poor attendance at a screening of "The Undefeated" is telling