You might be a Fascist if . . .

Are you a fascist? Many people are fascists and they don’t even realize it. And sometimes, they know it all too well, but hide and deny it. Most of the time though, it’s obvious who the fascists are. For instance, you might be a fascist if…




1. You are obsessed with national power and pride and believe your country doesn’t have to follow the rules and shouldn’t ever apologize for doing things that are wrong. You think your nation can do whatever it wants.



2. You believe in the rule of the few, election rigging, political decisions being made by a select group of officials behind closed doors, embrace the informal and unregulated exercise of political power, arbitrary deprivation of civil liberties, and little tolerance for meaningful opposition.





3. You believe in survival of the fittest, an every man for himself mentality that causes you to believe that poor people and sick people are weak and must be punished. You think rich people are strong because they are wealthy and that they should rule us. You also believe your race is superior to all others.



4. You use the media as a political propaganda machine to target a specific audience and to push your agenda on others. You make sure the media demonizes your opponents and takes your side on nearly every issue. You use your propaganda machine to play on the fears of others.



5. You are obsessed with security, and war. You feed this obsession by spending trillions of dollars building up a large military force and are willing to sacrifice domestic programs your people count on to keep your military huge. You start unnecessary and costly wars and you are paranoid of other nations.







6. You are driven to indoctrinate others into your way of thinking. So much so, that you try to re-write history, change the way school children are taught and you brainwash the ignorant. You use your propaganda machine as a tool to achieve this.



7. You fear and demonize intelligent people who have a higher education because they are the ones who can thwart your effort to brainwash people. You then attempt to prevent others from achieving a higher education because you want the people as ignorant as possible so you can convince them that your way is the right way.



8. You have a deep hatred and fear of communists and you instill your followers with hatred and fear of others by accusing your political opponents of being communists. This gives you an easy scapegoat to blame when things go wrong. Any person or policy you don’t like is branded as communism.



9. You disrespect women and think their place is in the home. You believe women are weak and cannot do things that men do. You believe that sexual harassment or assault is no big deal and that the only thing women are good for is cooking meals and having babies.



10. You strongly align yourself with corporations and you support corporate money and influence in government. You despise government regulations that keep corporations honest because you believe everything should be controlled by the free market and that corporations should be allowed to do whatever they please.



11. You are obsessed with Christianity. You seek to declare a Christian State and to impose religious laws on all the people across the country and the world. You believe other religions are inferior and that those who practice them should either be converted or destroyed.



12. You believe your race is superior and seek to disenfranchise or humiliate other races. You believe in legalized discrimination and fantasize about a return to times when the races were separate or when those of color were enslaved. You use code words in an attempt to hide your racism and you make laws that weaken the influence of those of color. Immigration and voting laws in particular.



13. You absolutely despise unions. To you and those like you, labor unions represent the empowerment of workers. Since you believe corporations can do whatever they want, you see organized labor as a threat because they fight for higher wages, health care, safety regulations, less hours, vacations, sick days, and holidays off. This obviously threatens the amount of money corporations can give to you and your cause so you brand unions as proponents of socialism and make laws that severely weaken them so that corporations can have a cheap, mindless labor force.



14. You are obsessed with crime and a major supporter of punishing those who commit crimes. So much so, that you don’t care about the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ You are proud of executing people and aren’t bothered if an innocent person is killed. You seek to make harsher laws, especially laws that target specific groups of people such as immigrants, women, and people of color. You also oppose Miranda rights and using humane interrogation tactics and you seek to undermine the independent judiciary.



15. You believe every election should go your way and to reach that goal, you push voting laws that disenfranchise those who traditionally vote for opponents such as people of color, the elderly, college students, and the poor. You even stoop to fixing elections in some cases and complain when your opponents challenge the vote counts.



16. You believe in rewarding your friends with positions when you gain power and you reward those who support you with government contracts and money, especially corporations. You also do your best to aid your supporters in any way you can, such as repealing undesirable pieces of legislation and regulations. You often have something to gain financially from this.



17. You create scapegoats to blame when problems arise. Whether it’s communists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, or non-Christians, one thing is for certain. You and your propaganda tool will blame each and every one of those groups for bad things that happen even if you were the cause of the problems in the first place.



18. You take advantage of a national disaster such as an economic collapse or an attack to demonize your opponents and push your agenda. You use these events to strike fear into the population in an attempt to scare people into voting for you and your cause. It’s all about fear and scare tactics.



Sounds just like the Tea Party led Republican Party, doesn’t it?

Out of Work? thank your Republicans Representive! for Killing 1.6 Million Jobs

Want jobs? Get Congress to end sequestration.




Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, requested an analysis of the costs of the sequester cuts – something I’ve been asking around for since they took place to no avail.



Guess what? The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reiterated their projections about the sequester slowing growth, and estimated that the Republican inflicted spending cuts would cost up to 1.6 million jobs if left in place through fiscal 2014.

The CBO determined that canceling sequester cuts would create between 300,000 (.3 million) to 1.6 million new jobs. Gee, we’ll take it! Sounds pretty good to us.




Their break down:



Those figures represent CBO’s central estimates, which correspond to the assumption that key parameters of economic behavior (in particular, the extent to which higher federal spending boosts aggregate demand in the short term) equal the midpoints of the ranges used by CBO. The full ranges CBO uses for those parameters suggest that, in the third quarter of calendar year 2014, real GDP could be between 0.2 percent and 1.2 percent higher, and employment 0.3 million to 1.6 million higher, under the proposal than under current law. Because those estimates indicate the effects of a prospective change in law, they do not encompass the full impact of the sequestration that has already occurred.



The sequester was always a Republican dream, and Republican Budget God Paul Ryan (R-WI) has been championing it since 2004.



On August 1, 2011, Paul Ryan went on Fox News to crow that he finally got his way when sequestration was put into place via the 2011 congressional debt ceiling deal. Yes, that’s right. We got there because House Republicans were holding the economy hostage over raising the debt ceiling because they didn’t want to pay for the things they’d already bought.



Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor (R-VA) admitted that they were the force behind sequestration when they admitted that they got House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to walk away from the Grand Bargain because they were unwilling to give on any revenue at all. Their way or the highway. (Caving to Ryan and Cantor was the beginning of the end for John Boehner’s legacy as Speaker.)



So, Paul Ryan and House Republicans believed that sequestration was the Holy Randian Grail of austerity gold — the economy would trickle down once they got their way! They got their way, and nonpartisans are saying their way sucks for jobs, which are the driving force of the purchasing power of middle America, which is also known as the market; aka, consumers.



Thanks to House Republicans, we could lose up to 1.6 million jobs by fiscal 2014. Gosh, that’s a heck of a campaign slogan to hand to Democrats, but luckily for Republicans, they are gerrymandered into districts where their base doesn’t trust anyone but Fox News.



Meanwhile the rest of the nation suffers due to Republicans catering to pockets of low information voters while they line their pockets and enjoy the healthcare we provide for them.



The fiscal year ends September 30, so this could really give Republicans something to do for once when they come home from the appropriately named “recess”. But we all know that House Republicans aren’t thinking about how to reconcile the budget, because they’ve got extortion on their minds. They’ve already announced their plans to hold our economy hostage again over ObamaCare. Republicans won’t pay off our debts for money they already spent until the law of the land is defunded because they don’t like it.




It looks like there’s no time out long enough to help House Republicans learn how to play appropriately with others.

What a Republican Government will look like in the future

North Carolina is proving itself to be the poster child for all that is wrong with modern American democracy and—with thanks to Moral Mondays—also highlighting all that may someday save it.




Once a temperate and tolerant beacon of the South, the state is poised to enact a rash of inexpressibly awful legislation, rushed through a Republican legislature. Because the GOP has veto-proof super-majorities in the state House and Senate and a Republican governor—for the first time since Reconstruction—the party has been on a spree. Republican-controlled redistricting was fantastically effective. So much so that in the 2012 elections, nearly 51 percent of North Carolina voters picked a Democrat for the U.S. House, yet Republicans won nine of the state’s 13 House seats, as Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis recently pointed out.



Some of the gems advanced recently in the legislature include an abortion bill tacked first onto an anti-Sharia law and then snuck in through a motorcycle safety law (new TRAP regulations may shutter all but one clinic in the state). Another bill forces all educators to teach seventh graders that abortion causes preterm birth (it doesn’t). Lawmakers also enacted legislation (described here and elsewhere as “the harshest unemployment insurance program cuts in our nation's history”) that resulted in 70,000 North Carolina citizens losing their unemployment benefits. The state is one of the 15 to have refused Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. A proposed education bill would slash teacher compensation, (already ranked among the lowest in the nation), eliminate tenure, and use vouchers to reallocate $90 million of public-school funding to private schools (The school superintendent issued a statement this week saying that in light of the proposed deep cuts to the education budget “For the first time in my career of more than 30 years in public education, I am truly worried about students in our care.”) Don’t forget the embarrassing proposed resolution allowing counties and cities to enshrine a state religion. Or the proposed ban on nipples.



Advertisement

But none of this is a joke. For reasons that Kromm and Sturgis lay out at length, it’s a well-funded, Koch-endorsed Christmas rush to get everything done right now.



How does the state legislature control an electorate that by all accounts really hates the state’s new legislative initiatives? Simple. Drown them out—by diluting minority/Democratic votes through redistricting, or suppressing the vote.



Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 40 counties in North Carolina had to go to the federal government for pre-approval of any change to local election law. When the Supreme Court locked up Section 5 last month, by a vote of 5–4, it gave a great gift to the disenfranchisement community. States no longer need to check their crazy with federal courts or the Justice Department. The obligation to prove that you aren’t harming minority voters (or expressly targeting them) has gone. Texas and Mississippi charged ahead with their own controversial voter ID laws within hours of the Supreme Court ruling. Alabama and Mississippi have either passed or are working on similar ones. And Tuesday, North Carolina took the first step to expanding its Voter ID bill to better disenfranchise a few more voters who might have leaned left, including students, African-Americans, and women.



Indeed, North Carolina has just put in place a vote suppression regime that can only really be described as political performance art. Here is the proposed new elections omnibus bill. It drastically reduces early voting, does away with same-day voter registration, weakens the disclosure of so-called independent expenditures, disenfranchises felons and the “mentally incompetent,” authorizes vigilante poll observers, and penalizes families of college students who vote out of state.



The voter ID component of the bill is probably the most draconian in the nation. It cuts to seven the forms of permissible identification. If it passes, no county or municipal government or public employee IDs will be valid proof of voter identification. Nor will any photo ID issued by a public assistance agency, or any student ID from any college. The new voter ID rules will hit African-American voters, women, and Democrats hardest. The indispensable Ari Berman sums up the aggregate effect as follows: “According to the state’s own numbers, 316,000 registered voters don’t have state-issued ID; 34 percent are African-American and 55 percent are registered Democrats. Of the 138,000 voters without ID who cast a ballot in the 2012 election, 36 percent were African-American and 59 registered percent Democrats.” And the scourge of voter fraud in North Carolina, at which the proposed law is directed? Between 2000 and 2010 there have been two cases of alleged voter impersonation. In that period three people also ate pop rocks and died.



While the General Assembly allocated $1 million in the budget to implement the new voting regime, estimates of the actual cost range from $3 million to $20 million. It is the voters themselves who will soon be paying for the privilege of being denied the vote.



This brings us to the rather amazing book review in the New York Review of Books this weekend, by retired Justice John Paul Stevens, of Professor Gary May’s superb new book, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. May scrutinizes the forces that led to the original passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, with an emphasis on the brute violence and racial ugliness that accompanied efforts to vote, organize, and protest.



Stevens aligns himself with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s June decision that hamstrung Section 5, and expressly takes on Chief Justice John Roberts’ constitutional claim that the “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among the states” controlled the case. Stevens also lambastes the majority for usurping the role of Congress, writing that while some neutral decision-maker could surely find that the preclearance formula is now dated: “The opinion fails, however, to explain why such a decision should be made by the members of the Supreme Court.”



May’s book offer a grim reminder of how truly awful things were for Southern Blacks before the VRA was enacted, and how hard Southern whites worked to suppress their votes, long after they were legally granted the franchise. He details the beatings, deaths, police-led violence and brutality that culminated in the events of “Bloody Sunday” in March of 1965. As May concludes, “History reveals that improved conditions come less from a revolution in white attitudes toward African-Americans than from the act’s effectiveness in altering electoral conditions that had prevented blacks from winning elections.” Stevens’ object in his review is not just to call out the majority for its institutional overreach—although he does that with gusto—but to try to shake his colleagues out of their willful ignorance of how egregious state efforts at vote suppression have been and continue to be, and how extensive the record of brazen misconduct remains.



The underlying paradox of the Supreme Court’s June ruling is that it was deployment of the Voting Rights Act that stopped efforts to suppress votes and limit voting in Texas, North Carolina, and Florida in the 2012 elections. The law was a victim of its own success, not just in the distant past, but only months earlier. In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that “the sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective.” She famously added that throwing out the law’s key protection for minority voters “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”



Less than a month later, it’s raining vote suppression in North Carolina. And the forecast calls for a whole lot more of the same.

Stand your Ground?

Cowards use Godwin's law for Racism

Even Godwin’s law has its day.


As awful as it is for people to deny the Holocaust, and in many countries it is a hate crime to do so, imagine what it would be for Germans to accuse German Jews of not only making up the Holocaust, but actually baiting the Nazis and the mass murders if they bring up the Holocaust. Not only are they denying history and the real victimization of an entire class of people, but blaming those people for creating the problem Nazis had with Jews by accusing them of Jew-baiting.



That’s what the Right is doing when they accuse anyone trying to discuss the very real problem of racism of being “race-baiters”.



It’s obscene.



The practice of transatlantic slavery was genocide. The death toll from four centuries of slave trade is estimated at around 10 million. (2) Between 1.2-2.4 million Africans died on their way to becoming slaves.(3) That’s not even including the numbers who died due to the harsh working conditions or the massive numbers murdered in the “gathering” and procurement (theft) of them from their homeland. So, it is appropriate to make this comparison to the Holocaust.



I say this repeatedly, but apparently not enough. Racism is not something that white Americans can claim as equal to racism experienced by black Americans, and other minorities, but specifically in this case, African Americans and black Americans.



Racism is more than prejudice. An honest discussion about racism will include historical context, just like an honest discussion of discrimination against Jewish people will include the lead up to the Holocaust, and the atrocities of the Holocaust itself. You see, suggesting that all Jews run the banks doesn’t seem so bad without the historical context, just like suggesting that black Americans are violent criminals without the historical context that they were the victims of massive, unspeakable crimes perpetrated by white Americans upon them doesn’t sound so bad.



To speak about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie making him a thug (thanks Fox News) is not only ignorant for modern day reasons, but it also obscenely ignores the fact that if things were really equal, then African Americans and black Americans would not statistically be more likely to be impoverished than white Americans. Because it’s poverty, not skin color, that increases crime rates.



However, Trayvon Martin was not a criminal. He was a kid, not yet 18, doing things kids do. Wearing a hoodie like kids do. He got shot down because George Zimmerman profiled him as black and therefore possibly a criminal.



When this fact is brought up, the Right screams “race-baiting!”



So, a Jewish person walks by a bank in a German neighborhood and a Neo-Nazi who collects military costumes because he was rejected by the actual military and police stalks the Jewish person, saying “they always get away”. Neo-Nazi kills Jewish person out of fear that Jewish person is runs a bank and is therefor trying to take over the world.



Neo-Nazi and friends then accuse anyone who calls them out on this hate crime of being Jew-baiters, thereby both denying the Holocaust and denying the results of the Holocaust. That’s the equivalent, morally, of cries of “race-baiting!”.



In this country, we have yet to face our shame over slavery. We do not force citizens to face it, the way they do in Germany. Have you ever seen records of slaves bought and sold? In the South, they’re everywhere. They are a part of life, but not in a way that faces the sins of our recent past. What does this mean to our country, and to an entire race of people that we wronged?



How do we blame those people, this short while past their enslavement, for not being as privileged as European whites? No, it’s not about giving free passes or “race-baiting”. That’s an obscene denial of our history.



It’s unforgivable, it’s disgusting, and the only reason it’s allowed is because African Americans as a group do not seem focused on guilt tripping white America, as they could, and because the privileged whites in charge of the media, history, etc do not seem very interested in exploring their guilt. Imagine that.



A young boy was shot down for no reason, and our legal system exonerated his killer. Oh, but we don’t have any problems with race in this country. Sure, our legal system goes after black Americans more than whites, and women more than men, and on down the food chain – but according to the very white males in charge of judging y’all, there are no problems here.



Judging African Americans for their grief and accusing them of “rioting” is just another way segments of white America exemplify their white privilege. Only whites dressed in ridiculous costumes and carrying loaded assault weapons are allowed to protest, apparently. They are not “dangerous”. Oh, no. The dangerous “rioters” are the folks carrying SIGNS. So even this freedom is to be denied based on skin color, from the very people utilizing “race-baiting” as an attempt to bully the victims into silence.



There’s nothing more stomach-turning than an abuser accusing his victim of doing what he is doing to the victim, and kicking him while he’s doing it. Who made this about race? George Zimmerman did, when he profiled an innocent boy because of the color of his skin.



It’s called DARVO (h/t to commenter Reynardine, who cites DARVO in many of their comments):



DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility or even blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.



The author wrote, “…I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower’s credicility, and so on….. [T]he offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground are completely reversed… The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense.” (1. Freyd, 1997, p 29-30)



The “race-baiting” charge in response to the “not guilty” verdict for George Zimmerman is DARVO in action. It is a cultural betrayal of the experiences of African Americans and our history, and as such, is meant to hurt so much that they shut up about it.



It’s not going to work. Too many people are disgusted by the obvious racial animosity being deliberately provoked by the Right in order to divide this country and point fingers at their “targets” (black Americans, in this case). Their audience knows who the “target” is, and that’s their objective.



But America is watching, and Americans are not tolerating this kind of seething political evil. Accusing African Americans of race-baiting because they are grieving over the absolute injustice of Trayvon’s murderer being found not guilty is the act of morally depraved cowards who refuse to take responsibility for themselves and their ancestors, and the depths to which their greed allowed them to sink.

Ted Nugent, Rush Limbaugh & Ann Coulter Exploited The Death Of A Child

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner called out the Right on their ‘disgraceful’ abuse of Trayvon Martin’s murder, saying that Nugent, Limbaugh, and Coulter exploited “the death of a child for partisan gainWagner went through the Right’s response, from Coulter tweeting, “Hallelujah” immediately after Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering an unarmed teenager, while Geraldo Rivera on Fox News suggested Trayvon Martin got what he deserved, “If you dress like a thug people are going to treat you like a thug.”



And Rush Limbaugh said the verdict was a win for conservatives, because liberals get everything else. It’s an “interruption in a string of victory after victory”. Alex Wagner said Limbaugh was the first conservative to “put a killer’s acquittal on par with historic progress, including passage of the nation’s first healthcare law and the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage equality.”



Wagner made an excellent point that Limbaugh demonstrated how to use the verdict as a button to press to create more division, “His killing and Zimmerman’s exoneration have now officially joined the conservative arsenal as weapons to be deployed, buttons to be pressed, in service of division.”



Ted Nugent, “working from the very same playbook”, used the Zimmerman verdict to fan the flames of division and indict the President. Nugent accused the President of causing a surge of in “black racism”:

You can't make this stuff up!

Texas confiscating tampons and maxipads


Ummm... yeah. You read that correctly.




Right now, women are flooding the Texas Statehouse to stand with Sen. Wendy Davis as she and her Democratic colleagues fight to protect a woman's right to choose for this afternoon's vote.



Before they get to the gallery, though, security is confiscating tampons and maxipads. You can bring in your gun - just not your tampons. (Filed under: You can't make this up!)





Tell Sen. Wendy Davis you're still standing with her and all women today!



Right now, Twitter is lighting up with photos of women handing over their personal products as they go through security. In fact, #TamponGate is trending as I write/send this email.



Sign the petition to Stand With Wendy! And then tell your friends!



Thanks for all you do!



Onward, 

Who me? Lie???

                      Paul Ryan Reveals That Everything He Said About Medicare in 2012 Was A Total Lie

The fact that House Republicans are holding Medicare as a hostage over raising the debt ceiling (which is their job, as it represents money they already spent) should erase the media’s confusion about just which party is coming for Medicare. Republicans are making a move to give the insurance companies the key to the treasury so they can raid it on whim.




House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is working with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) among other conservatives to draft the debt ceiling “options” menu. Jason Easley referred to this House plan as the Stupid Linings Playbook, because they outline several very unpopular plans, which they will be forcing just in time for the next election. It’s as if they want to make 2014 about Medicare and Social Security, even though they already lost those fights very clearly in 2012.



Ryan and House Republicans presented the option to privatize Medicare as the Big Idea for the President. While it may be hard to stomach being lectured to by the party and often individuals who voted for Bush’s unfunded Medicare Part D, but now want to pretend they are the fiscal grown ups, the truth is that these folks are only fooling their base. And how hard is that? Sadly not hard at all.



During the 2012 presidential campaign, we were treated to epic lies about Medicare from Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, who were pretending that they had no intentions to change the program. They couldn’t defend their own plans, so instead they borrowed lies from the Koch brothers about Obama’s healthcare reform law, also known as ObamaCare.



The Ryan plan would not even offer traditional Medicare except to those now 55 and older; in fact, Paul Ryan and House Republicans voted to drop traditional Medicare altogether, except for those now 55 and older. Ryan and Romney claimed they were “saving” Medicare by privatizing it, while Obama had destroyed it with ObamaCare.



Ryan claimed ObamaCare “weakens Medicare for today’s seniors and puts it at risk for the next generation. First, it funnels $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. Second, it puts 15 unelected bureaucrats in charge of Medicare’s future.”



Reality? According to PolitiFact this was “Mostly False” and highly misleading, “Ryan’s comments are highly misleading. Neither Obama nor his health care law literally cut funding from the Medicare program’s budget. Still, the number has a slight basis in fact… So, yes, Obama’s law did find $716 billion in spending reductions. They were mainly aimed at insurance companies and hospitals, not beneficiaries.”



For these lies Ryan won many mostly false ratings, but the media was still “confused”. Even PolitiFact had a tough time with the idea that privatizing Medicare would actually be ending it as we know it. Back then, PolitiFact rated the claim that Republicans were privatizing Medicare as “mostly true”.



However, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Ryan plan suggested that a voucher system would shift costs from the taxpayers to seniors (“seniors would end up paying almost twice as much out of their own pockets — or more than $12,510 a year, the CBO estimates. Altogether, the total cost of insurance would be higher”) and costs for healthcare for the elderly would increase since commercial insurers cost more to run than government plans. That’s pretty much ending Medicare as we know it, since Medicare is a safety net. It’s not a safety net if your “vouchers” don’t buy you the healthcare you need because they aren’t keeping up with rising healthcare costs.



In 2011, PolitiFact gave a good grade to President Obama’s “precise words” regarding the Republican plan, “President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal ‘would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more.’” You can see that voucherize is the same thing as privatize in this scenario, but if it wasn’t clear then, House Republicans are making sure it’s clear now. They want to privatize Medicare so badly that they will hold our credit hostage to do it. But Obama eventually did say during the campaign that the Romney Ryan plan will end Medicare as we know it.



Privatizing Medicare means it is no longer a guaranteed program. It is no longer a social safety net. You’re on your own, dealing with for profit insurance companies. You’re fighting for survival in Paul Ryan’s Randian “free market”, which is the exact opposite of a social safety net.



If privatized, Republicans would be lining the pockets of executives and lobbyists with millions of dollars along with paying for advertisements, as Ray pointed out for PoliticusUSA in November of 2011. Ryan got booed during the campaign for trying to sell his privatization scheme to retirees. Paul Ryan didn’t defend his plan; he just lied about ObamaCare, using Koch-funded falsehoods.



Ryan and his running mate lost the 2012 election. So what do House Republicans do in 2013? They let Ryan be in charge of their entire budget and plan their mode of “attack” on this president. You almost want to feel sorry for them.



Republicans are now holding Medicare hostage, and this should be an ah-ha moment for the media and the fact-checkers. Paul Ryan’s claims to be saving Medicare from mean old Obama were a lie. Paul Ryan’s outrage over his inaccurate claim that ObamaCare took money from the beneficiaries of Medicare was a lie. Not only were those lies, but they are exactly what he aims to do to Medicare.



Not only do Republicans justify their Medicare destruction by lying about ObamaCare, but they can’t defend the actuality of privatized Medicare. They never want to discuss the reality of turning Medicare into a for-profit business with middlemen like David Koch (someone has to make money on your healthcare or it’s not for profit) being in charge of your Medicare. Before ObamaCare, insurance companies were dictating to doctors what care you needed based upon their very high profit margin. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what for profit Medicare would look like.



Republicans like Paul Ryan increased spending and cut taxes when they were in charge, rubber stamping huge expenditures like the unfunded Medicare Part D under Bush, which drove the deficit up. Spending under Obama is at its slowest pace since Eisenhower, but Republicans feel compelled to swagger around playing fiscal grown ups when in fact they are the adolescents who got us here by charging things on daddy’s credit card.



Instead of paying for the bills the House already approved to spend, the House Republicans are going to use their own spending in order to hold your Medicare hostage or the debt ceiling gets it again.



On one hand, Ryan and House Republicans try to sell the idea that harming Medicare would be very bad – this they do by attacking ObamaCare. In Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech, he proclaimed that he and Romney were going to save Medicare from Obama who just came and “took” money from Medicare for ObamaCare. Ryan called stealing from the elderly a cold power play, “The biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly.”



But while Ryan and the Republicans are saying that to you, their other hand is behind their back trying to give your Medicare to wealthy men like David Koch so he can raid the treasury that your tax dollars funded while denying you care. They call this “privatizing Medicare”. The media might want to pretend that privatizing Medicare doesn’t end it as we know it, but it would. Perhaps they are ignorant about the usual costs/results of privatization.



Following Republicans’ own logic, if taking money out of Medicare to fund something/someone else is so rotten, then Ryan and House Republicans attempt to hold Medicare hostage in order to privatize it so their funders can make a profit off of it while leaving the elderly with useless vouchers instead of care is actually the “biggest, coldest power play of all.”



Why Education Matters the call to mumpsimus

Last Tuesday’s special Senate election for John Kerry’s old Senate seat went mostly unnoticed as it was buried by larger political stories during the week. In the end, the Democrat Ed Markey won by a comfortable but unremarkable 10-point margin over Republican Gabriel Gomez 55-45. In a state as blue as Massachusetts, those numbers are hardly anything to crow about. However, upon closer inspection, there is one data point that stands out. In the city of Cambridge, home to both Harvard University and M.I.T, Ed Markey beat Gomez 89-11 percent. That data point stands as a testament to how toxic the Republican Party has become for high information voters.




With their disdain for intellectuals, their flat refusal to acknowledge global warming, their denial of evolution and their inability to comprehend that rape can result in pregnancy, the modern, heavily tea-stained version of the Republican Party is simply unpalatable to the vast majority of scientists, professors and other educated professionals. As GOP candidates continue to pander to aging white religious fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists, they undermine their own hopes for reclaiming the White House in 2016.



While much attention has been paid to the demographic changes that may doom the GOP as the country becomes increasingly non-white, that is only part of the Republican’s electoral problem. The other problem they face is that they have alienated highly educated voters of all races, to the point that their electoral prospects have grown dim even if they do somehow succeed in suppressing a large number of minority voters and even if they do manage to stem the flow of immigration. Tuesday’s results in Cambridge starkly illustrate the continuing erosion of support for the GOP among high information voters.



To be fair, voters in the shadow of Harvard and M.I.T have never been strong supporters of the Republican Party. However, Tuesday’s 89-11 drubbing stands as a tremendous testament to how bad things have become for the Republicans. In 2002, When Mitt Romney ran for Governor, he pulled 22 percent of the vote in Cambridge. While that may seem pretty dismal, it is still double the percentage Gabriel Gomez managed to receive on Tuesday. In the 2010 and 2012 Senate races, Scott Brown only pulled 15 percent of the city’s vote each time, but Gomez’s total plummeted even well below those pathetic numbers.



To understand how spectacular the Republican collapse has been among high information voters, not just in Cambridge, but nationally, a look at exit polls reveals the steady decline of GOP strength among highly educated voters. In 1988, George H.W. Bush trounced Michael Dukakis among voters with a Bachelor’s degree 62-37. He also carried voters with a post-graduate degree 50-48. In 2012, Barack Obama carried college-educated voters, narrowly losing those with only a bachelor’s degree but carrying post-graduate voters by a decisive margin of 55-42.



In the swing states where votes were most crucial, the results were even more lopsided. In New Hampshire Obama carried the post-graduate vote 61-37, In Wisconsin 62-37 and in Colorado 60-38. Obama carried Virginia twice, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the Old Dominion state since 1964. He did so largely on the strength of post-graduate voters in Northern Virginia. In 2012, 24 percent of the voters who turned out in Virginia had post-graduate degrees. They delivered for Obama by a 57-42 margin offsetting his losses among less educated voters.



Democratic fortunes in some swing states have relied heavily on the post-graduate shift away from the GOP. For example, George W. Bush carried Nevada and Florida in both 2000 and 2004, but both states shifted parties and went with Obama in both 2008 and 2012. While immigration and changing demographics are often given as the reason for this transformation, the party switch can just as easily be attributed to the defection of high information voters away from the GOP. Post-graduates gave Bush a 53-45 cushion in Nevada in 2004. By 2012, after being introduced to the GOP’s Sharron Angle, post-graduates had swung 18 points to the left, delivering for Obama 54-44. In Florida, Bush won post-Graduates 53-45 in 2004. In 2012, Florida post-graduates were solidly behind Barack Obama 53-46, a 15 point swing away from the GOP.



The toxicity of the GOP message to educated voters is most evident in races where Republican candidates espouse extremist positions and where they pander to religious fundamentalists, xenophobes, or to anti-intellectualism. Take for example, the case of Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri. In 2006, McCaskill managed a narrow victory over Jim Talent, a mainstream country-club Republican whose politics were very conservative but whose rhetoric was measured and focused on fiscal policy. McCaskill beat Talent among post-graduate voters by a 53-46 margin and Talent beat her by double digits (53-43) among voters with just a Bachelor’s degree. McCaskill eked out a narrow victory by carrying the most and least educated voters in the state, while Talent crushed her among those with middling levels of education.



In 2012, the Republicans nominated a Christian Right extremist named Todd Akin, who will remain forever infamous for his “legitimate rape” comments. Akin actually held his own with less educated voters but he got beat by McCaskill with voters who had a Bachelor’s degree (50-44) and he got clobbered mercilessly (58-36) by voters with post-graduate degrees. From 2006 to 2012, the Republican Party lost 15-16 points among college educated and post-graduate voters in Missouri Senate races, largely due to the Republican Party’s drift to the Evangelical right-wing fringe and its continuing disdain for science.



In 2012, Republicans only managed to win 8 of the 33 contested Senate races. In most of the close races that they lost, post-graduate voters proved to be the decisive factor. In Virginia, Tim Kaine beat George Allen 58-42 among people with a post-graduate degree. In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren hammered Scott Brown 59-41 with post-graduate voters. Joe Donnelly in Indiana owed his victory in large part to his 57-41 margin over Richard Mourdock with post-graduate voters. Mourdock, like Akin, turned off educated voters with his insensitive and seemingly clueless comments about rape. In Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin annihilated Tommy Thompson 62-37 with high information voters and in a losing effort in Arizona, Richard Carmona drubbed Jeff Flake 64-34 with post-graduate voters, a performance that was 22 points better than Jim Pederson’s performance against Jon Kyl with the same demographic, six years earlier.



As the Republican Party continues to dismiss man-made climate change, continues to ignore the biological realities of the female body and continues to appeal to xenophobia and anti-intellectualism, they will continue to dig their political grave. The GOP has become entirely dependent upon the White Evangelical Christian vote for its political survival. In the 2012 election while White Evangelicals gave Romney a whopping 78-21 margin, the rest of the nation collectively chose Barack Obama by a 60-37 landslide. Since White Evangelicals are now just over a quarter of the electorate and shrinking as a percentage each election cycle, the GOP’s pandering to their anti-science, anti-woman agenda will only hasten their demise as a competitive political party. If the party wishes to continue to disregard the theory of evolution, they may do so at their own peril. For if the GOP fails to evolve into a party that high information voters can again support, they will eventually face political extinction. The Republicans may do everything they can to suppress the votes of students, senior citizens, and minority voters with photo ID laws, but if they continue to remain politically toxic to the highly educated, they will continue to lose elections consistently, and no amount of voter suppression will be enough to save them.

If Republicans will not learn- they must feel!

Did you see it?




Last night, surrounded by a smiling group of Republican male legislators, Governor John Kasich signed one of the most restrictive laws on women's health care in state history, including a provision to defund Planned Parenthood.



With the stroke of a pen, Kasich launched an all-out assault on women’s health care making Ohio among the most anti-woman states in the nation.



Removing funding from Planned Parenthood puts at risk the life-saving, critical health care they provide to women, including cancer screenings, HIV tests, and even birth control. But Kasich went further, even signing into a law a gag that punishes rape counselors from discussing all health options, implements mandatory ultrasounds, and targets women's clinics across the state for closure.



We have to send John Kasich an immediate message that the women of Ohio will not stand for this.