Linn Washington - The Republicans’ Rancid and All-Too-American Dance With Racism

As the racist rhetoric oozes from Republican presidential candidates, why are comments contained in Ron Paul newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s being widely considered more offensive than current bigoted banter uttered by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum?

One answer to that question is a politics where partisan criticisms are directed at crippling certain candidates feared as rising stars.

Thus when Congressman Paul began percolating up in the Iowa Caucus polls late last year, news of his caustic comments in those decades-old newsletters became headline news coverage.

Curiously for a candidate tagged racist Paul has a public record of opposing the most racist governmental offensive in contemporary America – the War on Drugs – that societally destructive campaign other GOP presidential candidates ignore.

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http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1012

Christopher Petrella - The GOP is 53% Wrong

Since last August five of the top seven GOP presidential candidates—Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann—as well as Marco Rubio, current republican front-runner for vice president, have repeatedly claimed that “poor people simply don’t pay enough taxes.” For months now leading GOP candidates have pugnaciously chastised the nearly 70 million Americans who “earn an income but don't pay a single cent in federal income taxes.” 

Their speciously agonistic claims were further fortified last October when Erick Erickson (founder of RedState.org) launched a Tumblr page entitled “We Are The 53%” as a counterpoint to the popular “We Are The 99%” website that has become the prevailing metonym for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Erikson’s website is rife with stories from the 53% of Americans who pay more in federal income taxes than they receive back in deductions or credits. He writes: “I work 3 jobs./I have a house I can’t sell./My family insurance costs are outrageous./But I don’t blame Wall Street./Suck it up you whiners./I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.”

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http://www.nationofchange.org/gop-53-wrong-1325956453

Seth Cline - Tea Party House Members Even Wealthier Than Other GOP Lawmakers

Their politics may differ. But both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have laid claim to representing the interests of the middle class, whose economic frustrations helped spur the groups' establishment and growth.

So which side's congressional lawmakers come closest to embodying that wide swath of the U.S. population? Or, in Occupy terms, which side is closer to the 99 percent?

Neither the members of the House Tea Party Caucus nor those of the House Progressive Caucus -- whose views most closely align with the Occupy Wall Street movement -- are remotely middle class, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of congressional personal financial disclosure forms covering 2010, the most recently available data. 

The members of the House Tea Party Caucus are especially wealthy, the Center's research shows.

The median average net worth of a member of the House Tea Party Caucus was $1.8 million in 2010. (Financial disclosure forms require lawmakers to value their assets and liabilities only in ranges, so it's impossible to know exactly how wealthy a particular elected official is. However, it's possible to calculate an average net worth for each member of Congress.)

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http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/01/tea-party-house-members-wealthy-gop.html

Robert Scheer - Arms Dealer Obama Will Win by Default

Barack Obama will be re-elected not as a vindication of his policies but because the Republicans are incapable of providing a reasonable challenge to his flawed performance. On the central issue of our time—reining in the greed of the multinational corporations, led by the financial sector and the defense industry—a Republican presidential victor, with the possible exception of the now-sidelined Ron Paul, would do far less to challenge the kleptocracy of corporate-dominated governance.

As compared to front-runner Mitt Romney, who wants to derail even Obama’s tepid efforts at regulating Wall Street, and who seeks ever more wasteful increases in military spending, the incumbent president appears relatively enlightened, but that is cold comfort.

Not only has Obama been a savior of the banking conglomerates that so generously financed his campaign, but he also has proved to be equally as solicitous of the needs of the military-industrial complex. He entered his re-election year by signing a $662 billion defense authorization bill that strips away some of our most fundamental liberties and keeps military spending at Cold War levels, and by approving a $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/arms_dealer_obama_will_win_by_default_20120105/

Ben Adler - Three Myths About Ron Paul

THE NATION - December 27, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165350/three-myths-about-ron-paul?rel=emailNation

In the Republican presidential primary, everyone but Rick Santorum seems destined to have his or her moment. Now is Ron Paul’s. Paul is polling well in Iowa and respectably in New Hampshire. Sharp attack ads against Newt Gingrich helped the media remember he is still running and deflated Gingrich’s balloon. 

And Paul is getting some of the adoration from certain pundits that he enjoyed last time. Andrew Sullivan recently endorsed Paul for the Republican nomination. Glenn Greenwald ofSalon defends Paul against perceived slights from the media.

The liberal counter-argument tends to be that while Paul is good on foreign policy and civil liberties, he is wildly wrong on economic issues. As Patrick Caldwell of The American Prospect wrote, “While his foreign policy and defense of civil liberties might appeal to the progressive heart, Paul jumps off a cliff when it comes to the economy.” It’s certainly true that Paul’s economic views are extremist and strange. But, unfortunately, Paul isn’t a progressive on much of anything else either.

Here are three crucial myths about Paul:

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Glenn Greenwald - Vote Obama – If You Want a Centrist Republican for US President

December 27, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/vote-obama-centrist-republican

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles.

by Glenn Greenwald

American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.

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TERRA DAILY - Science taboo for Republicans seeking White House

by Staff Writers, TERRA DAILY

Washington (AFP) Dec 29, 2011

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Science_taboo_for_Republicans_seeking_White_House_999.html

Many of the Republican candidates vying for their party's nod to take on President Barack Obama, dismiss science in favor of strong evangelical faith, playing to a hardline conservative electorate.

Only one of the White House contenders, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, has come out with force to proclaim a belief in man-made climate change, as he condemned his party's hostility to science.

"To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy," he wrote in an August post on micro-blogging site Twitter.

"The minute that theRepublican Party becomes the anti-science party -- we have a huge problem," the former US ambassador to China later told ABC television's "This Week."

Other major political figures, such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have lambasted the lack of scientific faith of Republican hopefuls seeking the highest office of the world's first superpower.

"We have presidential candidates who don't believe in science. I mean, just think about it, can you imagine a company of any size in the world where the CEO said 'Oh, I don't believe in science' and that person surviving to the end of that day? Are you kidding me? It's mind-boggling!" Bloomberg told an economic forum in November.

The importance of the ultra-conservative vote, championed by a religious, anti-evolution electorate, is not lost on the contenders seeking their party's nod to face Obama in November's presidential election.

In Iowa, where caucuses kick off the months-long nominating process on Tuesday, just 21 percent of Republican voters said they believe in global warming, and 35 percent in the theory of evolution, according to a Public Policy Polling survey.

Frontrunner Mitt Romney, a Mormon former governor of Massachusetts, has reversed his pro-science support in favor of more conservative views in a bid to gain favor among the more conservative base of his party.

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Robert Reich - Why the Republican Crackup is Bad For America

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

http://robertreich.org/post/14535718993

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican crackup threatens the future of the Grand Old Party more profoundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for America.

The crackup isn’t just Romney the smooth versus Gingrich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Republicans who just scotched the deal to continue payroll tax relief and extended unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of the year, versus Senate Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for it.

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps making agreements he can’t keep, versus Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who keeps making trouble he can’t control.

And not just venerable Republican senators like Indiana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of foreign policy for more than three decades, versus primary challenger state treasurer Richard Mourdock, who apparently misplaced and then rediscovered $320 million in state tax revenues.

Some describe the underlying conflict as Tea Partiers versus the Republican establishment. But this just begs the question of who the Tea Partiers really are and where they came from.

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Michael Winship - The GOP’s Hazy Cloud of Ignorance

December 16, 2011

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/16/the-gops-hazy-cloud-of-ignorance/

By Michael Winship

Have you heard about the great brown cloud? No, it’s not a new nickname for Donald Trump (his cloud is more an intergalactic nimbus of Aqua Velva and Tang), or the ominous menace in a new Stephen King novel. It’s almost as nasty, though.

The Atmospheric Brown Cloud, formerly known as the Asian Brown Cloud, is a mass of air pollution hovering over northern India along the southern Himalayas and down across Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. The cloud began growing shortly after World War II, a smoggy mass of soot and sulfates from diesel emissions, wood fires and other burning stuff that’s almost two miles thick.

A new study by scientists from a number of research organizations – including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – finds that the cloud’s pollutants are making cyclones in the Arabian Sea more intense.

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Robert Scheer - There Goes the Republic

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/there_goes_the_republic_20111214/

Posted on Dec 15, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Once again the gods of war have united our Congress like nothing else. Unable to agree on the minimal spending necessary to save our economy, schools, medical system or infrastructure, the cowards who mislead us have retreated to the irrationalities of what George Washington in his farewell address condemned as “pretended patriotism.”

The defense authorization bill that Congress passed and President Obama had threatened to veto will soon become law, a fact that should be met with public outrage. Human Rights Watch President Kenneth Roth, responding to Obama’s craven collapse on the bill’s most controversial provision, said, “By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

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