Republicans Destroying Democracy Step by Step - Undermining Voting Rights

Ohio's Anti-American RepublicansWeaken Election Law By Allowing Poll Workers To Refuse To Inform Voters Where They Can Vote

Last week, the GOP-led House passed an election law overhaul without the highly restrictive voter ID provision. However, the House tweaked the bill to weaken a law mandating poll workers to direct voters in the wrong precinct to their correct voting location. Under the new language, a poll worker need not direct a voter to where they are eligible, adding that “it is the duty of the individual casting the ballot to ensure that the individual is casting that ballot in the correct precinct.”

Allowing poll workers to refuse to help those who are legitimately confused about where they should vote opens the door for increased voter suppression. As state Sen. Nina Turner (D) pointed out, “Voting in the wrong precinct led to over 14,000 registered voters statewide to lose their vote in 2008.” Rating the statement “true,” Politifact reports:

    [T]he second most common reason the ballot was not counted was because while the person was properly registered to vote in Ohio, they cast the ballot in the wrong county or precinct. In all, 14,335 such ballots were not counted for this reason, according to the Brunner report.

    Of those 14,000-plus ballots, 3,423 were cast in Cuyahoga County, home to Turner’s district and by far the county with the most uncounted provisional ballots during the November 2008 elections due to wrong place filings.

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer pointed out, mixing up precincts “most often occurs” in “urban and impoverished areas of the state,” leading Turner to sarcastically suggest of Republicans, “I guess the loss of votes for some doesn’t matter.” The bill now heads to Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) for signature.

The only votes the elitist fascist-lite Republicans seem to care about are the votes of billionaires like the Koch brothers, racists, xenophobes, fundamentalist thugs who have more in common with the Taliban than Thomas Jefferson, anti-environment wackos, arrogant yuppie frat boys and corporate robber barons.

Who Has Glenn Beck Used for Authoritative Sources - a rabid anti-Semite, a conspiracy nut and an Historian Who Thinks Slave Owners Were The Real Victims

Who Has Glenn Beck Used for Authoritative Sources - a rabid anti-Semite, a conspiracy nut and an Historian Who Thinks Slave Owners Were The Real Victims

During his time at Fox News, Glenn Beck regularly turned to disreputable sources to back-up his wild and unfounded conspiracy theories. Here are five of Beck's least credible sources.

5. Mahathir Mohamad. As part of his long-running smear campaign against George Soros, Beck said that "many, including the Malaysian prime minister, believe it was billionaire speculator George Soros who helped trigger the [Southeast Asian] economic meltdown" in 1997, a reference to former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's false and anti-Semitic claim that Soros was part of a Jewish "agenda" to collapse Southeast Asian currencies. In an October 10, 1997, report from the Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian (excerpted by BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, accessed via Nexis), Mahathir was quoted as saying: "We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew. It is also a coincidence that the Malaysians are mostly Muslim." Matahir later met with Soros and disavowed his allegation, saying: "Mr Soros said he was not involved in the devaluation of the Malaysian currency and that other people were involved. And I have accepted that." [Fox News, Glenn Beck, 10/5/10]

4. G. Edward Griffin. Beck has repeatedly used his Fox News program to present G. Edward Griffin as a credible authority on the Federal Reserve. But Griffin has an extensive history of promoting wild conspiracy theories, including 9-11 conspiracy theories, the notion that HIV does not exist, and the claim that cancer is a dietary deficiency that can be cured with "an essential food compound." [Media Matters, 3/26/11]

3. Joel Richardson. Beck has hosted author Joel Richardson to discuss religious and social issues. Richardson has a long history of antagonism toward Islam, having written in his book The Islamic Antichrist that Islam will be the "primary vehicle" "used by Satan to fulfill the prophecies of the Bible." He agreed with Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who planned to burn Qurans, that "Islam is of the devil," and wrote a column headlined "What Obama and the Antichrist have in common." [Media Matters, 2/17/11]

2. Eustace Mullins. Beck promoted Eustace Mullins' book Secrets of the Federal Reserve as a resource on the history of the Fed. Mullins was a 9-11 truther who has been described as an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist" and a "nationally known white supremacist"; the Anti-Defamation League called the book Beck promoted "a re-hash of Mullins' anti-Semitic theories about the origins of the Federal Reserve." [Fox News, Glenn Beck, 9/22/10]

1. W. Cleon Skousen. Beck has frequently touted the work of fringe anti-communist activist W. Cleon Skousen. A promoter of New World Order conspiracy theories, Skousen claimed that there "exists a relatively small but powerful group which has succeeded in acquiring a choke-hold on the affairs of practically the entire human race." Skousen also published an American history book, The Making Of America, which presented a "story of slavery in America" that cast slaveowners as the "worst victims of the system." Skousen was a staunch defender of the John Birch Society. In a September 2009 Salon.com article, Alexander Zaitchick wrote that Skousen "aligned himself" with John Birch Society founder Robert Welch's accusation that Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." [Media Matters, 9/30/09]

No wonder Beck and his obsequious followers don't know anything about U.S. history, culture, science, literature or politics. Instead of searching for the truth the members of Beckistan and their messiah look for sources that validate their fantasy filled world view rather than the truth. 

In America Work No Longer Pays. Meet The Corporate Republican Nanny State

In America Work No Longer Pays. Meet The Corporate Republican Nanny State

After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations. According to the study:

    “Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. …The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented.”

The New York Times adds, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.”

So as average wages fall, and nearly 14 million people remain unemployed, America’s economic recovery has almost entirely benefited corporations. This development adds another chapter to the decline of the middle class, whose incomes are shrinking and wages are stagnating. Last year, top executives’ salaries increased 27 percent, while workers’ salaries increased only 2 percent. At the moment, income inequality in America is the worst it’s been since the 1920s, as the richest 1 percent make nearly 25 percent of the country’s income.

Since the Corporatist Party or Right-wing Conservative Republican party has been once and for all purged of its moderates, they have become captive of narrow corporate interests and billionaires. So there is little chance of say increasing the taxes on wealthy executives in proportion to their unearned windfall of wealth. That would be the fair thing to do, the American thing to do. It would certainly help the economy to put the money earned by labor back in labor's pocket rather than redistribute it to executives who have never done an honest day's work in their life.

Related - Squeezed Dry: Why Americans Work So Hard but Feel So Poor

Ha Ha Ha Now That's Funny - The Right-wing Conservative Propagandists and Serial Liars Called American Crossroads Says it is "grassroots"

Ha Ha Ha Now That's Funny - The Right-wing Conservative Propagandists and Serial Liars Called American Crossroads Says it is "grassroots"

The IRS filing of American Crossroads, an outside 527 group that was conceived by Rove and ex-RNC chair Ed Gillespie, gives a good taste of who is funding the GOP effort to make big gains in the House and Senate come the fall. The group has already burned through $600,000 on ads attacking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is facing a reelection contest against Republican Sharron Angle (see one of the spots below). Chaired by another ex-RNC chair, Mike Duncan, American Crossroads has pledged to raise $50 million to beat Democrats in the midterms and has been seen by some as a competitor to the Republican National Committee itself.

And despite the group's description of itself as "grassroots," Salon's review of its IRS filings show that four billionaires have contributed 97 percent of the $4.7 million it has raised to date. There are no limits on how much corporations, unions, and individuals can donate to 527 groups. Here's a guide to American Crossroads' four donors:

    Trevor Rees-Jones, president of Dallas-based Chief Oil and Gas, gave a $1 million donation to American Crossroads just as the group was starting in April. That's small money for Rees-Jones, who, Forbes estimated in 2009, amassed a $1.5 billion fortune investing in gas prospects around America. He has also been a big donor to John McCain and the Texas Republican Party, Politico reported.
     Bradley Wayne Hughes, chairman of Public Storage Inc, is American Crossroads' biggest donor, contributing $1.55 million to date. Hughes founded Public Storage in 1972 and the company has grown into a self-storage behemouth with over 2,000 locations. Worth $3.9 billion, he lives in Lexington, KY, where he actively raises thoroughbred horses at Spendthrift Farm. (Hughes' son, B. Wayne Hughes Jr., is on the board of former Senator Norm Coleman's new conservative group, the American Action Network.)
     A company called Southwest Louisiana Land LLC donated $1 million to American Crossroads in June. It turns out Southwest, which doesn't have much of a public footprint, is owned by Dallas billionaire investor Harold Simmons -- no stranger to conservative causes. Since the 1980s, he has ponied up for everthing from Oliver North's defense fund, to Newt Gingrich's PAC, to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, to the American Issues Project, a group that ran ads attempting to tie Obama to Bill Ayers in 2008 (Simmons was the sole funder of the Ayers effort, giving nearly $3 million.) Simmons is worth $4.5 billion.
     TRT Holdings, owned by Dallas' Robert Rowling, gave American Crossroads $1 million. Rowling, whose firm owns Omni Hotels and Gold's Gym, got started at his father's successful company, Tana Oil & Gas. He's now worth $4.4 billion. In 2004 Rowling gave $1 million to Progress for America, an outside group backing President Bush's reelection.

It's also important to note that American Crossroads has set up a partner organization called  American Crossroads GPS that, because it has a different tax status, does not have to reveal any donor information and is also more limited in spending its money on campaigns (Politico has more on this). American Crossroads GPS took in over $5 million in June, and we'll likely nver know who is putting up the money.

[UPDATED]Virtually all of the $4.7 million raised by Karl Rove's new conservative outfit was contributed by just four billionaires, three of whom are based in Dallas, Texas, and two of whom made their fortune in the oil and gas industry.

C-Roads is currently running ads around the country that - wait for it - are fact free. Somehow facts like Republicans were responsible for the Great Recession, the Recession started on Bush's watch, the TARP and auto company bailouts were started by push and voted for by the vast majority of Republicans in both Houses is left out. They leave out that Bush's two unpaid for wars and the Bush tax cuts are responsible for the vast majority of the current deficit. They leave out that the rate of unemployment started to nose dive under Bush and that Republic economic policies cost the nation about $17 trillion dollars in wealth. In other words C-Raods and its billionaires are propagandists who want to convince the nation the years 2000 to 2008 - when for six of those years Republicans controlled all three branches of government, never happened.

Moving The Goal Posts to Appease Conservative Zealots

Moving The Goal Posts to Appease Conservative Zealots

If you want a short encapsulation of how far right the economic debate has moved, check out this passage from the Washington Post:

    Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent with socialist leanings, delivered a 90-minute address Monday outlining his plan calling for 50 percent of all savings to come from tax increases. “The wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations in this country must pay their fair share,” Sanders wrote Monday in a letter to Obama.

    Such a proposal has no chance of passing because Republicans and many Democrats believe steep tax increases are both politically unpopular and potentially harmful to the struggling domestic economy.

So the socialist plan for one of the lowest-taxed advanced economies on Earth -- a country that could balance its budget entirely through tax hikes and still have a tax burden that ranks in the lowest third among the OECD -- is to cut the deficit with a plan consisting of half spending cuts. And that plan is immediately dismissed as so wildly unrealistic it stands no chance of passage. Cut hundreds of billions of dollars of spending and also raise taxes to cut the deficit, during a massive economic crisis? Go back to Russia, you crazy socialist!

This serves as a great example of how far to the extreme Right the national conversation has shifted. How dare we increase taxes on the richest one percent of the population and solve our REVENUE problem. We must slash Medicare, education, child health care first. President Obama, the supposed socialist anti-Christ Kenyan Muslim is pretty much going along with Republicans. After its all over the extreme Right - those nutters who call themselves "conservatives" will still be calling him names and claiming he didn't cut enough.

Republicans Fight to Let Corporate Bosses Break Laws Protecting Their Workers

Republicans Fight to Let Corporate Bosses Break Laws Protecting Their Workers

Working America labors under the weakest protections from abusive management in the developed world, by far. We take it as a given that our bosses can fire us for any reason (with a few exceptions like discrimination on the basis of race or gender), or no reason at all – a notion that would shock and appall working people in most advanced economies.

But corporate America doesn't want the very modest protections that do exist in this country to be enforced. Even as companies lay claim to many of the Constitutional rights of citizenship, they want to be held above the rule of law when it comes to their employees.

This desire lays at the heart of a recent barrage of assaults on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a New Deal agency that for over 75 years has been tasked with enforcing the very modest protections for organized workers afforded by the National Labor Relations Act. The agency, according to former NLRB general counsel Fred Feinstein, “has the stated purpose of encouraging private-sector collective bargaining, protecting employees’ right to form a union to improve working conditions and preventing retaliation for exercising these rights.” He adds that passage of the law “helped the U.S. climb out of the Great Depression and encouraged the growth of a vibrant middle class for much of the last century.”

The primary focus of conservative outrage at the NLRB of late has been its complaint against Boeing for locating a new plant in South Carolina as an explicit act of retaliation against its unionized Washington state workers for going on strike – for exercising a right guaranteed by the law.

The company's CEO claimed that he'd “made a rational, legal business decision about the allocation of our capital and the placement of new work within the U.S.” The spin is that the company was simply pursuing its business interests according to “free market” principles, when pasty government bureaucrats intervened. But the truth is very different. Boeing can indeed locate its operations wherever it wants to for any legal reason, including seeking out states with low union rates and cheaper labor costs. What it cannot do is break the law, and that is what is alleged in the case.

As the American Constitution Society (ACS) explained it, “The right to strike is protected by law, and an employer’s retaliating against employees for exercising their legal rights violates the NLRA, the law the NLRB enforces.”

    After the charge [against Boeing] was filed, the NLRB’s regional office in Washington investigated the case. That investigation involved taking sworn affidavits from witnesses and collecting other relevant evidence. Boeing had the right to present its evidence during the investigation. The evidence included public statements by Boeing officials – and reported in the Seattle Post Intelligencer Aerospace News and the Seattle Times– that they were angry that Boeing employees in Washington had gone on strike in the past. Boeing officials also said that they would, therefore, move work that was originally going to be done in Washington to a plant in South Carolina. This evidence... supports a finding that Boeing violated § 8(a)(1) and (3) of the NLRA.

Boeing has been the driving force behind the backlash against the NLRB, and the right has been quick to jump on the bandwagon. Sarah Palin, ignoring the fact that we have far fewer protections for workers than any other developed country on the planet, offered what has become an industry-standard talking-point, predicting that “eventually every state will suffer when businesses declare 'enough is enough' with these tactics and decide to relocate in more business-friendly countries.” And during the recent GOP debate in New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich called on Congress to “Immediately...defund the National Labor Relations Board which has gone into South Carolina to punish Boeing, which wants to put 8,000 American jobs in South Carolina.”

Rep. Darrel Issa, R-California, told MSNBC host Joe Scarborough that “[If] the labor union wants to make a suit, make a suit but for the government to spend your tax dollars to pursue seems to be over the top.” Issa was either misinformed about the labor laws in this country, or he was intentionally misleading the show's audience: according to the National Labor Relations Act, unions cannot sue companies for violating the labor laws. Their only recourse is to file a complaint with the NLRB – if it were defunded, union workers would have absolutely no protection whatsoever against illegal practices on the part of employers.

Even the most modest rules that might help working people form unions are under assault today. As labor journalist Mike Elk reported, the NLRB proposed a new rule this week that would simply streamline the union elections process. “Companies seeking to stop union drives often delay union elections by months in order to allow more time for extended anti-union intimidation... campaigns,” he wrote. Those extended campaigns often involve firing” organizers – in a 2007 study, economists John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer found that “about 1 in 5 union organizers or activists can expect to be fired as a result of their union organizing.” According to John-Paul Ferguson of the Stanford Business School, under duress, 35 percent of petitions filed by workers to hold a union election don't result in one being held (PDF).

A study of employer activities during NLRB administered union campaigns between 1999-2003 by Cornell University's Kate Bronfenbrenner (PDF) found that it was “standard practice for workers to be subjected to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance, and retaliation for union activity.”

    63%of employers interrogate workers in mandatory one-on-one meetings with their supervisors about support for the union;

    54% of employers threaten workers in such meetings;

    57% of employers threaten to close the worksite;

    47% of employers threaten to cut wages and benefits; and

    34% of employers fire workers.

Some of that is what labor organizers say happened during an organizing campaign among Target employees at a New York outlet last week. The New York Times reported that according to the UFCW local, workers at the Valley Stream store had endured a “campaign of threats, intimidation and illegal acts by Target management.” UFCW has called on the NLRB to investigate the claim and call for a new election, enforcing a law that would be unenforced entirely were the agency defunded.

Conservatives like to claim they are pro freedom and individual rights. That has become one of the longest running jokes in America. They believe in the power of the economic elite and everyone who is not a member of the plutocracy is wage slave who better not get uppity with their plantation masters. 

More Reasons To Impeach Right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

Rep. Murphy Says Thomas’ Actions Call Into Question Whether He ‘Can Continue To Serve As A Justice’

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT) — the lead sponsor of a bill which would strip Supreme Court justices of their immunity from a code of ethical conduct that applies to other federal judges — suggests that an investigation may be necessary to determine whether Justice Clarence Thomas’ many ethics scandals rise to the level where Thomas is no longer fit to serve on the nation’s highest Court:

    QUESTION: Do you think what Thomas has done is as serious as what forced [disgraced former Supreme Court Justice Abe] Fortas off the bench?

    MURPHY: I think our problem is we don’t know the full extent of Justice Thomas’ connections to [leading GOP donor] Harlan Crow, or, frankly, to a further network of right-wing funders. What he’s done is incredibly serious. I think, at the very least, his actions should disqualify him from sitting on any cases in which Crow-affiliated organizations are parties to or have attempted to influence [the Court]. But this is starting to rise to the level where there should start to be some real investigations as to whether Clarence Thomas can continue to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court.


Justice Thomas has sat on at least 11 cases where a Harlan Crow-affiliated group filed a brief — adopting the group’s preferred outcome in all but one case. Moreover, Thomas has yet to explain the full extent of his connections to Crow, despite news reports that Crow lavished gifts and other expensive favors on Thomas and his family. Nor has Thomas explained how his gifting scandal differs from the very similar gifting scandal that brought down Justice Abe Fortas.

While Rep. Anthony Weiner may have acted like a cad, Weiner was also a vocal critic of Thomas. Odd coincidence that some wing-nut stalkers should target Weiner.  

Fox's Chris Wallace admits he is not interested in fair and balanced but setting the "balance" to the far Right -The ‘other side of the story’