Daily Music Selection12 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin by Joshua Holland AlterNet.org What’s happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then ” signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit.” Walker then used the deficit he’d created as the justification for assaulting his state’s public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as “the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money.” Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana. Read the rest here. And then there’s this: Rush Limbaugh’s Disgusting Anti-Union Lies, Calls Demonstrating WI Workers ‘Freeloaders’ by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd AlterNet.rog Feb. 18, 2011 Piggish fake anti-socialism rants continue to spew from…
Early in the year, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both confess that from the very beginning the whole weapons of mass destruction/al-Qaeda had ties to Saddam Hussein thing was a total fabrication - and - the entire Iraq War was a total fraud that was all about Big Oil. Criminal proceedings begin. The next day on his show, Rush Limbaugh explains to his audience that the confessions were false, based on a voodoo curse put on them by Bill Clinton before he left office. The day after that, a Rasmussen poll will show that 20% of the American population buys into this. Thus, the beginning of the “curser movement.” In late spring, Glenn Beck will define the following groups as “domestic terrorists” – all public school teachers, all union members, all Democrats, all moderate Republicans, The Humane Society, The Red Cross, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America and Christian Scientists. The next day, a CBS/NY Times poll shows 29% of the American population buy into this. Sarah Palin develops a severe eating disorder and accuses Michelle Obama of trying to cut off her credit with Dominoes Pizza. Failed Teabagger endorsed Nevada Senatorial Candidate Sharron Angle returns to the…
… and it’s nothing new. As 2011 settles in, some things haven’t changed, such as the investment bank aristocracy of Wall Street, already wallowing in obscenely large salaries, apparently believing they deserve bonuses for continuing to peddle worthless paper and hoodwinking their own customers. This addled belief, however, is nothing new. Having misspent a part of my youth as an advertising director for a publishing company, I once had an opportunity to encounter some wealthy people at business lunches and dinners, and noticed a few habits of hypocritical thinking they had in common: – To a man — and they were all men — they believed, even the silver-spoon-born trust fund scions and coddled bosses sons, that they were ‘self-made’ and everything they had was attained by their own hard work, even if their wealth was derived mostly from dividend income, the result of a long-dead relative picking the right investments or starting a successful business. – Speaking of hard work, when these VIPs came in at 10:am to check the mail and sign a few letters, left for a two-hour lunch at 12:30, and then went golfing for the rest of the afternoon, leaving their overworked and underpaid secretaries…
“It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince ‘em, confuse ‘em. It’s an old political trick.” – Harry S Truman Your Tattlesnake has had running arguments with various Teabaggers and Tea Party sympathizers for many months now and they all share the same tactic: Should you ask a question they can’t answer or make a point they can’t refute, they start screaming at you or rudely talking over you, as if the volume of their voice can eradicate reality and reason. This leads not to debate, but confrontation, and that seems to be what they want. Beyond that, exactly how do you ‘debate’ people who insist: – There are no racists in the Tea Party movement; – It’s Obama and not George W. Bush who started the TARP bailouts of the banks and Wall Street; – The terrible economy is exclusively the fault of Obama and his liberal social programs; – All of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social programs were complete failures; – Social Security, Medicare, the VA and the GI Bill were/are not liberal social programs; – Obama has raised taxes for the poor and middle-class; – Obama is a Muslim/socialist/communist (take your pick) plotting the downfall of the US backed…
By W.B. Dunne As the News Pauper peruses the demise of sensible discourse since the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, he is forced to ask himself if the Founding Fathers expected anything like Fox News or Rush Limbaugh to exist. It seems to be common belief that the actions of these right-wing ‘Nattering Nabobs’ and those like them will somehow put the Constitution to a test…those archaic intellects can’t be safe in a world with Mass Media Mensas like Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes to contend with! It seems to smack of panic-stricken recognition of the threat of irrelevance or defeat that drives the daily shrillness on Fox. Glenn Beck bounces the rhetorical superball down the crazy collider and Rush superconducts the energy generated into the mainstream conversation. In the beginning, Rush carried the crazy relatively alone, but now, a generation later, the crazy is refracted and amplified. Like shards in the gutter from some smash and grab, there are so many knock-offs of Rush we may never be completely free of them. The NP begs the reader to consider the environment in which our founding documents were spawned, and consider the possibility that the intent of the…
