Myth Busters: President Obama and Appeasement

Myth Busters: President Obama and Appeasement

The Bizarre Meme That 'Appeasement' Caused the Libya Attack

There is no better example of the obliviousness to reality that characterizes current conservative attacks on Obama's foreign policy.

Professor Paul Rahe is a nice man who teaches history at Hillsdale College. Here's what he wrote about the attack on our embassy in Libya and the murder of four people, including the American ambassador:

    The American people cannot be allowed to discover that Barack Obama's policy of appeasement has persuaded our enemies that we are weak and feckless and has elicited aggression on their part. Nor can they be allowed to learn that Hillary Clinton and our minions have been grossly negligent with regard to the security of our embassies, consulates, and other installations in the larger Muslim world. Instead, we must ignore the spirit of the First Amendment and vent our wrath on an inept Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt.

So let me get this straight. President Bush cuts a deal with Moammar Gadhafi, in which the dictator forswears weapons of mass destruction, and is thereafter treated as a friend of the United States. President Obama takes office. The Libyan dictator threatens to massacre his own people. In response, Obama orders the U.S. military to play the lead roll in bombing Libya, helping rebel forces to oust and kill Gadhafi. Every last person in Libya knows that this happened.

And you assert, as if it's self-evident, that the Libyans attacked our embassy because of Obama's "policy of appeasement." What possible sense does that make? In Libya, none, and it doesn't make sense elsewhere either. Obama surged troops into Afghanistan before beginning the present withdrawal with bipartisan support in Congress and from American voters.

Obama escalated a drone campaign that has spread to half a dozen countries, ordered a raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, and helped to engage in a cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. He ordered a special forces raid on pirates that rescued hostages. All told, the various drone strikes that Obama has ordered have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.

Perhaps you have critiques of this record.

I certainly do!

To call it appeasement is to traffic in fantasies. But Rahe is hardly alone in doing it. It's a widespread meme on the right. And for a slightly different species of unreality, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

    At the very least, the Obama administration needs to drop the politically-correct euphemisms, stop the Cairo-speech banalities, and remind its diplomatic team that radical Islam's hatred of the West is not placated by loud American outreach, soaring mytho-history about Islam, or the particular politics, race, pedigree, or charisma of the occupant of the White House, but that Islamic expressions of that hatred most surely are predicated on the degree to which America appears diffident, apologetic, and unsure--or confident, occasionally dangerous, and unpredictable.

I don't know how the people of Libya judge America's confidence. But again, given our recent intervention in their civil war, after previously cutting a deal with their dictator, it's a fair bet that Libyans of all people regard as as "occasionally dangerous" and "unpredictable." When it comes to foreign policy, the conservative movement is running against a president of their own creation.

Victor Davis Hanson a hack on the payroll of wing-nut welfare at several "think tanks" has a record of supporting every failed policy of the neocons. Having no humility, lacking the intellect and maturity required for insight, Hanson keeps rolling the same stinking boulder up the same stinking hill no matter how many times it crushed him on the roll back down. As an historian ( that is a kind of joke, no one thinks Hanson is a real historian excpet some brain damaged conservative geeks) Hanson shows a remarkable ability to learn abosutely nothing from history. There are certainly hate filled radical Muslims. Out of the world's 1.1 billion those radicals represent perhaps 1%. Since most serial killers are white males by Hanson's logic we should declare war on white males as well as all Muslims.

Romney And Bain Boosted Agriculture Giant Monsanto In Spite Of Toxic Past

K.T. McFarland, Fox News Security Analyst, Repeats Myth That Obama Went On "An Apology Tour". This meme has been around since the first month Obama was in office. You'll note that at no time has any of these conservative Republican freaks ever produced a transcript - a full one - not an edited one - in which Obama apologizes for America. It never happened. If Republicans have values how come they never show them. Do they keep their values in a secret place, maybe the safe where Rush Limbaugh keeps his drugs and divorce papers.

2012 Republican National Convention Is Proving What Patriotic Americans Already Know, Republicans Have The Values of Pond Scum

2012 Republican National Convention Is Proving What Patriotic American Already Know, Republicans Have The Values of Pond Scum

1. The "You didn't build that" deception. By now, Obama's rhetorical trip-up on the campaign trail is the stuff of legend, because in the construction of a series of sentences, Obama left an opening for Romney and his allies to suggest that the president meant something entirely different from what he said. At a campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., Obama said that a business owner's success requires government investment in infrastructure such as roads and bridges. "If you've got a business, you didn't build that," he said -- meaning, quite clearly, the roads and bridges. Republicans, however, pulled the quote from its context and ran with it. And Romney is determined to carry that ball to the finish line.

Never mind that even mainstream media have repeatedly refuted the meaning falsely imparted to the president by Romney and company. As of Tuesday night, the Obama quote was altered even further in the "Hands" videos to make it seem that he was shaking his brown finger in the face of lighter-skinned business owners: the audio track takes the words, "Let me tell you" from earlier in the speech, and sets them just ahead of the out-of-context quote to make it sound like this:

    "Let me tell you, if you've got a business, you didn't build that."

Here's the actual quote in its entirety, with the Romney edit in bold:

    "There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

    If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

2. The welfare lie. The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that it would consider providing waivers to states from the implementation of welfare-to-work requirement in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program if the states could demonstrate that they had a more effective means of helping welfare recipients find work. Romney has seized upon this announcement to claim that Obama is "gutting welfare reform" and eliminating the TANF work requirement -- a blatant lie that has been reported as such by many news outlets.

If facts actually mattered to the Republican Party, and truth-telling actually mattered to Romney, that would have put an end to the promulgation of the lie. But when a lie feeds a false but effective narrative about a black president and welfare, Romney and his allies apparently can't bear to give it up.

Several convention speakers took up the theme, most notably Rick Santorum, who said:

    "And this summer [Obama] showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waiving the work requirement for welfare."

Artur Davis, the former Alabama Democrat turned Virginia Republican, put it this way:

    Bill Clinton took on his base and made welfare a thing you had to work for; this current crowd guts the welfare work requirement in the dead of night.

Davis' part in promoting the lie is especially sweet for the G.O.P. Because he's African American, he provides a certain amount of insulation from charges of racism, despite the obvious racial dog-whistle to those voters who see welfare as a black thing.

3. The "dependency" lie. The Republicans have found a useful corollary to the welfare lie in their invention of a Democratic dependency doctrine, which sells the false idea that Democrats deliberately seek to make people dependent on government benefits as a means of winning votes. It flows from the Republicans' emerging producerist narrative, which was a staple of the racist rants of President Andrew Jackson -- the idea that the world is inhabited by "makers" and "takers," with the "takers" characterized as anybody outside of one's own constituency.

The most juvenile articulation of this steaming pile of prevarication was delivered by radio host and former actress Janine Turner, who followed up a Ben Franklin quote with this:

    Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death." Today Obama enables an entitlement society that says, "Give me liberty and gimme, gimme!"

    Why? Because Democrats depend on dependence.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose entire political career is a creation of the Koch brothers' Americans For Prosperity enterprise, chimed in with this description of the outcome of progressives' attempts to recall [7] him from the governor's mansion after he gutted labor protections for public employees and slashed the education budget:

    On June 5th, voters in my swing state were asked to decide if they wanted elected officials who measure success by how many people are dependent on the government, if they wanted leaders who believe success is measured by how many people are not dependent on the government, because they control their own destiny in the private sector. ( there are three more examples at the link)

Republicans are real worked up over someone down on their luck getting $4 a day in food assistance until they get back on their feet. In contrast they think its great that America's largest corporations and billionaires get billions in subsides from the capital created by American workers. It is not just the 2012 RNC convention, the entire conservative movement is based on a foundation of lies, just like every radical authoritarian movement in the last 120 years..

Why do Republicans hate science based facts- Todd Akin (R-MO) Claims Breast milk Cures Homosexuality

Paul Ryan stands on a foundation of lies. If there was a way, a humane way, to make Ryan tell the truth or be rendered mute, he would not be able to talk.

His Royal Highness Mitt Romney Wants To Be President So He Can Give Himself an $80 Million Dollar Tax Cut

His Royal Highness Mitt Romney Wants To Be President So He Can Give Himself an $80 Million Dollar Tax Cut

The U.S. tax code may be difficult to grasp, but understanding the presidential candidates' plans for it doesn't have to be. President Obama wants to raise his own taxes, while Mitt Romney wants to dramatically reduce the already small slice he pays to Uncle Sam.

Of course, that simplification doesn't shed light on just how dramatic President Romney's windfall for his family would actually be. Mitt's plan, which the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center forecast would cut taxes for the richest five percent of earners while increasing the tax bill for the other 95 percent of Americans, could slash his own annual IRS payment by almost half. And by eliminating the estate tax, the $250 million man would potentially divert $80 million (and possibly more) from the United States Treasury to his own heirs

On Friday, Governor Romney defended his mystery finances, declaring, "I have paid taxes every year. A lot of taxes. A lot of taxes." But when he announced Sunday that he wants "something dramatic" to boost the economy, he must have been speaking about his own.

Here's why.

At the end of 2012, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 will expire. Among other changes to the tax code, President Obama wants to let the top 35 percent tax rate for income over $250,000 to return to its Clinton-era level of 39.6 percent and implement the Buffett Rule guaranteeing millionaires pay a minimum 30 percent effective tax rate. Obama would also end the "carried interest exemption" that allows Mitt Romney and other similar financiers to pay under 15 percent to Uncle Sam each year. In contrast, Romney would not only make the Bush tax cuts permanent, but deliver a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. Upper income taxpayers would not only see their rate slashed to 28 percent, but would benefit by the elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

While conservatives and their friends in the media have decided we have a deficit problem, we in fact still have a revenue problem. They are at their lowest level since the Reagan years - the last time we had a major recession. The major reason conservatives want to frame the issue this way is to make everyone believe we can cut spending to balance the budget. The only way to do that is to gut the safety net programs like Medicare.

Why Does Mitt Romney Want To Restrict Voting Rights For More Than 900,000 Ohio Veterans?

Scott Brown (R-MS) has a well deserved reputation for being lazy. So lazy that he is letting his buddies at the Anti-American Fox News do his attacking for him, REPORT: Fox Spends Over 43 Minutes Smearing Elizabeth Warren. Why is Scott Brown afraid of doing his own dirty work. Would making these kinds of false smears ruin little Scotty's fabricated image as a nice guy.

Mitt Romney Is A Capitalist The Way A Bank Robber Is A Champion Of The Free Market

Mitt Romney Is A Capitalist The Way A Bank Robber Is A Champion Of The Free Market

A splendid accidental benefit of this year’s Republican presidential primary is that one of the most abusive dark corners of American capitalism, so-called private equity, is coming in for belated scrutiny and scorn. Delectably, the disclosures and criticisms are coming from leading Republicans, in a blatant undermining of cherished Republican ideology. Even before Democrats lay a glove on Romney, he will be assaulted by an investigative documentary that is more Michael Moore than Adam Smith. In politics, it doesn’t get much better than this.

“Private equity” was rebranded in the 1990s. It used to be called, more honestly, leveraged buyouts. While the job-killing aspect of many of the deals done by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and kindred financial engineers has come in for withering criticism, that is only one part of the mischief.

The phrase “private equity” conjures up images of venture capitalists pooling their funds and backing promising new ventures or contributing new equity and new management to companies in need of restructuring. But that is not how the game really works most of the time. Typically, private-equity companies borrow a ton of money, sometimes in collusion with incumbent management and sometimes in opposition to it, and take a company private. That is, the company’s shares are no longer publicly traded.

This maneuver has several advantages to the new owners. First, despite the picture of investors putting in equity, most of the money is usually borrowed. That produces a huge tax break, since the interest is tax-deductible. Second, the new owners can pay themselves large management fees as well as “special dividends.” Typically, they take out far more than they put in, by incurring debts carried on the books of the operating company.

For instance, when Bain masterminded a private-equity deal for HCA, one of America’s largest for-profit hospital chains (which has gone from private to public twice and which paid a multibillion-dollar fine for defrauding Medicare), Bain paid itself a management fee of $58 million, even though it had only put up 6.3 percent of the buyout fund.

Another big plus: The main regulatory principle protecting investors and by extension, the system as a whole, is disclosure. Under the securities laws administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission, management must disclose information deemed “material” to the interests of the investing public, including salaries, earnings, losses, assets, liabilities, and risks. But these laws flow from the fact that a corporation’s shares are publicly traded. A company owner by a private-equity outfit like Bain can operate completely in the shadows.

Then, there are three possible ways to cash in.  If the company turns out to be a success, like Staples (one of Bain’s big winners), the private-equity owners can take their legitimate share of the reward. But that turns out to be the exception. If the company, newly loaded up with debt, starts to falter, it can be broken up, with massive layoffs and cuts in health and pension benefits, and resold, usually at a profit for the private-equity owners.

Or the company can simply declare bankruptcy under Chapter 11 and shed its debts. Normally, shareholders think twice about incurring risks that could result in  bankruptcy, because one of the consequences is that the stock becomes worthless. But private-equity owners typically have already made their bundle on management fees and special dividend payouts, so even if the operating company goes bankrupt, they are still in the money.

And all of this is legal.

Oddly, as one abuse after another was exposed following the financial collapse, the predations of private equity have sailed merrily on. There is a terrific 2009 book on the subject, which I reviewed for the Prospect, Josh Kosman’s The Buyout of America. Read Kosman, and you will learn chapter and verse about how Bain, Carlyle, Blackstone, Texas Pacific Group, and the others plunder operating companies with taxpayer subsidies thanks to the borrowed money.

Among the tales Kosman tells: Thomas H. Lee Partners buys Warner Music, the world's fourth-biggest music company, and loads up the company with debt to finance the buyout and to pay itself $1.2 billion in dividends. One-third of the workforce is fired. CD&R, The Carlyle Group, and Merrill Lynch buy Hertz, the nation's largest auto-rental company, putting up just $2.3 billion in cash out of a $15 billion deal. The private-equity owners quickly recoup more than half of their down payment by loading up the company with even more debt. Funds for rental operations are cut by 39 percent, and Hertz's market share falls. In another example, Bain Capital, the company that made Mitt Romney rich, invests just $18.5 million in KB Toys, extracts $85 million in dividends, then takes the company into bankruptcy, stiffing employees, investors, and creditors.

In their tactical attack on Mitt Romney, the other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner. They owe it to the public to explain just what is improper about what private-equity operators do, what should be illegal, and what should be subject to disclosure.

Many Americans, bless them, have some naive ideas about how modern capitalism works in the USA. Many, if not most think if you work hard you earn money. You might get promotions and rises based on merit. You get ahead mostly by playing fair and being a decent human being. That is pretty much the way things operate for most Americans. Romney, Bain, Carlye group, and Blackstone operate by different rules. They make money as parasites on the value or capital created by others. That is not capitalism or even Americanism, it is moral corruption of the worse kind. No nation in history that has fallen so deep into this kind of depraved behavior has survived unscathed. We are well on our way to be a nation not of and for the people, but of and for the upper 1%. They used to call that tyranny.

CNN Facilitates Romney's Deceptive Highly Edited Video Attack Ad Against Obama and

Romney To Release Misleadingly Edited Obama Video As An Ad

Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic nominee for Senate in Massachusetts, has said that the Libor scandal calls the integrity of the entire financial system into question. Her opponent the morally bereft Scott Brown doesn't care because without a corrupt system where are his contributions going to come from.

Republican Lies About Spending and Deficits Exposed

Republican Lies About Spending and Deficits Exposed

We’re at the edge of the cliff of deficit disaster!  National security spending is being, or will soon be, slashed to the bone!  Obamacare will sink the ship of state!

Each of these claims has grabbed national attention in a big way, sucking up years’ worth of precious airtime. That’s a serious bummer, since each of them is a spending myth of the first order. Let’s pop them, one by one, and move on to the truly urgent business of a nation that is indeed on the edge.

Spending Myth 1:  Today’s deficits have taken us to a historically unprecedented, economically catastrophic place.

This myth has had the effect of binding the hands of elected officials and policymakers at every level of government.  It has also emboldened those who claim that we must cut government spending as quickly, as radically, as deeply as possible.

In fact, we’ve been here before.  In 2009, the federal budget deficit was a whopping 10.1% of the American economy and back in 1943, in the midst of World War II, it was three times that -- 30.3%. This fiscal year the deficit will total around 7.6%. Yes, that is big. But in the Congressional Budget Office’s grimmest projections, that figure will fall to 6.3% next year, and 5.8% in fiscal 2014. In 1983, under President Reagan, the deficit hit 6% of the economy, and by 1998, that had turned into a surplus. So, while projected deficits remain large, they’re neither historically unprecedented, nor insurmountable.

More important still, the size of the deficit is no sign that lawmakers should make immediate deep cuts in spending. In fact, history tells us that such reductions are guaranteed to harm, if not cripple, an economy still teetering at the edge of recession.

A number of leading economists are now busy explaining why the deficit this year actually ought to be a lot larger, not smaller; why there should be more government spending, including aid to state and local governments, which would create new jobs and prevent layoffs in areas like education and law enforcement. Such efforts, working in tandem with slow but positive job growth in the private sector, might indeed mean genuine recovery. Government budget cuts, on the other hand, offset private-sector gains with the huge and depressing effect of public-sector layoffs, and have damaging ripple effects on the rest of the economy as well.

When the economy is healthier, a host of promising options are at hand for lawmakers who want to narrow the gap between spending and tax revenue. For example, loopholes and deductions in the tax code that hand enormous subsidies to wealthy Americans and corporations will cost the Treasury around $1.3 trillion in lost revenue this year alone -- more, that is, than the entire budget deficit. Closing some of them would make great strides toward significant deficit reductions.

Alarmingly, the deficit-reduction fever that’s resulted from this first spending myth has led many Americans to throw their support behind de-investment in domestic priorities like education, research, and infrastructure -- cuts that threaten to undo generations of progress. This is in part the result of myth number two.

Spending Myth 2: Military and other national security spending have already taken their lumps and future budget-cutting efforts will have to take aim at domestic programs instead.

The very idea that military spending has already been deeply cut in service to deficit reduction is not only false, but in the realm of fantasy.

 There are a few other details at the link, including the ridiculous Republican urban myth that Obamacare will increase the deficit ( that is utterly false), that government health care (Medicare) is too expensive and we should privatize it Medicare is more cost effective than private insurance). Why do Republicans use these myths as a crutch; because they cannot win the battle on ideas based on facts. Conservative constantly engage in the sleaze of fake patriotism - hiding their freakish agenda behind the flag, and behind the Bible. They should be ashamed, but they seem to lack the moral conscience to feel shame.

Conservative Republicans are actively trying to stop job creation. Not exactly how a patriot should act.

Conservative Republican Journalist and Pervert James O'Keefe Fails To Find A Scandal, Union And Public Works Edition

Don't Have a Job? Say Thanks to Conservative Republicans

Don't Have a Job? Say Thanks to Conservative Republicans

New numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy added a mere 80,000 jobs in June. That’s down from an average of 150,000 jobs a month for the first part of the year, and far too little to keep up with population growth.

Republican intransigence on economic policy has been a key contributor to the sluggish recovery. As early as 2009, Republican fear-mongering over spending and their readiness to filibuster in the Senate helped convince the White House economic team that an $800 billion stimulus was the most they could hope to get through Congress. Reporting has since revealed that the team thought the country actually needed a stimulus on the order of $1.2 to $1.8 trillion. The economy’s path over the next three years proved them right. Here are the top five ways the Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery since:

    1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

    2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

    3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

    4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

    5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those policies — the payroll tax cut, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and discretionary spending for low-income Americans — have the highest multipliers, meaning more job boosting potential per dollar.

Since the tea baggers voted in a majority in the House of Representatives in 2010 and Republicans in the Senate - even though they are the minority - have used the filibuster or threats of one to kill any jobs bills, there is not much Obama can do. In a round about way Mitt Romney agrees. H/T to here for this video,
Gov. Romney on Poor Job Growth in Massachusetts: ‘To Suggest That Somehow the Day I Got Elected, Jobs Should Have Immediately Turned Around, Well, That Would Be Silly’

[When] Romney himself was running a government, in his case the state of Massachusetts, he was even more defensive about his lack of control of the employment picture than Obama is today. A new video unearthed by the liberal research group American Bridge shows Romney at a press conference in June 2006 admonishing reporters on disappointing jobs data. “You guys are bright enough to look at the numbers. I came in and the jobs had been just falling right off a cliff, I came in and they kept falling for 11 months,” he explains.

    “And if you are going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected, somehow jobs should have immediately turned around, well that would be silly. It takes awhile to get things turned around. We were in a recession, we were losing jobs every month,” he added.

USA Today's Uninformed Campaign To Shame The Poor - A USA Today editorial is downplaying poverty and food insecurity in America, and using Fox News talking points to justify a push to cut vital and effective anti-poverty programs.

Why Conservative Republicans Are Criminalizing Pregnant Women

Why Conservative Republicans Are Criminalizing Pregnant Women

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.



Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.



"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaignNational Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."



Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.



Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.



In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state's "chemical endangerment" law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes.



Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way. During her pregnancy her fetus was diagnosed with possible Down's syndrome and doctors suggested she consider a termination, which Kimbrough declined as she is not in favour of abortion.



The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth.



Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.



"That shocked me, it really did," Kimbrough said. "I had lost a child, that was enough."



She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars. "I'm just living one day at a time, looking after my three other kids," she said. "They say I'm a criminal, how do I answer that? I'm a good mother."



Women's rights campaigners see the creeping criminalization of pregnant women as a new front in the culture wars over abortion, in which conservative prosecutors are chipping away at hard-won freedoms by stretching protection laws to include foetuses, in some cases from the day of conception. In Gibbs' case defence lawyers have argued before Mississippi's highest court that her prosecution makes no sense. Under Mississippi law it is a crime for any person except the mother to try to cause an abortion.



"If it's not a crime for a mother to intentionally end her pregnancy, how can it be a crime for her to do it unintentionally, whether by taking drugs or smoking or whatever it is," Robert McDuff, a civil rights lawyer asked the state supreme court.



McDuff told the Guardian that he hoped the Gibbs prosecution was an isolated example. "I hope it's not a trend that's going to catch on. To charge a woman with murder because of something she did during pregnancy is really unprecedented and quite extreme."



He pointed out that anti-abortion groups were trying to amend the Mississippi constitution by setting up a state referendum, or ballot initiative, that would widen the definition of a person under the state's bill of rights to include a fetus from the day of conception.



Some 70 organisations across America have come together to file testimonies, known as amicus briefs, in support of Gibbs that protest against her treatment on several levels. One says that to treat "as a murderer a girl who has experienced a stillbirth serves only to increase her suffering".



Another, from a group of psychologists, laments the misunderstanding of addiction that lies behind the indictment. Gibbs did not take cocaine because she had a "depraved heart" or to "harm the fetus but to satisfy an acute psychological and physical need for that particular substance", says the brief.



Perhaps the most persuasive argument put forward in the amicus briefs is that if such prosecutions were designed to protect the unborn child, then they would be utterly counter-productive: "Prosecuting women and girls for continuing [a pregnancy] to term despite a drug addiction encourages them to terminate wanted pregnancies to avoid criminal penalties. The state could not have intended this result when it adopted the homicide statute."



Paltrow sees what is happening to Gibbs as a small taste of what would be unleashed were the constitutional right to an abortion ever overturned. "In Mississippi the use of the murder statute is creating a whole new legal standard that makes women accountable for the outcome of their pregnancies and threatens them with life imprisonment for murder."


From protection to punishment

At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced fetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.



South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.

Ironically and predictability - yesterday,being the 4th of July I spent some time reading some conservative Republicans yammer on about freedom. Conservatives, much like communists and fascists are repeating a tiresome reenactment of fanatical political philosophy. Their restrictions on individual freedom, their draconian authoritarianism against anyone who breaks their loony ideas about "values" is to be imprisoned or at the very least kept from fully participating in society. Another example. Conservative Republicans could not get their legislation passed so they're shoving their agenda down everyone's throat by making their legislation a "rule", In Letter, Texas Department of Health Accused by Ten Democratic Legislators of Subverting Democratic Process

Why does Mitch McConnell(R-KY) Hate Americans : I’m ‘Not Convinced’ Congress Should Prohibit Insurers From Discriminating Against The Sick

Wisconsin Gov Scott Walker(R) Has Terrible Economic Record. Anti-American Fox News Spins The Numbers For Their Friend Scott

Wisconsin Gov Scott Walker(R) Has Terrible Economic Record. Anti-American Fox News Spins The Numbers For Their Friend Scott

Bill O'Reilly Touted Walker's Economic Record. In his Talking Points Memo segment, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly highlighted the drop in Wisconsin's unemployment rate, saying that Walker "has a pretty good story to tell." O'Reilly continued: "When he took office in January 2011, Wisconsin unemployment stood at 7.7 percent. Now it's down to 6.7 percent, according to the last reading in April." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 6/4/12]

....Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin's Job Numbers During Walker's First 13 Months In Office Was The "Worst Among The 50 States." In March, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel compared job gains and losses among all 50 states between December 2010 and January 2011 and found Wisconsin's performance under Walker to be the "worst among the 50 states":

    In Gov. Walker's first 13 months (using December 2010 as the baseline), the state lost 8,500 non-farm jobs. That was worst among the 50 states.  Only four other states experienced a net decrease in that time. The chart below shows where other Midwestern states rank and shows the top state for job growth, Texas:

    Journal Sentinel 50 States Job Situation 2011

    If you take the most recent 12 months -- January 2011 to January 2012 - the state lost 12,500 non-farm jobs, also worst in the nation, a fact Democrats have seized on. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 3/15/12]

Wisconsin's Economic Recovery Under Walker Has Lagged Behind Surrounding States

Economic Policy Institute: Under Walker, "Wisconsin Is Lagging With Employment" Compared To Surrounding Midwest States. An Economic Policy Institute analysis of BLS data shows that in the year since Walker took office in January 2011, "Wisconsin stands out in the region, lagging with employment significantly lower -- by 0.5 percent -- in Jan. 2012 than a year earlier":

EPI Midwest Job Trends 2011

[Economic Policy Institute, 3/16/12]

Journal Sentinel: Under Walker, Wisconsin "Has Lagged Substantially Behind The National Pace In Private Sector Job Growth." A chart from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel shows that in the year since Walker took office, Wisconsin "has lagged substantially behind the national pace in private-sector job growth":

Why do Scott Walker and Fox News hate America and our ideals?

Memorial Day Thoughts on National Defense Spending and Priorities

Memorial Day Thoughts on National Defense Spending and Priorities

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program.

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight.

The absence of a budget deal on Capitol Hill is supposed to trigger an automatic across-the-board ten-year cut in the defense budget of nearly $500 billion, starting January.

But Republicans have vowed to restore the cuts. The House Republican budget cuts everything else — yet brings defense spending back up. Mitt Romney’s proposed budget does the same.

Yet even if the scheduled cuts occur, the Pentagon is still projected to spend over $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.

At the very least, hundreds of billions could be saved without jeopardizing the nation’s security by ending weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare. We should shrink the F-35 fleet of stealth fighters. Cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And take a cleaver to the Navy and Air Force budgets. (Most of the action is with the Army, Marines and Special Forces.)

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

A reasonable and rational defense budget would be a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives so we may remain free.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future; The Work of Nations; Locked in the Cabinet; Supercapitalism; and his newest, an e-book, Beyond Outrage. His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

Editorials like this are just so much pissing in the wind. Both political parties reap buckets of campaign cash from the defense industry. No Congressional representative wants to see a defense plant closed down in their district. Defense is not even a good way to create jobs.

Conservative Republican Sleaze Bag Sites Baselessly Accuse WH Of Leaking Bin Laden Raid "Classified Information" To Filmmakers

How Florida Governor & Known Criminal Rick Scott(R) Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney

Sleaze Bag Scott Brown(R-MA) justifies subsidizing a golf course over aid for 9/11 rescue workers

Sleaze Bag Scott Brown(R-MA) justifies subsidizing a golf course over aid for 9/11 rescue workers

Mitt Romney Associate Peter Schaumber Likely Violated The Hatch Act

Sorry for the disturbing images. They are related to this story: Former Republican precinct committeeman in AZ J.T. Ready, Neo-Nazi and One-Time Pal of Russell Pearce's, is Shooter in Gilbert Massacre

The pathological liar and conservative Republican blogger Jim Hoft(The Gateway Pundit) has tried to associate Ready with Democrats and the Occupy movement -  Far Right AZ Neo-Nazi Commits Mass Murder, Wingnut Bloggers Immediately Paint Him as a Left Winger

Mitt Romney Associate Peter Schaumber Likely Violated The Hatch Act

Last week, the Romney campaign finally broke its silence on an advisor’s role in a growing scandal. A report released last night shows why it had to.

In September, Mitt Romney named former National Labor Relations Board Chairman Peter Schaumber as the co-chair of his campaign’s Labor Policy Advisory Committee. Then in March, the NLRB’s inspector general named Schaumber as the recipient of leaked confidential info from current NLRB member Terence Flynn – and the Romney campaign avoided comment for a month.

Last Thursday, Rep. Elijah Cummings announced that the IG would be releasing a follow-up report, and was referring his findings to the Office of Special Counsel “for potential Hatch Act violations due to Mr. Schaumber’s role as a senior advisor” to Romney. (The Hatch Act bans public officials from using government access to advance political campaigns.) The new report, released last night by the House Education and Workforce Committee Democrats, is a sequel that truly outdoes the original.

The same day Cummings announced the forthcoming report, Romney Etch-A-Sketched Schaumber – sort of. The campaign issued no statement, but a “Romney campaign aide” told the Hill that Schaumber had already stepped down from his campaign role sometime in December. That’s the same month that Flynn learned he was being investigated by the IG. (The Romney campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s hardly a coincidence,” said AFL-CIO spokeswoman Alison Omens in an emailed statement, “that Schaumber resigned from the Romney campaign the same time his inside source at the board was notified he was being investigated.”

When Romney tried to dump right-wing anti-immigrant warrior Kris Kobach as part of a post-primary pivot, Kobach talked back, telling Think Progress he was in fact still advising the candidate. Romney shouldn’t have that problem with Schaumber, who’s been keeping his mouth shut since being named in the IG report last month. But there are some facts that complicate the Romney campaign’s narrative. A month after Schaumber’s supposed departure, he appeared on Fox News to discuss Republican outrage over Obama’s NLRB appointments (one of whom was Schaumber’s alleged mole, Flynn). The host introduced Schaumber as a “top advisor” to Romney – as did the Fox chyron – and asked him about Romney’s stance on the NLRB. (She also asked him about NLRB investigations of Bain Capital; Schaumber pleaded ignorance of the details, then launched into a blanket defense of companies that get investigated by the NLRB.)

Romney’s website was also slow to adjust to his supposed months-old parting with Schaumber. Until recently, a link to an essay by Schaumber was prominently displayed on his Labor page, and the press release announcing his appointment was in the campaign’s archive. Now, the Web addresses for both bring up pages reading “Access Denied.”

Looks like Team Romney is trying to put distance between itself and Schaumber’s scandal without actually addressing it. But the scandal is just getting started.

Romney and friends see American workers as serfs who should have no rights. Like all good conservative Republicans they think the American workplace should operate like an Antebellum plantation where none of the workers should get too uppity. Talk about elitism gone wild.

Obama's Composite Girlfriend: How Politico and Drudge Created Fake News

Redistributing income upwards, Study: CEO Pay Increased 127 Times Faster Than Worker Pay Over Last 30 Years

Latest Attempt To Deny Obama Credit For Bin Laden Raid Falls Flat

Mitt Romney Spokesman Proto-fascist Richard Grenell Scrubs OnLine Attacks on women

Eight of the Top Ten 2012 Super PAC Donors Are Anti-Democracy Conservatives Hell Bent on Bringing Back Bush Policies

Mitt Romney Spokesman Proto-fascist Richard Grenell Scrubs OnLine Attacks on women

Mitt Romney Spokesman Proto-fascist Richard Grenell Scrubs OnLine Attacks on women

In the Twitter-fueled 2012 election, it's not surprising that reporters quickly began digging through Grenell's Twitter feed, even before he got a chance to scrub out a number of impolitic and sexist comments.

ThinkProgress noted Grenell's tendency to make cutting remarks about the appearances of prominent women in media and politics, including his tweet advising MSNBC host Rachel Maddow "to take a breath and put on a necklace," and another suggesting she resembled Justin Bieber.

In another tweet, Grenell wrote that "Hillary is starting to look liek Madeline [sic] Albright." He discussed First Lady Michelle Obama working out and "sweating on the East Room carpet." He also asked whether Callista Gingrich's "hair snaps on," and on another occasion, commented how Gingrich's third wife "stands there like she is wife #1." Politico flagged more examples and noted Grenell's "old pastime" of "ridiculing the Gingriches."

When contacted about Romney's hiring of Grenell and his removal of online writing, a campaign spokesperson referred The Huffington Post to a response Grenell gave to Politico. "My tweets were written to be tongue-in-cheek and humorous but I can now see how they can also be hurtful," Grenell said. "I didn’t mean them that way and will remove them from twitter. I apologize for any hurt they caused."

Maddow certainly didn't think Grenell's tweets were so "tongue-in-cheek" or "humorous," pointing out the ones written about her during Friday night's show, while asking if the Romney campaign sees "any sign that they understand that a long, string of really nasty, sexist tweets about Callista Gingrich's appearance might be alienating to people who might otherwise consider voting for Mr. Romney."

But Maddow's not the only member of NBC/MSNBC who Grenell has knocked in recent months. Grenell described NBC's "Meet the Press" on Twitter as "a commercial for the Democratic Party & its radical feminist agenda," while taking a few shots at chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell and political director and White House correspondent Chuck Todd.

"[A]re any reporters asking HillaryClinton tough questions?" Grenell asked on April 3. "NBC has expert foreign policy reporter Andrea @mitchellreports asking non-questions." On March 27, Grenell tweeted that MSNBC "has ushered @chucktodd so far left he's lost his ability to see a Russian video moment as anything more than a 2nd term reality." That same day, Grenell said what he "love[s] about twitter and facebook is that it has outed reporters from their phony facade of pretend non-partisan commentary."
Richard Grenell Twitter


He has also taken a few jabs at BuzzFeed, writing that the Ben Smith-led site "looks like it's either working for [liberal watchdog Media Matters for America] or the Obama re-election." (Smith wrote Saturday how the hiring of Grenell, who's openly gay, quickly prompted an attack from Bryan Fischer, the anti-gay chief spokesman of the American Family Association).

Grenell also recently tweeted that New York Times reporter Matt Bai "isn't fit to cover Obama," and once tweeted that this reporter is a "liberal" who "ignores george @stephanopoulos' secret coordination w/ WhiteHouse on contraception," both posts that appear to have been removed. On another occasion, Grenell disputed whether this reporter's article included a "clarification" or, in his view, a "correction." In a subsequent tweet, he alleged that bias was the motivation for clarifying the article.

On his now-removed personal site, according to a few posts archived online, the spokesman takes similar swipes at the "Fourth Estate."

In May 2010, Grenell criticized New York Times columnist Charles Blow in a post headlined "Charles certainly does Blow."

"Blow's writing is choppy and vapid," Grenell wrote in a post that has since been removed. "His filing today is a 474 word piece of partisan whining for his favorite political party labeled 'Liberals in Limbo". While conservatives won't be shocked that Blow is on staff and writing for the Grey Lady, intellectuals everyway [sic] should demand she do better than Blow."

Grenell has blogged for The Huffington Post as recently as last month.

Given Grenell's repeated swipes at the media, reporters may be concerned that they won't get a fair shake and that legitimate questions could be dismissed as being motivated by liberal bias.

Mitt Romney has high standards, yes sir. His idea of running a campaign of substance is to hire a  lunatic who specializes in jokes so bad that no one likes them except Rush Limbaugh fans and cockroaches.

Not Just Labor Rights; America hating Conservative Republican Scott Walker(R-WI) Is Also Dismantling Women's Rights


The Right Wing's Insurrectionist Mindset. Conservatism is fanatical anti-American movement that tries to disguise its radical democracy hating agenda in patriotism.

The 2012 Elections - Another Season of Conservative Republican Lies, Real Values Become an Inconvenience

The 2012 Elections - Another Season of Conservative Republican Lies, Real Values Become an Inconvenience

A spring awash with Etch A Sketch conservatives, camera-wielding GOP con men and a bogus deficit reduction budget from House Republicans shows that for the right, wrong is justified when it achieves the desired results.

A perfect example of this political philosophy is the work of James E. O’Keefe III, a right wing, unsupervised, unaccountable, self-appointed and self-styled “investigative journalist” who has violated federal law, lied about his identity and deceitfully cut and pasted video to destroy what he perceives as liberal institutions.

Oddly for the party that claims conservative Christians as key constituents, O’Keefe’s misbehavior is celebrated by GOP talking heads — the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. That encourages copycats. The New York Times last week told the tale of one. John M. Howting, a bungling video scam man, sees himself as an O’Keefe apostle.

Honorable journalists abide by an ethics code forbidding lying to secure a story. For them, the end does not justify the means. By contrast, for O’Keefe and today’s Etch A Sketch conservatives, the end they want vindicates any scheme to secure it. Deliberate lying, cynical deceit, cut-and-paste deception – all of that is rationalized by conservatives to get their way. It’s a lovely escape clause they’ve written for themselves from that annoying Judeo-Christian thou-shalt-not-lie commandment.

O’Keefe wanna-be John M. Howting tried clumsily to trod in his disgraced mentor’s footsteps, lying about his name, who he represented and his intentions in a failed effort to discredit a couple of what he perceived to be liberal New York community groups.

O’Keefe had better luck. This right wing rebel without a conscience lied about his name, who he represented and his intentions in successful efforts to manipulate some targets into saying stupid stuff, which he surreptitiously recorded. His deceptive and distorted films destroyed ACORN and damaged other groups he considered progressive. Despite O’Keefe’s liberal use of the Commandment escape clause, he became conservatives’ golden boy.

Among right-wing talk show hosts who urged their conservative Christian listeners to praise the con was Bill O’Reilly who said O’Keefe should be awarded a Congressional Medal. Not so worshiping were federal prosecutors who charged O’Keefe with misrepresenting himself in an attempted phone hacking at the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. O’Keefe pleaded guilty. And not so revering was the California state attorney general who determined that O’Keefe’s sliced-and-diced video misrepresented the actions of ACORN workers.

Conforming to the conservatives’ philosophy of wrong-is-right-if-the-right-benefits is GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Like a Judas, he betrayed his own health insurance program.
Romney contended that requiring everyone to get health insurance – known as the individual mandate — was good when he was governor of Massachusetts and signed Romneycare, which includes it. As Congress considered health care reform, Romney repeatedly said Romneycare should be the model for the nation. But later when conservatives blasted the individual mandate in Obamacare, Romney sold out his Massachusetts plan, saying an individual mandate was not good for the nation.

Similarly, in 1994 during Romney’s failed campaign for U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat, Romney and his wife attended a Planned Parenthood fundraiser and she donated $150 to the group. But now, in pursuit of the vote of the anti-abortion Christian right, Romney no longer likes Planned Parenthood so much, promising:

    “Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.”

Are those switches adorable little flip-flops or calculated lying? The comments of a chief Romney aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, show they are calculated. A reporter asked Fehrnstrom how Romney would appeal to crucial middle-of-the-road voters in the fall after taking such hard right positions in the spring to win the primary. Fehrnstrom compared the campaign to an Etch A Sketch:

    “You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

So, basically, tell the conservative Christian primary voters one thing. Then tell the mainstream general election voters something else. This is the campaign of the GOP front-runner, the party’s likely standard-bearer. This is who most Republicans voted for.

It makes sense really. Apparently Republicans don’t expect the truth. Look at the Ryan budget. He calls it the Path to Prosperity. The nation went down this road of tax cuts for the rich and program cuts for the middle class before, under Bush II, and it was a one-way road to increased income inequality. Voodoo trickledown economics is a path to prosperity only for the already prosperous.

Congressman Paul Ryan contends his budget is a deficit-buster, that it would shrink the deficit to 1.2 percent of the gross domestic product by 2022 – which is exactly the same place where the country would be if it did nothing, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. In addition, the cumulative 10-year deficits under Ryan’s plan would be $200 billion higher than just doing nothing. No busting going on there.

The GOP wants conservative Christian votes so badly it’s willing to break those set-in-stone rules conservative Christians revere.

Conservatives only have two choices if they should wake up one day and be cursed to only be able to tell the truth - they either hate America or they love America the way a child abuser loves their children.

Conservatives are completely out of touch with reality - Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) has 'little tolerance' for student loans

I'm not sure how a full-time college student is supposed to come up with $50,000 per year, unless it's selling things Virginia Foxx probably doesn't approve of. But I guess back when Virginia Foxx went to college the tuition was five pumpkins and a bag of turnips, and if she could come up with it then, surely an 18-year-old can come up with $200,000 now. Get a job! Well, it's minimum wage, so get four jobs, slacker! (Oh, and did I mention that back then, they all tied onions to their belts, which was the style at the time?)

For newcomers who haven't heard of Virginia Foxx before, she is a proud member of the House dimwit caucus, alongside such esteemed freedom-geniuses as Allen West and Louie Gohmert. Amongst their weaponry: Gullibility, foot-in-mouth disease, and a fanatical lack of awareness as to the most basic realities faced by other people in the country. So yes, she says stuff like this all the time.

Rep. Allen West’s (R-FL) Might Be an America Hating Nazi

Rep. Allen West’s (R-FL) Might be an America Hating Nazi

A top official of the Communist Party USA on Wednesday ripped Rep. Allen West’s “sad ploy” for claiming that as many as 80 Democratic members of the House are communists.

“I just think it’s an absurd way to cast a shadow over his colleagues. It’s kind of a sad ploy,” Libero Della Piana, a vice-chairman of the national Communist Party, said of the Florida Republican’s charge that about 80 House Democrats were members of the radical party.
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“It’s just guilt by association taken to an extreme,” he told POLITICO. He also said there are no members of Congress who are members of the Communist Party – not even avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

(Also on POLITICO: West claims there are 80 communists in the House)

“I think it’s just absurd,” Della Piana said.

In a video clip of the event posted Wednesday, West was responding a question from a constituent asking “What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists?”

“That’s a fair question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party,” West says in the video. He went on to say, “It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus,” according to a West spokesman, Tim Edson.

Della Piana also said that using the term “communist” as slander ran counter to democratic principles.

West does not feel he has to prove any accusation. he states his "feelings" and that is his complete standard for delivering his message to the public. Let's all go by the standards of this "conservative" "Christian" and simply say that West is a Nazi. That is how some people might feel. Thus by West's very own standards he is a Nazi. West says that if you 're against regulating business you are a communist. So being a Nazi West is OK with corporations dumping toxic waste into your family's drinking water because disposing of waste cots too much. West thinks that Wall Street should be able to steal your house and life savings because anyone who wants to regulate Wall St is a communist. Since West thinks that any rule that might cost Wall St even one dollar is wrong, so that makes him by definition a fascist. Let's us not assume that West is crazy and radical - though he may be. Let's assume based on the evidence we do have that West is just old fashioned evil.

Mitt Romney's 'Women for Romney' surrogate is not for equal pay for women in Wisconsin

Newt Gingrich Campaign Vendors Wonder If They'll Ever Get Paid. Shouldn't a good little capitalists like Newt have figured out a way to pay for his expenses rather than relying on the kindness of strangers to pay his debts. Conservatives are always completely self-sufficient. Right?

Ann Romney and Working Moms It is simply a fact that Ann has not had to rise children while also working a job outside the home. If she finds that offensive then she finds simple facts offensive.