What Does The Conservative Mind Look Like? A Hostess Twinkie

What Does The Conservative Mind  Look Like? A Hostess Twinkie

Hostess Brands, the maker of sweet snacks like Twinkies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, will ask a bankruptcy judge today to approve a plan that will allow it to pay $1.75 million in bonuses to 19 of its executives. Hostess’ decision to file for bankruptcy came amid disputes with its union workers, who threatened a strike that Hostess said imperiled the company’s finances. The unions are now protesting Hostess’ request for the bonuses, though they are unlikely to prevail, CNN Money reports:

    Hostess Brands will ask a bankruptcy judge on Monday for approval to shut down the company and pay $1.75 million in executive bonuses.

    Unions representing workers at the maker of Twinkies, Wonder Bread and Drake’s snacks are arguing against the bonuses. [...]

    Under the plan, bonuses ranging from $7,400 to $130,500 will be paid to 19 executives. The company argues the bonuses are below market rates for such payments.

Even as it blamed unions for the bankruptcy and the 18,500 job losses that will ensue, Hostess already gave its executives pay raises earlier this year. The salary of the company’s chief executive tripled from $750,000 to roughly $2.5 million, and at least nine other executives received pay raises ranging from $90,000 to $400,000. Those raises came just months after Hostess originally filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

Hostess is hardly the only company that has compensated its executives during bankruptcy or times of financial instability. Failed financial firm MF Global gave CEO Jon Corzine an $8 million pay package after it filed for bankruptcy, and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit received a $6.7 million pay package when he resigned, despite Citi’s 88 percent profit loss during his final quarter. And Hostess isn’t alone in giving executives massive raises while asking for concessions from union workers either: construction giant Caterpillar rewarded its CEO with a 60 percent pay raise, paying him $17 million, even as it forced a pay and pension freeze on its union workforce.

Republicans get really pissed off when someone uses food stamps because their job does not pay enough to cover the basic costs of living, but they're happy to protect the elite privileges of the plutocratic executives who have systematically sent American jobs offshore, weakened unions and created a wage structure for workers that people can barely live on. That's not your grandfather's capitalism that is the capitalism of overlords over the serfs. They have to start calling people names like "Statists" and "Marxists" to distract attention from their fundamentally immoral and Anti-American shenanigans.

Is Anti-American proto-fascist Ann Coulter's book about "lies" a self-indictment?

Former Murdoch Aides to Be Charged With Bribery. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian wing-nut, is one of the patron saints of conservatism. Conservatives will do anything Rupert tells them to. So how is it that Conservatives can say they have Americans values when they worship a foreigner like a god.

The Mind-blowing Hypocrisy of John McCain(R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC): WMD Lie is Good, Repeating Intelligence is Bad

The Mind-blowing Hypocrisy of John McCain(R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC): WMD Lie is Good, Repeating Intelligence is Bad

Hypocrisy alert: John McCain supported Condoleeza Rice who misled the public on WMD, causing thousands to die, but now attacks Susan Rice.

Remember when Condoleezza Rice misled the public about Iraq’s WMDs and over 4,000 Americans died? John McCain doesn’t seem to. McCain is trying to sell the idea that Susan Rice appearing on TV to tell the American people what the intelligence community had ascertained about Libya on September 18 was wrong. She should have chosen not to speak on the subject without more certainty, he and Lindsay Graham claim.

Yet, Susan Rice’s statement made it clear that things were not certain. Here, once again, is her statement to the media on September 18 (emphasis mine):

RICE: Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack… Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.

Later, when the intelligence community updated their information, we learned that perhaps things didn’t go down as they first thought. Here’s a shocker for Republicans: Now there are reports saying that it might have had something to do with the video after all. The lesson here is that it takes time to gather the information. The Obama administration wanted to give the public the information it had on that date in September, and they continued to update us as they learned more. You can’t know what you don’t know yet. This is not hard to understand.

What is hard to understand is that as National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice made a public case for the Iraq war based on what was misleading information. John McCain later supported her confirmation as Secretary of State in 2005 and said that anyone who questioned her integrity did so for political reasons. McCain lectured, “We can disagree on policy and we disagree on a lot of things, but I think it is very clear that Condoleezza Rice is a person of integrity. And yes, I see this, some lingering bitterness over a very tough campaign.” Oh, do tell, Senator.

Back in 2002, Bush officials made the rounds on TV to claim that Iraq was accumulating high-strength aluminum tubes. Condoleezza Rice said the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.” Rice told CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

 Conservatives cannot make up their minds. They want to portray President Obama - head of the administration that finally caught Bin laden, as incompetent, yet they also want everyone to think he has super powers that allow him to see through mountains and walls 10,000 miles away.

Jerome Corsi's final straw

Back in April, after ABC News quoted Jerome Corsi as an authority in an article on so-called "birth tourism," Media Matters' Todd Gregory pointed out how low ABC had sunk:

    Jerome Corsi is the guy who co-wrote Unfit for Command, a book so infamously inaccurate that it helped spawn the term "swiftboating" as a description of a political smear campaign.

    That alone should tell you everything you need to know about Corsi, but there are so many other reasons he's not a credible figure. There's the birtherism. The appearance on a "pro-White" radio show. The bigoted comments on Free Republic. The promotion of laughable conspiracy theories about global government and the "North American Union." The failed Obama smear book.

What has Corsi done since? Well, there's this:

Yeah, that's Corsi at the WorldNetDaily Convention last weekend, saying President Obama has engaged in "identity theft" because he has "stolen the identity of a natural born citizen" by "using someone else's Social Security number."

He also called for Obama to "renounce Lucifer." Seriously.

 Who knows, it is possible that Corsi is evil incarnate. What other kind of being would regulate so much evil and still claim to have American values.

Republicans Have Abandoned All Pretense To Morality With Shameful 'Dreams From My Real Father'

Republicans Have Abandoned All Pretense To Morality With Shameful 'Dreams From My Real Father'

After four years of invective, four years during which the right has called President Obama a traitor, a communist, a fraud, an affirmative-action case, a terrorist-sympathizer, and a tyrant, its shrillest voices have been reduced to the most primal insult of all. They are calling Obama’s mother a whore.

For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

It’s tempting to ignore Dreams From My Real Father because it’s so preposterous. The movie claims that Obama’s actual father was the poet and left-wing activist Frank Marshall Davis, who Dunham met through her father, who was a CIA agent merely posing as a furniture salesman. “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” says the narrator, speaking as if he were Obama reading his autobiography. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.”

Davis enjoyed taking nude photos of women, and the images said to be of Dunham, to which the director pays lascivious attention, are presented as evidence of their intimate relationship. “These photos were taken a few weeks before 1960, when Mom was about five weeks pregnant with me,” the narrator says. “Frank then sold the photos to men’s mail-order catalogs.”

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.

Newsbeast discusses President Obama’s early life and his reelection campaign.

Gilbert won’t say who is funding this distribution, and there’s no way to verify his numbers. Had he not made other right-wing documentaries in the past, I might suspect that the whole thing is a brilliant conceptual art project about the limits of anti-Obama credulity. But the fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri.

What would Republicans do without the politics of hysteria and character assassination. They might have to start actually standing up for something that resembles American values and ideals. And they can't do that because genuine democratic republicanism ( note the small r - Thomas Jefferson started the Democratic-Republicans Party - the beginnings of what has been shorted to the Democratic Party), because that political philosophy, is the opposite of what conservatism stands for.More here, CNN Lets Dinesh D'Souza Peddle Conspiracy Theory That Obama Is "Anti-American"

Noted White Lady Ann Coulter Explains the Black Experience to Whoopi Goldberg. I guess Coulter deserves some kind of kudos. She has not worked for a living during her adult life, yet make enough money to live in Palm beach and hang out at expensive night clubs. She better love America, what other country could she find so many rubes willing to finance her luxurious lifestyle in return for being no more than a bad insult comic.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or as some call him Scott Brown(R-MS) plans a career on the stage should his stint as a hand puppet for Mitch McConnell (R-KY) fall through -  Scott Brown Won't Release Client List While Demanding Elizabeth Warren's.

Is John Hinderaker America's Sleaziest and Most Dishonest Republican Blogger

Is John Hinderaker America's Sleaziest and Most Dishonest Republican Blogger. JH churns out a litany of disinformation for the cause of social-Darwinism, turning back the clock of social and economic progress, bizarre takes on reality that are along the lines of an acid tripping paranoid on former Time Magazine blog of the year. He writes in a post fancifully called Is Barack Obama America’s Most Dishonest Politician?

A lot of politicians are dishonest, but Barack Obama may be in a league by himself. He appeared on the David Letterman show last night, and Letterman asked him about the national debt (somewhat surprisingly). Obama’s answer was a masterpiece of prevarication. He described how the debt originated, and claimed, falsely, that he inherited a $1 trillion deficit. In fact, this country had never run a deficit anywhere near $1 trillion until FY 2009, the first year of the Obama administration.

Call me a dreamer, but I tend to think when a blogger regulatory dispenses political analysis they would have a grasp of basic facts. Fiscal year 2009 was the Bush budget and the deficit that year - a legacy of the Bush years was $1.2 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office. One realizes that John's audience is composed of zombies who eat whatever putrid lies Johnny boy feds them, but what if, you know, someone who is not brain dead or high on the konservative kool-aid checks his facts and his childish exaggerations. One assumes he has no concept of leaving a legacy of honor and integrity. These virtues mere excess baggage in the anti-American cause of radical conservatism.(insert name of almost any Republican pundit here)...Falsely Claims Obama "Created A Gigantic Deficit"

In Fact, Experts Attribute Deficit To Bush-Era Tax Cuts, Wars, Economic Downturn

CBO Projected $1.2T Deficit In January 2009 Based On Spending Bush Authorized; Actual Deficit Was $1.4T. In a January 7, 2009, report, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected, based on spending authorized under the Bush administration, that the federal deficit in FY2009 would total $1.2 trillion. According to the CBO, the actual federal deficit for FY2009, which began during the Bush's last year in office, was $1.4 trillion. [CBO, January 2009 and January 2010]

CAP: "Single Most Important [Cause Of The Deficit] Is The Legacy Of President George W. Bush's Legislative Agenda." In an August 2009 analysis, the Center for American Progress (CAP) concluded that about two-thirds of the then-projected budget deterioration for 2009 and 2010 could be attributed to either Bush's policies or the economic downturn:

Deficit Chart - at top.

The report explained:

    As for the deficit's cause, the single most important factor is the legacy of President George W. Bush's legislative agenda. Overall, changes in federal law during the Bush administration are responsible for 40 percent of the short-term fiscal problem. For example, we estimate that the tax cuts passed during the Bush presidency are reducing government revenue collections by $231 billion in 2009. Also, because of the additions to the federal debt due to Bush administration policies, the government will be paying $218 billion more in interest payments in 2009.

    Had President Bush not cut taxes while simultaneously prosecuting two foreign wars and adopting other programs without paying for them, the current deficit would be only 4.7 percent of gross domestic product this year, instead of the eye-catching 11.2 percent--despite the weak economy and the costly efforts taken to restore it. In 2010, the deficit would be 3.2 percent instead of 9.6 percent.

    The weak economy also plays a major role in the deficit picture. The failure of Bush economic policies--fiscal irresponsibility, regulatory indifference, fueling of an asset and credit bubble, a failure to focus on jobs and incomes, and inaction as the economy started slipping--contributed mightily to the nation's current economic situation. When the economy contracts, tax revenues decline and outlays increase for programs designed to keep people from falling deep into poverty (with the tax impact much larger than the spending impact). All told, the weak economy is responsible for 20 percent of the fiscal problems we face in 2009 and 2010.

    President Obama's policies have also contributed to the federal deficit--but only 16 percent of the projected budget deterioration for 2009 and 2010 are attributable to those policies. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, designed to help bring the economy out of the recession is, by far, the largest single additional public spending under this administration. [CAP, 8/25/09]

CBPP: "[V]irtually The Entire Deficit Over The Next Ten Years" Due To Bush Policies, Economic Downturn." The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) published an analysis of federal deficits in December 2009, which was most recently updated on June 28, 2010, titled, "Critics Still Wrong on What's Driving Deficits in Coming Years: Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers." The report noted:

    Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush's policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade -- that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.

The report also graphed the effects of Bush's policies and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the deficit. From the report:


[CBPP, updated 6/28/10, emphasis in original]

Harvard Business Review Group Director: "[T]he Giant Deficit Is Mainly The Result Of The Collapse In Tax Receipts Brought On By The Recession." In an October 2010 post on his Reuters blog, Justin Fox, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group, analyzed the deficit and concluded that it was "mainly the result of the collapse in tax receipts brought on by the recession":

    The Treasury Department reported on Oct. 15 that the deficit in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, was $1.294 trillion. That's less than FY 2009's $1.416 trillion, but it's still really really big. Why is it so big, though? Is it because of all that stimulus and bailout spending? Or is something else going on?

    To find out, I created a fantasy world. I figured out how fast federal spending and revenue grew over the last business cycle, from 2000 through 2007, and calculated where we'd be today if those growth rates had continued through 2010. I was originally motivated to do this for a commentary that's supposed to air tomorrow night on Nightly Business Report. But I'm thinking there's not a huge overlap between Felix Salmon readers and Nightly Business Report viewers, so I'll go ahead and share what I learned.

    In my no-financial-crisis, no-bailout, no-recession, no-stimulus scenario, spending kept growing at 6.22% a year, and revenue kept growing at 3.45%. You can see from the difference between the two numbers that this was an unsustainable path. But it clearly could have been sustained for a few more years.

    Where would it have left us in fiscal 2010? With $2.843 trillion in federal revenue and $3.270 trillion in spending, leaving a deficit of $427 billion. The actual revenue and spending totals for 2010 were $2.162 trillion and $3.456 trillion. So spending was $186 billion higher than if we'd stuck to the trend, and revenue was $681 billion lower. In other words, the giant deficit is mainly the result of the collapse in tax receipts brought on by the recession, not the increase in spending. Nice to know, huh? [Justin Fox,blogs.reuters.com, 10/25/10, emphasis added]

Mitt Romney's Contempt For Morality. Romney's Three Biggest Lies, Just This Week

Mitt Romney's Contempt For Morality. Romney's Three Biggest Lies, Just This Week

“I Have Paid Taxes. Every Year. A Lot of Taxes.”

Romney has been dogged by questions about his tax returns, exacerbated by his steadfast refusal to release more than one year’s worth of taxes. (He’s promised to release one more year in the fall.) Romney faced added scrutiny over the last week, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has said that a reliable source told him that Romney paid no federal income tax for several years, and that is the reason he won’t release his returns.

Romney and Republicans have demanded that Reid retract the statement, but so far, Romney has been unwilling to release the tax returns that could prove Reid a liar. Instead, Romney chose to go before his supporters and declare that he has too paid taxes — trust him.

“Let me also say categorically: I have paid taxes every year. A lot of taxes. A lot of taxes,” Romney said Friday. That is, of course, almost certainly true. Romney likely paid sales taxes and property taxes and gasoline taxes, just like everyone else. Of course, Romney left a very important word out of his defense: “income.”

Romney was careful not to claim he paid income taxes every year, which are the taxes Reid was talking about. Does that mean Reid is right? Well, without seeing Romney’s tax returns, it’s impossible to say.

One other part of Romney’s statement is a lie: the part where he says he paid “a lot” of taxes. Romney only paid 14 percent of his income in taxes in 2010. That’s because most of his income was investment income, which is taxed at a far lower rate than job income is. Certainly, the dollar amount Romney paid was higher than your average Joe, but the percentage Romney paid is far from burdensome.

...Obama is Going to “Gut Welfare Reform”

For those of you who are either too young to remember the late 20th century (or for those of you who’ve chosen to block it out), welfare reform was once a great Republican bugaboo, the “immigrants are stealing your jobs” of the Reagan era. Ronald Reagan himself once decried the “strapping young bucks” who used welfare to buy “t-bone steaks,” and if that sounds incredibly racist, you’re right.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton helped Republicans achieve their goal of slashing — er, reforming — welfare. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act made it harder to get public assistance, especially for women who were seeking post-secondary degrees. While the act did have the effect of kicking a lot of people off of assistance, the initial reports of its significant benefits in reducing poverty were primarily due to the roaring economy of the tech boom.

Why do I mention this? Because Mitt Romney’s base is made up of people who were well into adulthood when the PRWOA was signed into law, people who remember welfare reform as a salient issue. Romney is attempting to appeal to those voters with his second-biggest lie of the week, the lie that President Obama wants to “gut welfare reform.”

Romney’s lie hinges on waivers that the Obama administration is issuing to states that want flexibility to adjust work requirements in the face of the current recession. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote last month, “The actual language is rather strict and rules out a number of potential waiver applications.” Job requirements are not going to be eliminated; rather, states will be able to use increased flexibility to help move recipients toward long-term employment.

Given the Republican love of giving the states more power, this may seem like something they would support the president in doing, or at the very least, have trouble arguing against. Romney makes the argument simpler by lying; in the ad, the campaign says, “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check and welfare to work goes back to being plain old welfare.”

Incidentally, if you’re wondering where Barack Obama could have gotten the idea of giving states more flexibility on welfare requirements, it may have come from this 2005 letter from the Republican Governor’s Association requesting exactly that from then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. The second signature on the request was then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who was for Obama’s welfare rule changes before he was against them.

....“I’ll work to protect the voting rights of our military, not undermine them.”

Mitt’s biggest lie of the past week is a doozy. Romney claimed that Barack Obama was trying to limit the voting rights of members of the military in Ohio, because of a lawsuit filed in the state over Ohio’s decision to eliminate early voting except for members of the military. Was Obama trying to “undermine” the rights of soldiers? In a word, no. Instead, Obama and the Democratic Party sought to give everyone in Ohio the same rights as Ohio wanted to give soldiers — in other words, to give everyone the opportunity to vote early.

Nevertheless, Romney took to Facebook to play more-patriotic-than-thou, lambasting Obama for “claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period,” something Romney said was an “outrage.” Of course, Obama wants to keep those early voting privileges in place for the military, and extend it for everyone — including veterans. Romney would refuse to give veterans early voting privileges. Who’s undermining voting rights now?

Indeed, Romney’s bald-face lie drew a rejoinder from John Soltz of VoteVets.org, who said, “Obviously with the narrative the Romney campaign is pushing, they probably don’t have a lot of people around them who have actually served. We also agree, like the president does, that someone who served in World World II in the Battle of the Bulge or someone who lost their legs in Vietnam has just as much of a right to vote as today’s veteran.”

With three whoppers in the last week, it’s tempting to ask why Romney thinks he can lie with impunity, but of course, the answer is simple: the media won’t call him on it. Given over to fake even-handedness, the media is stuck saying things like this:

The last president we had who was a serial lying sleaze bag sent off over 4,000 Americans to Iraq to die for a lie. He and his Congressional conservative partners in crime also tanked the economy. Romney has exactly the same arrogant attitude.

Anti-American Fox News and The America Hating Steve Doocy Hides Religious Accommodation For Reproductive Health Mandate 

Fox News' Steve Doocy falsely claimed that the Obama administration was forcing churches to provide contraception coverage to employees, ignoring an exemption that explicitly exempts religious institutions.

On Fox & Friends, Doocy reported on tensions between Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan and President Obama due to a Health and Human Services (HHS) rule mandating that all health insurance plans cover women's reproductive health. After religious leaders, including Dolan, protested the move, the Obama administration exempted churches and other religious groups from the mandate.

But Doocy not only ignored the religious accommodations made by the administration on the contraception mandate; he falsely claimed that the mandate still applied to the Catholic Church:

Don't ask me why Fox and Doocy hate America, religious freedom and women's reproductive rights, they just do. Perhaps Steve would be happier in Iran where they believe pretty much the same things Steve and his boss Rupert Murdoch do.

Sean Hannity Is Pissed That Obama Killed Bin Laden So He Takes Revenge In Unhinged Attacks

Senator Sleaze Scott Brown (R-MS)

 

Identity Politics cartoon thumbnail via Kos

Sean Hannity Is Pissed That Obama Killed Bin Laden So He Takes Revenge In Unhinged Attacks

Sean Hannity devoted his Fox News show Friday to furthering misleading attacks on President Obama's record on  national security.

Hannity opened his show by playing a misleading political ad from a right-wing political activist that deceptively edited statements President Obama made about the Osama bin Laden raid to make it look like Obama took all the credit for the success of the raid himself. Hannity then asked audience members whether they agreed that Obama "politicized the killing of bin Laden this week":

The reality is that President Obama has repeatedly thanked and praised the American troops and other military and intelligence individuals who participated in the mission.

Hannity later turned to birther and less than ethical Fox military analyst Gen. Thomas McInerney to criticize the Obama administration for attempting to negotiate with the Taliban. McInerney said "you can't negotiate with them." However, CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and many other national security experts have said that it is in America's interest to negotiate with the Taliban.

Perhaps the most disgraceful part of Hannity's special was when he brought up the topic of waterboarding and said that "President Obama calls that torture." Fox national security analyst KT McFarland then offered a full-throated defense of the practice:

    McFARLAND: No, it's not torture. And there's a second issue, which is: Did it work? And it worked. And if it worked, it's kept the United States safe for this last 10 years -- even if it's torture, it's probably worth doing.

In fact, former interrogators, intelligence officials, and experts have stated that torture did not lead to bin Laden's whereabouts, and furthermore, that it doesn't provide trustworthy information.

And it's not just President Obama that "claims" waterboarding is torture.

In April 2006, Human Rights Watch sent an open letter to Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, signed by more than 100 law and legal studies professors, which stated that "waterboarding is torture." The letter continued:

    Waterboarding is torture. It causes severe physical suffering in the form of reflexive choking, gagging, and the feeling of suffocation. It may cause severe pain in some cases. If uninterrupted, waterboarding will cause death by suffocation. It is also foreseeable that waterboarding, by producing an experience of drowning, will cause severe mental pain and suffering. The technique is a form of mock execution by suffocation with water. The process incapacitates the victim from drawing breath, and causes panic, distress, and terror of imminent death. Many victims of waterboarding suffer prolonged mental harm for years and even decades afterward.

Military experts, including a Bush adviser on terrorism, agree. So does Republican Sen. John McCain, who wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in May 2011 that waterboarding "is a mock execution and thus an exquisite form of torture."

And according to the most recent major polling on the issue, a majority of Americans also consider waterboarding to be torture.

Hannity once promised to undergo waterbroading to prove it was not torture. To this day Hannity has not kept his promise to be waterbroaded. Like your average conservative pundits Hannity has one quality in great supply, cowardice. Hannity may be even be a bigger coward than he is a liar and hypocrite. Hannity is not an American patriotic he is a blister, a pox, trying to degrade American values. That is the reason he has so many conservative fans. Sean-boy reflects their values. Regardless of what pretend patriots like Hannity and his fans think waterbroading is illegal and immoral. The U.S. government prosecuted the Japanese for using water torture during WW II.

Tavis Smiley Defuses Bill O’Reilly’s Loaded Interview about “Race-Based” Virginia Assault

President Obama: Don’t Let Romney ‘Turn Back The Clock’

Conservative Republicans Know No Shame When it Comes To Exploiting Terrorism

Fox News Antisemitism Shows in its Smear of George Soros

Fox News Antisemitism Shows in its Smear of George Soros

The chief executive of a leading Jewish policy organization is condemning Fox News president Roger Ailes for reportedly urging his hosts to push the false claim that Jewish philanthropist George Soros aided the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Alan van Capelle, CEO of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, criticized Ailes following a report today that Ailes had emailed Fox host Bill O'Reilly suggesting he promote the false claim about Soros. Van Cappelle said that those emails indicate "the hate at Fox starts at the top."

According to a story on Gawker, which obtained the emails:

    On November 1, 2010, Ailes sent an email to Bill O'Reilly and his producer David Tabacoff. It contained a partial transcript from a 12-year-old 60 Minutes profile of George Soros in which Soros, a Jew, acknowledged that he posed as a Christian under the Nazi regime and helped confiscate property from other Jews being shipped off to death camps.

The emails indicate Ailes received the transcript from Mitchell Kweit, Fox's vice president for news research and strategic information, in an email titled "Soros No Nazi Guilt," and forwarded it to O'Reilly and Tabacoff with the note, "FYI. This guy has no conscience."

In reality, as a fourteen-year-old boy in occupied Hungary, Soros was hidden from the Nazis by a Christian family. The man hiding Soros was assigned to go inventory the estate of a wealthy Jewish family and brought Soros along to protect him. Soros himself was never part of any property confiscation.

O'Reilly's producer Tabacoff replied to Ailes with a single word: "ugly." Ailes responded by asking, "Do you think you guys will use it or should I give it to someone else?"

That someone else was likely Glenn Beck. The following evening during the 5 p.m. hour of his show, Beck promoted a special about Soros. Beck referred to the billionaire philanthropist as a "puppet master" and questioned his Jewish identity. Earlier that day on his radio show, Beck said Soros "saw people into gas chambers."

Beck's "special," which was broadcast a week later, included the information Ailes forwarded to O'Reilly. Beck claimed Soros "had to help the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors." On his radio show Beck went even further, saying that Soros helped "send the Jews" to "death camps." His comments were widely condemned by Jewish leaders.

"It's obvious that Glenn Beck could not have carried on his insane tirades against George Soros without the support of Roger Ailes, so these emails really just confirm what common sense tell us - the hate at Fox News starts at the top," van Capelle told Media Matters in a statement Thursday.

"George Soros lost family members in the Holocaust. As a 13 year old boy he survived because his father arranged for him to be hidden with a non-Jewish family willing to take an enormous risk to do the right thing. Six decades later Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck exploited these circumstances to call Soros a Nazi-collaborator. It's a characterization that speaks volumes about Ailes and Beck, and says nothing at all about George Soros."

Bend the Arc was formed in April 2012 from the merger of Jewish Funds for Justice and the Progressive Jewish Alliance.

No wonder conservative pundits and bloggers regularly treat President Obama suggestion that we have a more civil discourse with contempt. Where would conservatism be without its smears, daily lies, conspiracy theories, frequent racism and antisemitism. Conservatism cannot have a moral agenda because than they would have to hold themselves up to actual standards of moral behavior. That should be the clue that like every radical movement in history conservatism is a twisted dangerous set of weird beliefs.

Independent and Principled? Behind the Cato Myth

But in order for progressives and others to make an honest and practical assessment about the Cato Institute and its battle with the Kochs, we need to first set the record straight about some of the claims being spun.

Cato Claim #1: The Cato Institute was one of the earliest and most principled critics of the Bush Administration’s wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home (here [4] and here [5]).

Fact: The Cato Institute’s actual record during the Bush Administration years was anything but principled and far from heroic.

    John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” [6] served on the Cato Editorial Board [7] for Cato Supreme Court Review during the Bush presidency. At the same time, Yoo was writing the Bush administration’s legal justifications for waterboarding, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping and more. Yoo also contributed articles [8] to Cato Supreme Court Review and a chapter to a Cato book titled The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton [9] criticizing President Clinton’s “imperial presidency.” [10]

    The “Cato Policy Report” attacked progressive critics of Bush’s War on Terror as "Terrorism's Fellow Travelers [11]" in its November/December 2001 issue. Former Vice President of Research Brink Lindsey wrote, “Most of the America haters flushed out by September 11 are huddled on the left wing of the conventional political spectrum.”

Libertarianism is another strange and twisted series of beliefs. Once you can a closer look, they are much like the old saying that libertarians are just conservative right-wing zealots who watch too much porn and smoke too much pot.

What Did Sandra Fluke Say That Ignited Conservative Rush Limbaugh's Psycho Misogynist Attack

What Did Sandra Fluke Say That Ignited Conservative Rush Limbaugh's Psycho Misogynist Attack

Below is the text of Sandra Fluke's opening statement, who testified before a House Democratic panel in support of the HHS contraception mandate.


    My name is Sandra Fluke, and I’m a third-year student at Georgetown Law School. I’m also a past-president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice or LSRJ. And I’d like to acknowledge my fellow LSRJ members and allies and all of the student activists with us and thank them so much for being here today.

    (Applause)

    We, as Georgetown LSRJ, are here today because we’re so grateful that this regulation implements the non-partisan medical advice of the Institute of Medicine.

    I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraceptive coverage in its student health plan. And just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously-affiliated hospitals and institutions and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens.

    We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women.

    Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses any potential conflict with the religious identity of Catholic or Jesuit institutions.

    When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected by this lack of contraceptive coverage.

    And especially in the last week, I have heard more and more of their stories. On a daily basis, I hear yet from another woman from Georgetown or from another school or who works for a religiously-affiliated employer, and they tell me that they have suffered financially and emotionally and medically because of this lack of coverage.

    And so, I’m here today to share their voices, and I want to thank you for allowing them – not me – to be heard.

    Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. 40% of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggle financially as a result of this policy.

    One told us about how embarrassed and just powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter and learned for the first time that contraception was not covered on her insurance and she had to turn and walk away because she couldn’t afford that prescription. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception.

    Just last week, a married female student told me that she had to stop using contraception because she and her husband just couldn’t fit it into their budget anymore. Women employed in low-wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.

    And some might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s just not true.

    Women’s health clinic provide a vital medical service, but as the Guttmacher Institute has definitely documented, these clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing, and women are being forced to go without the medical care they need.

    How can Congress consider the [Rep. Jeff] Fortenberry (R-Neb.), [Sen. Marco] Rubio (R-Fla.) and [Sen. Roy] Blunt (R-Mo.) legislation to allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraception coverage and then respond that the non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are attempting to de-fund those very same clinics?

    These denial of contraceptive coverage impact real people.

    In the worst cases, women who need these medications for other medical conditions suffer very dire consequences.

    A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown’s insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy.

    Unfortunately, under many religious institutions and insurance plans, it wouldn’t be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Sen. Blunt’s amendment, Sen. Rubio’s bill or Rep. Fortenberry’s bill there’s no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs.

    When this exception does exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers rather than women and their doctors dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, women’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.

    In 65% of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescription and whether they were lying about their symptoms.

    For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her.

    After months paying over $100 out-of-pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it.

    I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of the night in her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room. She’d been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me, ‘It was so painful I’d woke up thinking I’ve been shot.’

    Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result.

    On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor’s office, trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.

    Since last year’s surgery, she’s been experiencing night sweats and weight gain and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She’s 32-years-old.

    As she put it, ‘If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no choice at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies simply because the insurance policy that I paid for, totally unsubsidized by my school, wouldn’t cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it.’

    Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at such an early age – increased risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis – she may never be able to conceive a child.

    Some may say that my friend’s tragic story is rare. It’s not. I wish it were

    One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but that can’t be proven without surgery. So the insurance has not been willing to cover her medication – the contraception she needs to treat her endometriosis.
    Recently, another woman told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome and she’s struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified to not have access to it.

    Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown’s policy, she hasn’t been reimbursed for her medications since last August.

    I sincerely pray that we don’t have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously.

    Because this is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends: A woman’s reproductive health care isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority.

    One woman told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered on the insurance and she assumed that that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handle all of women’s reproductive and sexual health care. So when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor, even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections, because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that – something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.

    As one other student put it: ‘This policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.’

    These are not feelings that male fellow student experience and they’re not burdens that male students must shoulder.

    In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking what did we expect when we enroll in a Catholic school?

    We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success.

    We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of ‘cura personalis‘ – to care for the whole person – by meeting all of our medical needs.

    We expected that when we told our universities of the problem this policy created for us as students, they would help us.

    We expected that when 94% of students oppose the policy the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for – completely unsubsidized by the university.

    We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that we should have gone to school elsewhere.

    And even if that meant going to a less prestigious university, we refuse to pick between a quality education and our health. And we resent that in the 21st century, anyone think it’s acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women.

    Many of the women whose stories I’ve shared today are Catholic women. So ours is not a war against the church. It is a struggle for the access to the health care we need.

    The President of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit colleges and the universities appreciate the modifications to the rule announced recently. Religious concerns are addressed and women get the health care they need. And I sincerely hope that that is something we can all agree upon.


    Thank you very much. (all emphasis and highlights are mine)



Conservatives such as Limbaugh have tried to convince the public that Fluke and others had wanted the general public to pay for their contraceptives. That was a lie. A lie repeated incessantly by Limbaugh, conservative hate radio and across the internet. These women want the same full insurance coverage for their health needs that men get. As simple as that. Conservationism continues to be a cancer on democracy. You cannot have a fully functioning enlightened democratic republic when a third of the population - conservatives cannot distinguish facts from lies, or maliciously deceive the public in the name of their radical anti-American agenda.

Conservative Republicans and Gas Prices - A Poltical Movement That Lies Constantly is a Movement That Hates Their Country

Conservative Republicans and Gas Prices - A Political Movement That Lies Constantly is a Movement That Hates Their Country. Conservatives hate freedom so it logically follows they hate the USA. They're good at waving flags, they suck at living up to the ideals that flag represents. We don't need flag waving fake patriots, we need good Americans capable of rational thinking about the future of the nation.

The oil industry isn't drilling on leases for millions of acres of land that could be producing energy.

Yet despite claims from several lawmakers, it doesn't appear this is part of a nefarious plan to drive up gas prices or reap huge profits by companies like Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500), BP (BP), Chevron (CVX, Fortune 500) or Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA).

Experts say oil companies aren't drilling on the land because it doesn't make economic sense to do it.

During recent congressional hearings many Democrats cited a recent report from the Interior Department showing that over 70% of the offshore acres the industry has leased from the federal government are sitting idle.

Onshore, nearly 60%, or 22 million acres in total, aren't producing any oil or gas.

They were responding to calls for more acres of the country to be opened up for oil and gas drilling.

"They have the drilling rights to an area of public land the size of Minnesota where they could and should be drilling," Massachusetts Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat, said in a statement to CNNMoney. "But instead [they] are coming back and asking Congress to allow drill rigs off our beaches up and down the East Coast."
Drill baby drill won't lower gas prices

How the leases work: The oil industry routinely leases blocks of land from the federal government to explore for oil and gas. The leases typically last for 5 to 10 years and cost anywhere from $75,000 to $2 million to get. Then the companies have to pay an additional fee each year for the duration of the lease.

If oil is found, the company get's to keep the lease for the life of the well, which could be 40 years. They would also have to pay the government a royalty on the production, usually ranging from 12% to 18%. If no oil is found, the land reverts to the government.

Markey and other lawmakers say the industry is purposefully idling production so they can book the oil and gas reserves on their balance sheet as an asset -- a move that might drive up their stock price.

Critics also say they might be saving the oil for a future date, when prices might be higher.

The Interior Department, which supports efforts to put more of these leases into production, says over half the nation's 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves lie untapped in the Gulf of Mexico.

To prod the industry into more rapidly exploring and drilling on these acres, the administration and members of Congress have proposed shortening the period for which leases are awarded -- a so-called "use it or lose it" provision.

They have also proposed increasing the amount of money companies have to pay each year for their leases, which can range from $40,000 to $200,000.

Drilling for oil isn't so simple: But the oil industry and independent experts say it's ridiculous to believe that companies wouldn't be trying to produce all they can from the land they have leased if it made financial sense.

The huge amount of untapped land being leased is accurate, said Erik Milito, director of exploration and production at the American Petroleum Institute. But to just look at that number and say the industry is sitting on its hands is too simplistic, "it doesn't explain the oil and gas businesses at all."

...By forcing the industry to produce on its idle leases, lawmakers hope to raise domestic oil production, which would tend to increase U.S. jobs and add to federal tax rolls without having to open up additional lands for drilling.

Some hope it would also lower gas prices. But it's questionable if forcing production would have the desired effect.

Conservatives keep say the answer is simple - drill baby drill. Oil companies have plenty of leases they are not using, even if the Obama administration was slow to approve new leases. Oil companies like to keep oil production in sync with refinery production, keeping gas prices high is an incentive for them to continue business as usual. No president of either party is to blame for gas prices. gas prices are do to oil company behavior and that of speculators that hope prices go up.

Why Does Conservative Republican Rick Santorum Hate America and The 1st Amendment

Why Does Conservative Republican Rick Santorum Hate America and The 1st Amendment

1. The end of the secular state. Santorum is a big proponent of the religious-right assertion, which he recently reiterated at the Conservative Political Action Conference, that the rights of American citizens come not from the U.S. Constitution or the laws of man, but from God. (To prove their point, they cite the Declaration of Independence, and the line that "men" are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.") Not just any God, mind you, but the authoritarian, patriarchal God of right-wing Christian theology. And Santorum has reserved for himself the role of theologian-in-chief, the arbiter of true religion, the messenger privy to the things God really wants -- and the things Satan really wants, which, according to a 2008 speech he delivered at Ave Maria University in Florida, is the demise of the United States.

Via Mediaite:

    "This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war at all. This is a spiritual war,” Santorum said, describing how American institutions and our nation’s way of life are falling to evil forces. “And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?"

At a February 18 campaign stop in Ohio, Santorum made the case that Obama is not a true Christian, that his overal agenda is based on "a phony theology." From Politico:

    Slamming the president's agenda on a range of points, Santorum said the agenda is "not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology."

On CBS News' "Face the Nation" the next day, Santorum said he was talking specifically about the president's environmental policy and, no, he didn't mean to suggest that Obama is a Muslim or anything like that. (Actually, he was suggesting that the president is an earth-worshipping pagan whose earth-worship is a path to growing the size of government.) Transcript from ThinkProgress:

    When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth; by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven, for example, the politicization of the whole global warming debate — this is all an attempt to, you know, to centralize power and to give more power to the government.

Some, including me, heard in Santorum's original comments a dog-whistle to right-wingers intent on viewing Obama as a crypto-Muslim. But Political Animal's Ed Kilgore reminds us of Santorum's assertion in a 2008 speech that mainline Protestants (basically, Protestants from the major sects who are not part of the religious right) are not Christian, either. Whichever it is, Rick Santorum clearly reserves to himself the right to determine who is and isn't a Christian, a particularly outrageous claim by a presidential hopeful who asserts that rights are bestowed on humans by his idea of the Christian God. In the practical sense, then, a President Santorum would render himself as God.

2. The end of science. While it may be de rigueur for Republican candidates to deny the science of climate change, Santorum takes it a step further, claiming not just that humans make no contribution to changes in the climate, but implicitly arguing that in order to be a great nation, America needs its citizens to waste energy, especially through such greenhouse-gas producing products as gasoline-guzzling cars and incandescent lightbulbs. For starters, that will give a rationale for raping the U.S. environment through fracking -- of which he's a big fan, especially near population centers -- offshore drilling, and plundering the Alaskan wilderness.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Santorum made the point that, among the nations of the world, those that use the most energy have the highest standards of living. (It doesn't take a genius to accept that people who live in centrally heated and air-conditioned homes, and who have refrigerators and ovens that run on fuel other than dung probably have a higher standard of living than those who don't.) So, by Santorum's reasoning, that means we should step up the energy gluttony if we want an even higher standard of living. (If you can come up with some scientific reasoning for that conclusion, you deserve a very special prize.)

At Talk to Action, Rachel Tabachnick attributes Santorum's anti-green messianism to a strain of religious-right theology known as "Biblical economics," which, Tabachnick says, is " a world in which unregulated free markets are holy and the opposition is literally demonic."

But it doesn't end there. At the intersection of Santorum's anti-science stance and his misogyny stands his opposition to prenatal testing.

3. A return to patriarchy. The leaders of Rick Santorum's religion -- the Roman Catholic Church -- oppose abortion and birth control, and so does he. Combined with his opposition to science, the fact-free mind of the GOP frontrunner has transformed his personal religious beliefs to a contention that prenatal screenings of pregnant women and their fetuses are a bad thing, so he wants to end any requirement on health-insurance companies that they be covered. Via First Read:

    "One of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing in every insurance policy in America," Santorum, a conservative Roman Catholic, told a Christian Alliance luncheon in Columbus. "Why? Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society. That too is part of ObamaCare — another hidden message as to what president Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."

"That ugly meme is completely made up," writes health expert Harold Pollack at the Reality-Based Community. "By any reasonable measure, the proliferation of genetic diagnostic technologies coincides with great progress in public acceptance and support for people with disabilities."

And those technologies actually save fetuses with anomalies, allowing pregnant women to have healthy babies because their pregnancies were monitored. One case in point is the daughter of writer Sarah Fister Gale, whose rH blood disease was discovered while she was still in the womb, by the use of amniocentesis, which Santorum claims, "does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortions." He added, "That is a fact."

Actually, it's not. Here's Gale, writing at Salon:

    If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong.

(Meanwhile, at the Nation, Ben Adler details Santorum's opposition to programs on which disabled people depend.) Yet Santorum talks constantly on the stump about his seventh child, Bella, who was born with a brutal chromosomic disorder.

The truth is, Santorum will use any rationale that suits him to deny women any kind of reproductive healthcare that informs their decision-making process, whether the decision is about getting pregnant or whether to bring a fetus to term. When arguing the merits of his so-called "partial-birth abortion" ban, a law enacted in 2003 to ban a particular abortion procedure, Santorum claimed that the procedure was used to abort fetuses that were not deformed or disabled in any way. But on "Face the Nation," as Slate's Will Saletan points out, Santorum claimed just the opposite, saying the procedure had been primarily used to abort fetuses that, if brought to term, would become disabled children.

Then there's birth control, which Santorum told a right-wing Iowa blogger at Caffeinated Thoughts, is "not okay" because it takes the procreation out of sex. In fairness to Santorum, he does say that, as a matter of public policy, he would not try to outlaw contraception: he just wants to make it harder for you to get (especially if you work for a business that is owned by a church-affiliated institution).

Like the other Republican presidential candidates, Santorum says the Obama administration's mandate that health insurance provided by employers must cover prescription contraception (and with no co-pay) is a violation of the religious freedom of employers whose consciences, like Santorum's, are offended by the very notion of birth control. But what makes Santorum unique is a novel interpretation of what health insurance is meant to do, which is not, according to the candidate, to pay for things that only "cost a few dollars." Which brings me back to the notion that Santorum will use whatever rationale he finds necessary to deprive women of the full range of reproductive healthcare. He has not voiced similar concerns, for instance, over having insurance plans pay for low-cost generic antibiotics, or Tylenol-with-codeine pills.

4. The fostering of ignorance. Although his wife home-schools their own children, Rick Santorum isn't completely against public education. He just wants to starve it. At an Ohio campaign stop, Santorum hailed the fact that most of the early U.S. presidents "home-schooled" their children (he neglected the mention of any tutors), adding, according to the New York Times:

    "Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children."

Which is great for parents who don't want their kids to learn actual science or facts. (The mind boggles to consider what the Santorum children are learning in science class at the kitchen table.) The Times goes on to note that federal government, which Santorum would cut out of the education process, contributes 11 percent of most schools' budgets, and is targeted for the enforcements of standards which would, of course, include the teaching of science. Meanwhile, the United States lags behind most of the industrialized world in turning out scientists and engineers.

5. The demonization of everybody but white, heterosexual, right-wing Christian males. In Rick Santorum's mind, everybody who is not like him is some form of demon: Obama is like Hitler, gay people are like beastialists, women who have sex for pleasure are licentious, working mothers take the easy way out, single mothers are welfare queens, undocumented immigrants are thieves, black people are lazy and Muslims are bloodthirsty infidels.

At a February 19 campaign stop in Georgia, Santorum compared the 2012 presidential election to World War II, when the U.S. initially stood by as Britain was showered with Nazi bombs. Via The Raw Story:

    "Why? Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, 'You know it will get better. Yeah, I mean, he’s a nice guy. It won’t be near as bad as what we think. You know, this will be OK. You know, maybe he’s not the best guy.' After a while, you found out some things about this guy over in Europe and maybe he’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what? 'Why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems, just get our families off to work and our kids off to school and we’ll be okay.'"

Santorum later denied he was comparing Obama to Hitler, but it's hard to come away with any other conclusion. Santorum also denied he was talking about black people when he was quoted as saying, at an Iowa campaign stop in January, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." (He laughably claimed three days later that he said "blah" people, not "black" people.)

Of working women, Santorum wrote in his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that they find it easier and "more socially affirming" to keep up their careers than to "stay home and take care of their children." In other words, women who work outside the home are not taking care of their children.

Single mothers often refuse to marry their partners, Santorum told Fox News in December, so they can collect welfare.

And of women who use birth control in order to have sex for (horrors) pleasure, Santorum told Caffeinated Thoughts: "[Contraception is] not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."  And while Santorum disavowed the comments of his sugar daddy, billionaire Foster Freiss, who suggest that women just clamp their knees together as a means of birth control, there have been no reports that he's stopped taking the old sexist's money.

In his, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" [1787-1788], John Adams wrote:

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

". . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."

What Liberal Media - The America Hating Conservative Republican Media Rely On Discredited Evidence To Dismiss Positive Jobs Report

What Liberal Media - The America Hating Conservative Republican Media Rely On Discredited Evidence To Dismiss Positive Jobs Report

Right-wing media are rushing to put a negative spin on newly released jobs numbers showing a drop in the unemployment rate and a net increase in jobs by parroting the discredited claim that government data show that "1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force" last month. In fact, as economic experts have explained, that number reflected an increase in population from 2010 Census figures and is not the result of how many people "dropped out" of the labor force last month.

After The Labor Department Reported January Employment Growth

Labor Department: Employment Rose By 243,000 Jobs In January And Unemployment Dropped To 8.3 Percent. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

    Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job growth was widespread in the private sector, with large employment gains in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing. Government employment changed little over the month.

    [...]

    The unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage point in January to 8.3 percent; the rate has fallen by 0.8 point since August. [Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2/3/12]

NY Times: Two Million Jobs Added In Past Year. The New York Times' Economix blog reported that "[o]ver the last 12 months, the economy added nearly two million jobs, more than in any similar period since early 2007." [The New York Times, Economix, 2/3/12]
Financial Blog Zero Hedge Dismissed Employment Growth With Dubious Claim That "1.2 Million People Dropped Out Of The Labor Force"

Zero Hedge: "1.2 Million People Dropped Out Of The Labor Force In One Month!" A post on economics and finance blog Zero Hedge claimed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics report estimated that "1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force" in January. [Zero Hedge, 2/3/12]

But Experts Argue That The 1.2 Million Number Is Based On A Misreading Of The Jobs Report

Economic Journalist Barry Ritholtz: "The Fact Is 1 Million People Did Not Drop Out Of The Labor Force In January 2012." Economic journalist and Washington Post columnist Barry Ritholtz explained that those who are claiming that 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in January are misreading the Labor Department's jobs report:

    So today following an otherwise pretty darn good jobs report, we get the usual perma-pessimists at Zero Hedge and Rick Santelli over at CNBC proclaiming that the report showed a drop of over 1 million people from the labor force in one month. Of course, as ususal, both Santelli and Zero Hedge have a real reading comprehension problem and completely missed that this million+ people isn't some new January phenomenon, but a result of the BLS using the 2010 census data to have more accurate data. In other words, the changes in the Household Survey to the various measures had taken place over the years prior to 2010, but for simplicity's sake, the BLS incorporates these changes into one month (which they clearly point out).

    [...]

    [T]he fact is 1 million people did not drop out of the labor force in January 2012. [The Big Picture, 2/3/12]

Rush Limbaugh Cited The 1.2 Million Number To Argue That The Jobs Report Is "Corrupt." On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh cited Zero Hedge and claimed that "1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month" to argue that the jobs numbers report is as "corrupt as it can be." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 2/3/12]

Sean Hannity Repeated The 1.2 Million Falsehood To Claim Lower Unemployment Rate Is "Phony."

 Between the drugs and alcohol Limbaugh can always claim he has a good excuse - he stays on the radio because the dumb rubes that listen to him make it possible for him to live in a Palm Beach mansion. Hannity doesn't need an excuse, he has the same IQ as his audience, its the same as his shoe size.

Neil Cavuto Gushes Over Trump’s Business Record – And Ignores The Four Bankruptcies. Trump was handed his business on a silver platter from dad, he is hardly a member of the worked hard to earn all he has crowd. Conservatives worship him, despite the lack of any real business expertise anyway.