Hillary Clinton is one of the most ethical and most lied about political leaders in America

Hillary Clinton is one of the most ethical (and most lied about) political leaders in America

Democrats are sick and tired of the endless lies about Hillary Clinton, the character attacks, the distortions of her record, the contorted caricature portrayed in the media. They want an unfiltered connection to her without the prism of GOP-style talking points and false frames.
If the headline of this piece blows some minds, you can thank three decades of relentless lies and smears by the conservative attack machine and its corporate media enablers, who have labored to create an aura of corruption around Hillary Clinton. Her detractors on the right, left and center reel off a laundry list of unsupported accusations with an air of absolute authority, as though it is simply a given that she is a terrible, horrible, no-good human being.
And that is precisely the intention: Taint her through innuendo and guilt-by-association, throw enough dirt at her that voters develop an instant negative association with her name. Accuse, accuse, accuse until the accusation becomes the reality, and may the truth be damned.
Karl Rove, the Koch brothers, and billionaire conservative moneymen like Paul Singer have spent inordinate sums to paint a malignant picture of Hillary, using sophisticated propaganda techniques to render her toxic to the American electorate.
Sadly, too many on the left imbibe and regurgitate these fabricated narratives. They are joined by corporate media operatives with personal vendettas, whose venomous words reveal more about their own failings than about Hillary.
But the fact is this: no one has ever produced an iota of evidence that Hillary has behaved improperly because of a campaign contribution. No one has produced a scintilla of proof that there is a quid pro quo when it comes to her speaking fees. From Whitewater to Benghazi to her emails, nobody can point to a single instance of corruption or wrongdoing on Hillary Clinton’s part.
None. Zero. Ever.
The most they have are votes and positions they disagree with or mistakes for which she has expressed regret. And even there, the false frames are tossed around with no regard for facts. During the Democratic primaries, Hillary’s critics portrayed Bernie Sanders as pure good and Hillary as pure evil. That’s hogwash. They are both politicians who make judgments and adopt positions, some of which we agree with, others we don’t.
Hillary’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump, has spent a year hurling insults at people who disagree with him. He has embraced intolerance as a platform. He has a shameful history of demeaning and degrading women. He lashes out at reporters in the most personal terms whenever he is questioned. He lacks even the most rudimentary preparedness for the office he seeks. He has a self-admittedly vindictive temperament which is profoundly ill-suited for the presidency. He has called our sitting president a terrorist and threatened Hillary’s life. Yet astonishingly, he receives less (yes, less) negative coverage than she does, according to two independent studies.
No matter how shocking this may sound to Hillary’s professional critics – those who spend their time condescendingly mocking anyone who says a good word about her – Hillary is an upstanding, principled and dignified leader who has survived the most intrusive, invasive, aggressive and unending vetting process in political history.
Time and again, she has emerged with her integrity intact. In the words of the Des Moines Register, which endorsed her in January, “Clinton has demonstrated that she is a thoughtful, hardworking public servant who has earned the respect of leaders at home and abroad. She stands ready to take on the most demanding job in the world.”

Continued at link…

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Trump Has Professional Internet Trolls Spreading Lies About Future President Hillary Clinton

The people who claim to have values have posted this and hundreds of thousands more.

Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine

Sad to see Trump dupe voters like he did students at Trump ‘University’

Trump’s obsession with painting Clinton as corrupt is looking more and more like a simple case of projection, however. There’s no real evidence that all these Clinton “scandals” are anything but a bunch of desperate right wing conspiracy theories. There is, however, a growing pile of irrefutable evidence that Trump is a straight-up grifter, a man so incapable of nourishing healthy businesses that he turned towards the shadier world of running real estate and “seminar” cons.

There is No Hillary Clinton Email Scandal

Republicans are hypocrites and liars switch into hypocritical liar mode when discussing Hillary emails.

The non-scandal of Hillary Clinton’s email has been placed in a prominent place in the radical Right’s outrage machine, and yes it is an actual organized smear campaign. Hillary may have made an error in judgement, but  that is  a matter of pure opinion, not fact. There a very simple test to determine if the radical Right is truly concerned about an individual’s actions or if they are just engaged in their never ending witch hunts. How many people on the list above have Conservatives millions of tax dollars investigating and then created an echo chamber of smears? Did anyone guess one? Four? How about zero. Because as always Republican bull can be a mile high and wide, and stink like raw sewerage, and to Conservatives it smells like roses. On the other hand, a small error in judgment, a small mistake by a Democrat and the anger and outrage is the grand comic opera of politics, the never ending melodrama they have the gull to wrap in patriotism and platitudes.Propagandist attack poodle Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) Says FBI Gave Top Clinton Aide Immunity in Email Investigation. The headline was taken and blown up like the Goodyear blimp by every radical right sycophant and of course leaving out the last bit,

Clinton aide Heather Samuelson, who worked with Mills to sort Clinton’s emails, also received a similar immunity deal.

Beth Wilkinson, the attorney for Mills and Samuelson, said in a statement to ABC News: “As the government indicated in these letters, the DOJ and FBI considered my clients to be witnesses and nothing more. Indeed, the Justice Department assured us that they believed my clients did nothing wrong. At all points my clients cooperated with the government’s investigation, including voluntarily participating in interviews with the FBI and DOJ.”

According to The New York Times, two additional staffers were granted immunity for cooperating with authorities.

The Associated Press first reported the new details of the immunity agreements.

The Clinton campaign criticized Chaffetz’s comments about the immunity deal and investigation, which the FBI closed without recommending charges against Clinton for using a private email server as the nation’s top diplomat.

If you have the money for a good lawyer, anytime the FBI wants an official on the record interview, your lawyer will get you immunity in case you inadvertently say something stupid – which we all know is what people tend to do under stress. After the FBI cleared Hillary of any illegal activity – literally millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of investigation, the State Department also closed its investigation, CNN Reporter Admits Email Hearings Led By Trump Allies In Congress. 

A lot of Donald Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are trying to paint her as the one who is reckless by the way she handled her emails. And that’s going to be a big focus on Capitol Hill going forward.

 

Bless their evil little hearts: I’ve read a dozen or so of the major right-wing hate sites such as Breitbart and its ilk (Fox News), they’re lying like their lives depend on it. Myths And Facts On Hillary Clinton’s Email And Reports Of “Top Secret” Materials

Media are exploiting news that two emails Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department from her time as secretary of state may be retroactively classified as “top secret” to push myths about Clinton’s handling of government information and scandalize her email use. Here are the facts.
FACT: None Of The Emails Sent To Clinton Were Labeled As “Classified” Or “Top Secret”

FACT: Emails Originated In State Dept. System, And Questions About Retroactive Classification Would Have Occurred Regardless Of Clinton’s Server Use

FACT: Experts Have Debunked Any Comparison Between Clinton’s Email Use And David Petraeus’ Crimes

FACT: IG Referral To Justice Department Was Not Criminal, And FBI Isn’t Targeting Clinton Herself

Not much has really changed about the Conservative movement and the lies they told about Iraq. Republicans are the radical party of the Big Lie. They repeat Big Lies until they have saturated every part of the delusional echo chamber. Throughout history those political movements that have depended on a foundation of lies – not the white lies and exaggerations all politicians make, have caused incredible to their countries and the world. Worth a read, Clinton’s Fibs vs. Trump’s Huge Lies. The media has been attacking the Clintons since the 90s and Whitewater. Together they might be the most investigated couple in history, yet Hillary has committed not one criminal and the Big Dog made his famous sex lie before a grand jury – which he was impeached. Bush and Cheney with millions of enablers got 4000 American killed in Iraq for multiple lies, yet no criminal charges. Talk about some incredibly lopsided double standards. When it comes down to issues of integrity and leadership, there really is no contest, Trump is utterly without integrity, No Honor Donald: 101 Of Trump’s Greatest Lies 

Will Conservatives show the tiniest bit of integrity and investigate this real email scandal, Leaked emails show how the Republican governor of Wisconsin flouted campaign finance law to court secret donors.

 

 

The Republican Shutdown Only Cost The Country $24 Billion

Early Fall wallpaper

Political wonks may wonder what the heck changed for the House especially, and the Senate to reach a deal on the debt ceiling. Jonathan Cohn has the go-to background article, Three Reasons That the Democrats Prevailed

But in a narrower political sense, this was one of those (relatively) rare Washington battles in which one side clearly prevailed. It was the Democrats. When this episode started, they said they were determined not to make major concessions simply because Republicans were threatening shutdown and default. Sure enough, here we are—with a new continuing resolution, a higher debt limit, and no major changes in law. Democrats achieved the policy outcome they had sought, while establishing a precedent for the future: No more negotiating while under such threats.

I don’t know that I would go as far as one analyst in comparing the damage to the tea bagger coalition as a battle where they were defeated and will be too frayed to do much damage in the next battle. It is more straight up and less dramatic. In politics you go into fights with some political capital. In the next fight – coming in January and February, the public knows that the tea bags will be pandering to the crazies – the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins that live in mostly gerrymandered districts. Most Republicans are not going to let these freaks on the outer fringe of conservatism drag down the party even more than they already have. Unless House Republicans stage a successful mutiny and get rid of Boehner (R-OH) he will strike a deal with more practical minded members of hos party and Democrats.

2. Republican crazy brings people together. The Senate still has some conservative Democrats, of course—Joe Manchin of West Virginia comes quickly to mind. But the agenda has changed a lot since 2009 and 2010: Instead of trying to enact their own policies, in this episode, at least, Democrats were mostly trying to stop Republicans from passing theirs. And that wasn’t so hard, given the nature of Republican tactics. Polls showed repeatedly that, despite the public ambivalence about Obamacare, majorities did not support shutting down the government in order to undermine the law. And as the shutdown wore on, it became clear that Republicans, not Democrats, were taking the blame. It helped, too, that prominent Senate Republicans were openly critical of what Ted Cruz and his House Republican allies were trying to do.

If you go over to the dark side- sites like Hot Air and Breitbart they are certainly tribal minded. The crazy is their rallying flag. But they make the mistake of thinking that only works in one direction. The crazier they get the more Democrats and the endangered moderate Republicans stick together, and sound to the public like the voice of reason. I have no desire to see them tone down their worship of Ted Cruz (R-TX) or Rand Paul (R-KY). They can pack their clown car with all the freaks and conspiracy theories they like. There has never been a point in history in which the clowns have won in the long haul. Call Obamacare – a gift to the health care industry and pharmaceutical companies – the same thing as slavery and you just create more distrust of the tea bagger agenda. Tea Party’s Image Turns More Negative

Unfavorable Views of Tea Party Have Nearly Doubled Since 2010. The Tea Party is less popular than ever, with even many Republicans now viewing the movement negatively. Overall, nearly half of the public (49%) has an unfavorable opinion of the Tea Party, while 30% have a favorable opinion.

One can only wonder what it is like to slowly swirl down the drain of history. The new tea bagger conservatism, being even more far Right than the conservatism of 2000 of 2008 comes with similar financial penalties for the country they claim to care about, S&P: The Shutdown Took $24 Billion Out Of The US Economy

The S&P has cut the annualized U.S. growth view closer to 2% from 3%, Bloomberg is reporting.

The ratings agency — which recognizes the Senate deal will be approved — says that the shutdown has taken $24 billion out of the economy and cut 0.6% off of yearly fourth quarter GDP growth.

In the last 13 years the Conservative Republican agenda has cost us trillions of dollars. Yet they endlessly grumble about poor kids getting food assistance. They must have read about the decadence of the late Roman Empire and seen that as a recipe rather than a warning.

Obamacare and Political Realignment

It is still fairly common for conservatives to claim to be the party of Lincoln. That might even have a teaspoon of truth in regards to north-eastern Republicans. Though when racists like Rush Limbaugh say that it is Democrats are are the racists party, such claims are either shameless lies or display a stunning lack of knowledge about the history of political and racial alignments in the U.S. Conservatives, which is what they should call themselves, not Republicans ( the Republican Party has almost nothing to do with small r republicanism) cannot even claim to be the party of Teddy Roosevelt (R, 1901-1909), our 26th president. Teddy went after monopolies and enacted government regulation controlling food quality and inspections. Today’s Repub lican Party, i.e. the Conservative Movement went ballistic at liberal pundits and economists suggesting that we bust up the too big to fail banks after the Great recession started, and they watered down new financial regulation (Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), said he believes Washington’s role is to “serve the banks.”). And of course conservatives are still fighting basic health and safety protections of the American public. Supposedly tossing out every sensible regulation on the books would create millions of jobs. Those jobs, in the conservative fantasy, would not even pay a minimum wage, much less a living wage. So there is evidence to support the observation that conservatives have become captives of the economic and cultural fantasies of the plantation economy. Sure it is easy to find a conservative on the internet arguing that they need low wage workers. That is because they think when they start a business it is their right to get wealthy on the back of wage slaves. How did conservatives to get this point. How did the Republican party, which used to be the progressive party, become the regressive movement. In case you missed it, this is a pretty good post about the history of political alignments between parties, How Racism Caused The Shutdown

This isn’t an article about how Republicans shut down the government because they hate that the President is black. This is an article about how racism caused the government to shut down and the U.S. to teeter on the brink of an unprecedented and catastrophic default.
I understand if you’re confused. A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.
The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits.

[  ]…Hence the famous Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, when Strom Thurmond and likeminded Southerners temporarily seceded from the Democratic Party over Harry Truman and the Democratic platform’s support for civil rights. The tacit bargain that Katznelson documents during the Roosevelt Administration, in which the Northern Democrats would get their New Deal if the Southern Democrats got their white supremacy, became untenable.

[  ]…

The Legacy Of The Democratic South’s Rebellion: The Tea Party
We all know what happens next. The Southern conservative takeover of the Republican Party pushes out moderates, cementing the party’s conservative spiral. This trend produces the Tea Party, whose leading contemporary avatar — Ted Cruz — engineers the 2013 shutdown and risk of catastrophic default.
So we can draw a tentatively straight line between the last 80 years of racial politics and this week’s political crisis. Aside from being an interesting point of history, what does that tell us?
First, that the shutdown crisis isn’t the product of passing Republican insanity or, as President Obama put it, a “fever” that needs to be broken. Rather, the sharp conservative turn of the Republican Party is the product of deep, long-running structural forces in American history. The Republican Party is the way that it is because of the base that it has evolved, and it would take a tectonic political shift — on the level of the Democrats becoming the party of civil rights — to change the party’s internal coalition. Radicalized conservatism will outlive the shutdown/debt ceiling fight.
Second, and more importantly, the battle over civil rights produced a rigidly homogenous and disproportionately Southern Republican party, fertile grounds for the sort of purity contest you see consuming the South today. There’s no zealot like a new convert, the saying goes, and the South’s new faith in across-the-board conservatism — kicked off by the alignment of economic libertarianism with segregationism — is one of the most significant causes of the ideological inflexibility that’s caused the shutdown.

While many of my conservative friends, co-workers and family support Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, Workman’s Compensation, i.e. the social safety net, sabotaging the safety net has become core to the conservative cause. This is also where racism and ye old far-Right nativism meets the ACA or Obamacare. Even the Tea Baggers support the safety net, they certainly depend on it to survive. Conservatives think it is morally just that they receive these entitlements, but not those people over there – the people of color. They see Obamacare as something, as another program that will – in their blurred vision – be taken advantage of by those other people. Even as like food assistance, white southerners and mid-westerners are actually the largest number of participants.

Shameless Hypocrisy of the Day, The Supernaturally Incompetent Conservative Donald Rumsfeld Criticizes Foreign Policy

Heroes in Ebony–The captors of the Confederate steamer USS Planter (1862), Robert Small, W. Morrison, A. Gradine and John Small.

At 04:00 on 13 May 1862, while her captain, C. J. Relyea, was absent on shore, Robert Smalls, a slave who was Planter’s pilot, quietly took the ship from the wharf, and with a Confederate flag flying, steamed past the successive Confederate forts. He saluted the installation as usual by blowing the steam whistle. As soon as the steamer was out of range of the last Confederate gun, Smalls hauled down the Confederate flag and hoisted a white one. Then he turned Planter over to the USS Onward of the Union blockading force.

Besides Smalls, Planter carried 15 other slaves to freedom behind Union lines: seven crewmen, five women, and three children. In addition to the cargo of artillery and explosives, Smalls brought Flag officer Samuel Francis Du Pont valuable intelligence, including word that the Confederates had abandoned defensive positions on the Stono River.

While we’re delving into history, some quotes from former conservative Republican Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld:

I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that. – Interview with Steve Croft, Infinity CBS Radio Connect, November 14, 2002

But no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. – Hearing Before the House Armed Services Committee, September 10, 2002 [9]. Quoted on March 14, 2004. Iraq was not a leading exporter of terrorism against the U.S. then or any other time, and they had no connections to al Qaeda or 9/11.

We know where they [Iraq’s WMD] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat….I would also add, we saw from the air that there were dozens of trucks that went into that facility after the existence of it became public in the press and they moved things out. They dispersed them and took them away. So there may be nothing left. I don’t know that. But it’s way too soon to know. The exploitation is just starting. – Interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News This Week, March 30, 2003. This is my favorite quote from Rummy. There was never any WMD, Bush called off the hunt for them several years after he kicked out weapons inspectors and invaded Iraq.

Rumsfeld, like the other neocons never had much humility or honor. That is why he shamelessly weighs in on the current situation in Syria,  Rumsfeld: Obama Administration Hasn’t Made Case for Intervening in Syria

Rumsfeld explained that “there really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation.” (Yesterday, White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters it is “absolutely in the national-security interests of the United States and the international community” to respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria.)

In an interview with Neil Cavuto that will air Wednesday night on Fox Business Network, the former Bush secretary of defense blasted the administration as “mindless” for tipping its hand and said he “[couldn’t] imagine what they’re thinking” by giving President Bashar Assad’s regime “crystal clarity, with respect to what they attempt.”

Of course the current administration should listen to the shameless venal rantings of someone who has proven to be singularly incompetent in foreign policy and management of U.S. military forces. Give the country fifty years and scholars will be writing about how the Bush administration, the invasion of Iraq and the management of that invasion was one of the most egregious betrayals of the American people in the nation’s history. The only episode that comes close is Nixon and Kissinger’s malicious prolonging of the Vietnam War for political gain.

“Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein,” Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983. This is after Iraq had used poison gas against Iran and the Kurds.

Poor, Poor Pitiful Conservatives

The War balloon at General M’Dowell’s head-quarters preparing for a reconnaissance.  Illus. from: Harper’s weekly, 1861 Oct. 26, p. 679.

 

Its a weekend linkfest:

 The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic – To understand the powerful appeal of the movement to many of its adherents, a narrative history is first required

Important as this is — and it is very important; its combination of righteousness and victimization is essential to the Tea Party’s image of itself as Innocence Aggrieved — it should not blind us to the second function of Beck’s rhetoric. For not only does his language summon a morally polarized universe (with all the benefits, tactical and personal, of such a scheme), but in doing so it underwrites a basic purpose of any narrative: It creates drama. The first duty of any storyteller is to hold the interest of his audience, and every prospective writer learns that the easiest way to do so is through conflict. But not all conflicts are created equal. Call your book “Deliver Us From a Less Than Fully Optimal Balancing of the Various Interests Involved in the Management of Global Conflict” and relatively few will beat a digital path to Amazon in search of it. But call it “Deliver Us From Evil,” as Tea Party favorite Sean Hannity did in 2004, and the dramatic appeal of your tome increases exponentially. If Beck had told his audience that the IRS’s mistake was just that — an error in judgment by well-intentioned, overworked bureaucrats — he would have been a) vastly more consistent with the available evidence and b) vastly more boring. In Tea Party politics, reasonable is what closes on Saturday night.

But the drama of Beck’s story doesn’t derive solely from his inflamed diction. It has a second, even more important, source. If we set aside the way in which he describes his dramatis personae and focus, instead, on what they do — on plot rather than character — we immediately notice something peculiar. Beck’s cast is crowded: There are federal agencies, journalists, civil rights groups, ministers, political parties, pilgrims. And Dr. King. And hookers. This suggests, superficially anyway, a plot with the potential to be somewhat complex. But the structure of Beck’s narrative mirrors the simplicity of its characters. There are many actors, but only two roles: oppressors and oppressed. The latter are represented by those increasingly rare descendants of our libertarian forbears who will “not abide convenient lies,” the former by everyone else. For Beck, a Virtuous Remnant confronts a landscape that is uniformly hostile. How many divisions do the “circus masters” have? Plenty. The IRS, EPA, ATF and FBI. The Republicans and the Democrats. Journalists. Civil rights and religious leaders. Feminists. Everywhere the Virtuous look, they are surrounded by those who want to corrupt and subvert them, to enslave them.

I did want to correct one thing that Kim Messick did in this very good essay, or at least left readers with the impression, that there was an IRS scandal. Even from hours after the media spread the news with the lede the IRS had “targeted” conservative groups, we knew that no conservative group has been denied its 501 tax exempt status, not one. We have since found out that language was used in the executive summary of the Inspector General’s report at the request of the perennially sleazy Darrell Issa (R-CA). Having grown up around the religious I have developed a automatic ignore mechanism. For my entire life they have been screaming and whining about their victim-hood. Beck is a fair example. he makes tens of millions of dollars a year. he does not make any great products, has never invented anything, if he wants to build a bridge he will have to call someone with the intelligence and expertise to do it. He has a mediocre mind, but is clover at manipulating his core audience. They buy his books, products and give him the ratings to make money from advertising. What does he do. he literally cries over how tough his life is. He goes on and on about how America is going to hell in a hand basket as he counts the stacks of money he has. As the tea party and far Right libertarians will always tell you in a comments section, they have houses and cars and pay taxes. Which is another way of saying they are doing well, yet thw end times are around the corner and they are suffering untold, immeasurable hardships. They’re both doing fine and carrying tremendous burdens. God loves them and is directly looking after them, yet their lives are also pure hell. Conservatives have been one big bundle of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance for decades. They’re going to run that old dog until it dies, then stuff it and run it some more.

6 of the Nuttiest Right-Wing Statements Just from this Week Alone. Conservatives want us to understand two things, they hate immigrants and they will only tolerant their own brand of religious extremism.

Charter school threatened teachers for trying to unionize. And they’re using tax payer money to fight unionization. Hypocrisy is not just a noun, for conservatives it is an addictive drug.

Richard Wolff on Fighting for Economic Justice and Fair Wages. You can watch the video or read the transcript.

BILL MOYERS: But as the economist Dean Baker points out this week, “If the minimum wage had risen in step with productivity growth it would be over $16.50 an hour today.” We talk a lot about what’s happening to the middle class, but the American Dream’s really become a nightmare for the poor. Just about everyone has an opinion about the trouble we’re in – the blame game is at fever pitch in Washington, where obstinate Republicans and hapless Democrats once again play kick-the-can with the problems we face. You wish they would just stop and listen to Richard Wolff.

An attentive and systematic observer of capitalism and democracy, he taught economics for 25 years at the University of Massachusetts and has published books such as “Democracy at Work,” “Occupy the Economy,” and “Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It.”

Sarah Palin, Howard Dean, and Liberal Bloggers All Making Mistakes In Discussing the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board. I hope those liberal bloggers will read this and correct accordingly. Palin does not have enough character to admit errors.

The Conservative Tea Party Still Stoned On Delusions

Lake and Mountain Range wallpaper

Steve has written one of the must read posts about Benghazi,  WINGERS HAPPY TO SCRAP THEIR ENTIRE BENGHAZI SCANDAL IN FAVOR OF A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BENGHAZI SCANDAL, featured in this post at Crooks and Liars. Another post featured at C and L is this,  There’s A Reason Why All Of The Reports About Benghazi Are So Confusing. Maybe its a just-me situation, but I do not find it especially confusing. Benghazi was basically a CIA op with some embassy personnel. We knew this almost from the first week and President Obama’s official statement and later when House Republicans were told the same thing by the CIA. The only real news that is kinda new is the size of the armed CIA force on the ground. Which is one of the reason the conspiracy theories conservatives started with – unprotected embassy, Obama weak on national security fell apart and now they are literally debating the number of armed agents. Erin Burnett has always been a willing water carrier for the far Right, CNN Benghazi Special Pushes Debunked And Deceptive Claims.

Back to new news or new old news. I check in on Steve’s No More Mister Nice Blog to see if that Benghazi link was working OK and find that he had the gull to criticize the tea smokers. A few of them see the link and the hoards of tea baggers descend writing about how wonderful, perfect, great, shiner than new patriots they are and how liberals kick puppies. You know, the usual. It is the same tiresome lies, sheeple under the delusion they have clear thoughts, feel strongly they can distinguish a lie from a truth they are strangers to, they’re like the nationalists of old Imperial japan though they were holier-then-thou or cultists who have seen the one true light and everyone else is a heretic. They’re literally the blast from the past, a modern version of the Spanish Inquisition mixed with some proto-fascism smothered in ingenuous platitudes, with a cup of outraged plantation master angry at the uppity. They’re the pure true plastic as compared to those fake patriots who founded liberalism and democracy, and created the syntax that became the Constitution, the tea smokers say they believe in, except the parts they don’t. To them the Civil War and White v Texas, decided nothing, if a state wants to conduct its govmint like Tehran, well that is fine with them. I know some of them and on a personal level they can be pleasant. Lots of pleasant people throughout history have believed in some wacko garbage, been great at denying reality, are champions at the utter inability to take an honest assessment of themselves and the shaky foundations of their beliefs.

Since the tea smokers are still around and high on some stuff reasonable adults should avoid, let’s ake a look back at some tea bagger history:

Matt Taibbi on Deluded Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand and How the U.S. Is Like the Soviet Union

MT: I wrote Griftopia really as a crime book about what happened on Wall Street in the last ten or fifteen years. But the politics are an element of the crime, and there had to be a mechanism through which they could get ordinary people to not pay attention to what was going on. To me, the Tea Party was an example of exactly how that works. I see it as a phenomenon where Wall Street has found a way to convince ordinary people to back their political agenda and their deregulatory aims, under the rubric of “we’re going to get the government off our backs,” and it’s really, in the end, it’s just going to be off their backs, but ordinary people believe in it.

MA: People say they don’t want government and yet they still want all the services that government does. But they somehow don’t connect the dots, it seems.

MT: Right, they somehow want their food to be clean; they don’t want to drink poisoned water; they want to have cops to protect them from burglars, but they’re very attracted to this whole idea that the government causes all of our problems. As I travel around the country, most of the Tea Party people I talk to — a lot of them are small business owners. They have hardware stores or restaurants, and they see regulation as an ADA inspector or a health inspector coming to bother them and ring them up with little fines here and there. That’s their experience with government regulation. And so when they think about JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs and regulating those banks, to them it’s the same thing. They have no idea that regulation for these big companies is really a law enforcement problem, that it’s not this little niggling health inspector type of business.

The whole Wall Street collapse was one of the first things one of the tea smokers said the tea baggers were formed in response to. At the beginning I remember hearing that and thinking maybe we had some common ground, but the tea hypocrites killed strong financial reform (After Watering Down Financial Reform, Ex-Senator Scott Brown Joins Goldman Sachs’ Lobbying Firm) and we got the watered down Dodd-Frank bill, which the tea smokers are still fighting against. So that is a lie, a sham, a delusion that goes so deep and at the same time is so ridiculous you wonder if you’re talking to someone from the same planet. Tea baggers till believe that Barney Frank and Fannie May caused the Wall Street collapse. Which is like believing space aliens left a loaf of white bread and mayonnaise on the front porch. So how is an organization that cannot tell the difference between a fairy tale and reality going to lead the nation to a better way. Tea Partiers Who Opposed Bank Bailout Take Campaign Donations From Bailed-Out Banks

Newly Elected Tea Party Conservatives Kill Jobs and Stop Progress. Because the great tea bagger in the sky will send locusts if we practice some old fashioned Keynesian economics.

Texas governor Rick perry is a tea bagger and has the level of integrity they have come to be known for, Rick Perry Sought State Profits From Teacher Life Insurance Scheme

When you smoke too much tea kids, this is what happens, Washington Legislator Calls For Tea Party To Stockpile Ammunition For Dystopic Future. But they claim to be reasonable and well informed.

Since I brought up puppies, as usual it is the far Right who believes it is every America’s constitutional right to treat puppies like sh*t, Tea Partiers barking mad over anti-puppy-mill humane measure in Missouri

And of course tea smokers hate Obamacare. Something to do with freedumb. That is the freedumb to deny working class Americans the right to have health insurance. The freedumb to keep American workers from organizing their purchasing power from the free market insurance industry. This is the way tea smokers define freedom – the right to make everyone else life as hard, miserly and miserable as possible. Those little store owners and big corps like Hobby Lobby have the freedom-right to treat their employees like trash. If the govmint takes way their right to act like little dictators, they fell oppressed. Tea smokers think of workers as disposable barely human-like creatures – 36 Senators Introduce Bill Prohibiting Virtually Any New Law Helping Workers. They like to think of themselves as populists, but they’re more like thugs who say they believe in free enterprise. Free for them, back of the bus for everyone else. Say something, do something about respect and dignity for workers and you’re interfering with tea bagger freedumb. Except, you know the ones that depend on Medicare and Medicaid to keep from falling into financial disaster or just to stay alive. What are no govmint-no way-no how tea smokers doing on Medicaid. They’re getting govmint assistance because the rest of us are subsidizing companies like Walmart. Where does the plasticroots tea baggers movement still get most of its money, from 501s running on Walton and Koch brothers money. Sure your neighbor is sending in twenty bucks a month that pays for the signs at the little rallies. The big bucks that buy legislation is coming from businesses, that the last things they want to see is competition and empowered employees.

The smoke in the tea tent is so thick, they believe – it is one of their “facts” that taxes are too high. They’re at their lowest level since the 1950s and that mean Obama has lowered taxes for small business 16 times. Bu those are real world facts, not the “facts” that come through the pipe and are sucked into the feeble brains of tea baggers.

Tea baggers are pro family? Yea right, Tea Partiers Protest Clean Water Rules Meant To Prevent Bladder Cancer. Because the Founders intended we have the freedumb to get cancer.

I could literally do this all day. Tea smokers, conservatives to the far Right of the far Right, are nothing new, they are the same freaks and thugs that have been fighting human progress since the days of feudal lords who claimed the peasants should shut-up and know their place. That they have convinced some working class Americans  big banks and corporations are their friend is both laughable and pathetic. Many of these tea baggers are paying more for basic services and getting less than. Their votes are giving private business a license, not to fairly compete, but to steal. They think hippie liberals are giving them the shaft. Nope, the tea baggers are so good at shafting themselves we don’t have to bother.

The Corporate Elite Are Redistributing Income To Themselves and Giving Americans The Shaft

Panorama View of Cumberland, Maryland 1906.  

Located on the Potomac River in the western part of the state, Cumberland was an important transportation hub early in the nation’s history.

In 1906 Teddy Roosevelt, the “trust buster” was president ( he would never get the tea bagger vote). It was the year of the Great San Francisco earthquake, the year Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published and Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act ( something else that conservatives would defeat if up for a vote today).

Fighting Back Against Wretched Wages

OFTEN relegated to the background, America’s low-wage workers have been making considerable noise lately by deploying an unusual weapon — one-day strikes — to make their message heard: they’re sick and tired of earning just $8, $9, $10 an hour.

Their anger has been stoked by what they see as a glaring disconnect: their wages have flatlined, while median pay for chief executives at the nation’s top corporations jumped 16 percent last year, averaging a princely $15.1 million, according to Equilar, an executive compensation analysis firm.

Conservatives, most libertarians and some centrist Democrats have been saying for years that the reason we have to keep wages low is to be competitive – competitive to whom, Asia. That is and has been a race to the bottom for half of the U.S. The truth is slight more complicated, but not so much so that even your kool-aid drinking conservative neighbors can understand. By shipping jobs overseas and using that leverage to put downward pressure on wages, all the while taking away much of organized labor’s power, corporate dreams have come true. Corporate America is making record profits – that means they could be paying people a living wage and keeping jobs in the U.S. rather than do that, these corporations are putting massive sums of money in executive pockets and shareholders. Sure some of the middle-class gets some of that via their mutual funds – but most Americans do not benefit from this capital redistribution from workers to the wealthy. This is a good recent example of how the very wealthy are redistributing capital to themselves, A Pension Deficit Disorder: The Massive CEO Retirement Funds and Underfunded Worker Pensions at Firms Pushing Social Security Cuts

A major player in the national debt debate, the “Fix the Debt” campaign, is arguing that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are necessary to avoid economic disaster. Meanwhile, the corporations leading this campaign are contributing to Americans’ retirement insecurity by funneling enormous sums into their CEO retirement accounts while underfunding their employee pension funds.

Key findings:

* The 71 Fix the Debt CEOs who lead publicly held companies have amassed an average of $9 million in their company retirement funds. A dozen have more than $20 million in their accounts. If each of them converted their assets to an annuity when they turned 65, they would receive a monthly check for at least $110,000 for life.
* The Fix the Debt CEO with the largest pension fund is Honeywell’s David Cote, a long-time advocate of Social Security cuts. His $78 million nest egg is enough to provide a $428,000 check every month after he turns 65.
* Forty-one of the 71 companies offer employee pension funds. Of these, only two have sufficient assets in their funds to meet expected obligations. The rest have combined deficits of $103 billion, or about $2.5 billion on average. General Electric has the largest deficit in its worker pension fund, with $22 billion.

Although they have not remedied their own internal pension fund debts, the Fix the Debt CEOs say they have the solution for our national debt problems, which would include cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

In some cases, the Fix the Debt member corporations could eliminate their pension fund deficits with cash they currently have on hand. GE, for example, has more than $85 billion in liquid assets, according to their most recent 10-K report — enough to easily wipe out their $22 billion pension deficit. But rather than fixing their own internal debts, these CEOs have embarked on an aggressive effort to persuade policymakers and the public that savings from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are essential to addressing the country‘s financial challenges. While these CEOs have offered few details on how they would cut costs with these reforms, it would likely be by limiting access to these programs paid for by all working Americans and by yet again raising the retirement age.

The corporate elite tell the public we have to pay sub-living standard wages or we’ll have to rise prices. What they could do is make reasonable salaries – say in the $85k to $125k range. I just suggested some heresy – hey this is America and corporate executives have to make millions or they won’t work. Fine, quite and lets usher is a new generation of hard working ethical executives they care about workers and America. Some conservatives bloggers have linked to this story – Exclusive: Signs of declining economic security, saying this is the result of Obama’s policies. They cannot put two and two together. Corporate profits at at all time highs and wages at all time lows. These companies could hire, they could pay more, but they are hoarding the money for themselves. Not exactly secret information, so conservatives continue to be the worse informed people on the planet. Read the comments on this post – if we made proof of general economic knowledge a requirement for voting, these people would not be allowed to vote. In one crazy-funny comment, one commenter goes off on how the communists are to blame. There is a very similar cognitive dissonance between what the Conservative base thinks about ” free enterprise” corporate America and what they thought about Bush and Iraq. They could not, and still cannot bring themselves to believe that the Bush administration betrayed America and they can’t believe these flag waving, “free enterprise” talking American businesses have betrayed America for more wealth than they will ever need and certainly never earned.