Saturday 28 January 2012
Taking stabs at Obama, Santorum claims the president wants all kids to go to college, and that’s a bad thing. You don’t want an educated electorate. It is harder to get educated people to march in goose-step with everybody else. Talk about indoctrination! Vote for me, because I will keep you safe from the horrors of an education of which I couldn’t stop my self from taking advantage. Don’t send your kids to law school. There can be real danger even in sending them to grammar school, for there they learn to spell. I wonder, if in the course of earning his three degrees, Mr. Santorum ever learned to spell the word “hypocrite. Three Degrees Below Zero ☀
Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth. It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos, corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the fifty states. The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission giving “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing human beings will likely prove as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that opened the unsettled territories of the United States to slavery whether future inhabitants wanted it or not. It took a civil war and another hundred years of enforced segregation and deprivation before the effects of that ruling were finally exorcised from our laws. God spare us civil strife over the pernicious consequences of Citizens United, but unless citizens stand their ground, America will divide even more swiftly into winners and losers with little pity for the latter. Bill Moyers ☀
Gingrich actually combines the very worst elements of so many other recent national Republican politicians. He has Nixon’s thirst for vengeance against his political enemies and contempt for the rule of law, Reagan’s ability to connect with “values” voters despite being a divorcee and a moral train wreck, Cheney’s neoconservative belligerence and desire to assert American hegemony throughout the world, George Bush the Lesser’s open contempt for the Constitution of the United States and Palin’s ability to pull the emotional chords of his dimwitted followers and masterfully play the victim in the media. Add it all up and you have the man who most clearly resembles author James Howard Kunster’s “Corn Pone Hitler” for America. Newt Gingrich: The “Leader” America So Richly Deserves ☀
About That Brokered Convention Idea ☀
The first product of a brokered Republican convention was Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
The most recent brokered Republican convention in 1940 produced Wendell Wilkie, who gave President Roosevelt a much tougher battle than Thomas Dewey would have done that year.
Gingrich doesn’t live by the strict sexual rules laid out by conservatives, because those rules are meant for other people. Sex is a weapon being used against all those classes of Americans they don’t like: non-white people, gays, non-Christians, liberals, Democrats, people who have to work for a living, poor people, Democratic politicians. Why Evangelicals Don’t Care When Rich White Conservatives Defile Marriage ☀
Friday 27 January 2012
Why No Responsible Democrat Should Want Newt Gingrich to Get the GOP Nomination ☀
Independents, who will be key to the general election, are especially alarmed by Gingrich.
As they should be. It’s not just Newt’s weirdness. It’s also the stunning hypocrisy. His personal life makes a mockery of his moralistic bromides. He condemns Washington insiders but had a 40-year Washington career that ended with ethics violations. He fulminates against finance yet drew fat checks from Freddie Mac. He poses as a populist but has had a $500,000 revolving charge at Tiffany’s.
And it’s the flagrant irresponsibility of many of his propositions — for example, that presidents are not bound by Supreme Court rulings, that the liberal Ninth Circuit court of appeals should be abolished, that capital gains should not be taxed, that the First Amendment guarantees freedom “of” religion but not “from” religion.
It’s also Gingrich’s eagerness to channel the public’s frustrations into resentments against immigrants, blacks, the poor, Muslims, “liberal elites,” the mainstream media, and any other group that’s an easy target of white middle-class and working-class anger.
These are all the hallmarks of a demagogue.
The management of well-connected Chinese companies needn’t worry much about regulation or law enforcement, because China is governed by a corrupt autocracy. They needn’t worry much about unions or other worker activism because that government has as a matter of industrial policy disempowered labor, making real unionism impossible. Tim Bray ☀
The Weird Truth Behind Newt's 'Contract' Scam ☀
Newton Leroy Gingrich is one wily mothertrucker. He’s calling his presidential platform this year a “21st Century Contract With America.” It’s a wingnutpalooza, naturally, endorsing such “timeless American values” as seeking to “establish English as the official language of government,” and reducing the corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent and the capital gains rate to zero; and featuring such “Day One Executive Orders” as the cancellation of all “immigration-related lawsuits against states” and a renewal of “President Ronald Reagan’s policy … to stop taxpayer dollars from being used to fund or promote abortions in foreign country.” (Critics call that the “global gag rule,” because it forbids any country receiving American aid from letting doctors even talk about family planning.) The title, of course, refers to the Contract With America, which 367 Republican congressional candidates signed on the Capitol steps in September of 1994. When, two months later, the GOP took over Congress for the first time since 1952, making its architect, Newt Gingtrich, the Speaker of the House, all the world proclaimed that the electorate had just delivered a historic mandate for conservatism.
Well, not really. The Contract With America was a hustle from start to finish. It never really was about conservatism at all – practically the opposite. The fact that Newt can redeploy it to promote his right-of-Attila-the-Hun harpyish shrieking for 2012 just shows how effective the hustle – and the hustler – turned out to be.
I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway. Gingrich served as Speaker from 1995 to 1999 and had trouble within his own party. Already in 1997 a number of House members wanted to throw him out as Speaker. But he hung on until after the 1998 elections when the writing was on the wall. His mounting ethics problems caused him to resign in early 1999. I know whereof I speak as I helped establish a line of credit of $150,000 to help Newt pay off the fine for his ethics violations. In the end, he paid the fine with money from other sources. Bob Dole ☀
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