After an exasperated rant about Republican obstructionism, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday night that it’s time to revamp the Senate’s longstanding filibuster rule.

“If there were anything that ever needed changing in this body, it’s the filibuster rule, because it’s been abused, abused and abused,” Reid said on the Senate floor.

Reid’s call for changing the procedural rule, which requires 60 votes to end debate on a bill, came after Republicans refused to take up and pass an otherwise noncontroversial bill aimed at reauthorizing the Export-Import bank. Republican leaders said they wanted more time to offer amendments, which forced Reid to file a procedural motion delaying the vote to Monday. Sixty votes will be needed to end debate on the bill, and a simple majority will be required to pass it. The bill regularly clears both chambers with little fanfare and already passed the House unamended and with an overwhelming majority.

Full Story Here: Harry Reid: Filibuster Rule Has ‘Been Abused,’ Needs Changing.

OPS: Senile old coward.  You mean NOW, that it might be too late? Well it’s about fucking damned time.

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer led the right-wing charge against Mitt Romney’s ousted foreign policy spokesman Ric Grennell, lambasting the presumed GOP nominee for hiring the openly-gay aide. When Grennell resigned under pressure from social conservatives this week, Fischer declared it a “huge win.”

But today, Fischer himself backtracked a bit. On his radio, the far-right activist noted what many liberals have, asking, why should voters trust Romney to confront Russia or North Korea if he can’t even stand up to a “yokel” talk show host? Right Wing Watch flagged the clip:

FISCHER: If Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership.

Watch it:

Full Story Here: Bryan Fischer To Romney: ‘How Is He Going To Stand Up To North Korea If He Can Be Pushed Around By A Yokel Like Me?’ | ThinkProgress.

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US. A new publication from the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn. From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact. We are a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility – in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.

More GRITtv

Full Story Here: GRITtv » Blog Archive » Chatting With Chomsky.

Caro sat down for an interview with The Huffington Post in conjunction with the release of the fourth volume of his biography, “The Passage of Power,” which covers Johnson’s vice presidency and some of his presidency.

“Harry Reid as a majority leader operated in near impossible circumstances,” Caro said. “The other side is intractable and it has the votes to stop legislation. That he has been able to get as much as he has — as little as it is — through the Senate is a tribute to him as majority leader. I think he’s in near-impossible circumstances. I think he’s done a terrific job.”

Full Story Here: Robert Caro: GOP Abuse Of Filibuster ‘Unconscionable,’ Harry Reid Has Done ‘A Terrific Job’.

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

Full Story Here: Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. – The Washington Post.

The House of Representatives advanced a bill Friday that funds cheaper student loans by cutting a preventive health care program — sparking a heated battle in which House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) accused Democrats of manufacturing a war on women.

The House passed the bill by a vote of 215 to 195, with 30 Republicans bucking their party to oppose the bill, and 13 Democrats voting in favor. Democrats might have blocked the measure if they had stayed together. The interest rate for federally subsidized student loans is scheduled to jump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent for some 7.4 million students on July 1 if Congress does not act.

Full Story Here: Student Loan Interest Rate Bill That Cuts Health Care Program Passes House.

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (The GOP’s Death Wish: Why Republicans Can’t Stop Pissing Off Hispanics, Women, and Young People).

President Barack Obama framed the 2012 election in some of the starkest terms to date in an interview published Wednesday by Rolling Stone.

Obama said that in this election there “will be as sharp a contrast between the two parties as we’ve seen in a generation.”

“You have a Republican Party, and a presumptive Republican nominee, that believes in drastically rolling back environmental regulations, that believes in drastically rolling back collective-bargaining rights, that believes in an approach to deficit reduction in which taxes are cut further for the wealthiest Americans, and spending cuts are entirely borne by things like education or basic research or care for the vulnerable,” Obama continued.

Full Story Here: Obama: Romney Can’t Say ‘Everything I’ve Said For The Last 6 Months, I Didn’t Mean’.

Paul Krugman :-:

Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are?

If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.

But the question was raised with particular force last week, when Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended.

First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention: George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure?

Full Story Here: The Amnesia Candidate – NYTimes.com.

Reducing government deficits Mitt Romney’s way would mean less money for health care for the poor and disabled and big cuts to nuts-and-bolts functions such as food inspection, border security and education.

Romney also promises budget increases for the Pentagon, above those sought by some GOP defense hawks, meaning that the rest of the government would have to shrink even more. Nonmilitary programs would incur still larger cuts than those called for in the tightfisted GOP budget that the House passed last month.

Differences over the government’s budget and spiraling deficits are among the starkest that separate Republican Romney and Democratic President Barack Obama. Obama’s budget generally avoids risk, with minimal cuts to rapidly growing health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid while socking wealthier people with tax increases. It’s all part of an effort to close trillion-dollar-plus deficits.

Full Story Here: Mitt Romney Budget Cuts Would Have Severe Consequences.

Wisconsin has open primaries, allowing voters of any party to vote in any election. So Republicans are free to vote in Democratic primaries, and vice-versa.

There are currently four Democratic candidates competing in the May primary. Former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett are considered frontrunners, with state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D-Alma) and Secretary of State Doug La Follette also in the race.

Full Story Here: Scott Walker Recall: Republicans May Vote In Democratic Primary, GOP State Senator Says.

President Obama and Vice President Biden today released their 2011 tax returns, ahead of Tuesday’s tax filing deadline. The returns show that Obama paid a 20.5 percent tax rate last year on $789,674 in income. About half of that income came from Obama’s presidential salary, while the rest came from book royalties.

As White House Press Secretary Jay Carney noted in a blog post, “under the President’s own tax proposals, including the expiration of the high-income tax cuts and limitations on the value of tax preferences for high-income households, he would pay more in taxes.” Obama, indeed, would see his tax rate go up due to his called for expiration of the Bush tax cuts above $250,000 in income. Obama would not, however, have been affected by the Buffett Rule — which he is stumping for this week — in 2011, as he did not have $1 million in income.

Full Story Here: What Obama’s Tax Returns Tell Us: His Taxes Would Go Up Under His Own Plan | ThinkProgress.

E.J. Dionne Jr. :-:

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Thursday, the veteran conservative journalist Fred Barnes offered Mitt Romney some advice for improving his campaign, including the sensible (and one might also say humane) suggestion that on immigration, the presumptive nominee “would be wise to move away from his harsh position in the primaries.”

Then Barnes included this fascinating sentence: “According to a Romney adviser, his private view of immigration isn’t as anti-immigrant as he often sounded.”

What exactly does that mean? Does it mean Romney said things that he doesn’t really believe? What are we supposed to make of a candidate who takes certain public positions to court one group of voters — and then tries to reassure an entirely different group of voters by leaking the fact that he doesn’t really believe what he said to win votes from the first group? How many other “private” positions does Romney hold that we don’t know about?

Full Story Here: Tell us more about Romney’s ‘private’ views – PostPartisan – The Washington Post.

Conservatives and liberals don’t seem to agree about much, and they might not agree about recent studies linking conservatism to low intelligence and “low-effort” thinking.

As The Huffington Post reported in February, a study published in the journal “Psychological Science” showed that children who score low on intelligence tests gravitate toward socially conservative political views in adulthood–perhaps because conservative ideologies stress “structure and order” that make it easier to understand a complicated world.

Ouch.

And now there’s the new study linking conservative ideologies to “low-effort” thinking.

Full Story Here: Conservative Politics, ‘Low-Effort’ Thinking Linked In New Study.

Earlier this week, President Obama tried to remind conservatives that, not so long ago, they believed that “the biggest problem is judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” Unfortunately, at least one Republican judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit did not take kindly to this reminder, and he responded by throwing a tantrum during a judicial hearing and ordering a junior Justice Department attorney to write a three page letter intended to embarrass the president.

That letter is due today. Whatever it says, however, the Republican Judge Jerry Smith clearly needs a reminder that there was absolutely nothing unusual about President Obama’s comments. Need proof? Here’s President George W. Bush saying exactly the same things Obama did, over and over again:

Full Story Here: VIDEO: George W. Bush Agrees With Obama On Judicial Activism — Over and Over Again | ThinkProgress.

The left never had a secret plan or much discipline. But the Mormons really do have secrets and a lot of discipline.

Mitt Romney will be the Republican to face President Obama in the fall. Tuesday night was the clincher, as the Mormon zealot won in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington DC. He may stumble on, but the Catholic zealot Rick Santorum is finished.

It’s hard to detect any alluring feature in Romney’s psychic or political make-up, and I’m none too sure about Ann Romney, who at this stage of the game is filling the role played by the late Elizabeth Edwards in the Edwards campaign on its upward trajectory back in early 2008.

The last Republican challenger to an incumbent Democratic president was Bob Dole in 1996. I always had a soft spot for the guy for his crack, which backfired on him, when he was Ford’s veep nominee in 1976, running against the Carter/Mondale ticket: “I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans — enough to fill the city of Detroit.” There was a lot of howling because Dole said “Democrat,” thus diverting attention from the substantive charge which was probably true.

Full Story Here: Romney: Why It’s OK to Stick It to Him for Being a Mormon » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

In a 51-47 vote, 43 Senate Republicans and four Democrats filibustered to protect $24 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil. Although a majority voted for Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) bill, it fell short of the 60 needed. The only two Republicans to break rank were Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

A Think Progress Green analysis shows how oil and gas companies have funneled cash to the same senators who protected its handouts:

– The 47 senators voting against the bill have received $23,582,500 in career contributions from oil and gas. The 51 senators voting to repeal oil tax breaks have received $5,873,600.

– The senators who voted for Big Oil’s handouts received on average over four times as much career oil cash as those who voted to end them.

– Overall, Senate Republicans have taken $23.2 million in oil and gas contributions. Democrats received $6.66 million.

– Since 2011, Senate Republicans have voted seven times for pro-Big Oil interests and against clean energy three times.

Full Story Here: Senators Who Voted To Protect Oil Tax Breaks Received $23,582,500 From Big Oil | ThinkProgress.

The simple truth is this: we overestimated our achievement in 2008, and we underestimated our opponents in 2009.

The 2008 campaign was a campfire around which millions gathered. But after the election, it was nobody’s job or role to tend that campfire. The White House was focused on the minutiae of passing legislation, not on the magic of leading a movement. Obama For America did the best that it could, but the mass gatherings, the idealism, the expanded notions of American identity, the growing sense of a new national community, all of that disappeared.

It goes without saying that clear thinking and imaginative problem solving are easier in hindsight, away from the battlefield. I was in the White House for six months of 2009, and I was outside of it afterward. I had some of the above insights at the time, but many did not come to me in the middle of the drama and action. Most are the product of deeper reflection, which I was able to do only from a distance.

Nonetheless, the exercise of trying to sort out what might have been and trying to understand why nobody was able to make those things happen in real time has informed this book and shaped my arguments going forward.

Full Story Here: The Age of Obama: What Went Wrong (and How to Fix It).

Goehl, the executive director of National Peoples Action, was interviewed Friday on the PBS program Moyers & Company. When Bill Moyers asked Goehl if he was satisfied with the president’s recent attempts to employ populist rhetoric, he responded firmly, “We’re not.”

“I would say that it’s been hard for the president to tap into that populist bone in his body,” Goehl explained. “I think some of us question whether it’s there. It often feels like he’s kind of trying to eat his worst, or least favorite, vegetable. Putting some broccoli down his throat. And he can do it for a couple days. But then he kind of moves back towards the middle. But he’s got a chance to prove himself.”

Full Story Here: Moyers guest: Obama needs to back up populist rhetoric | The Raw Story.

Just over a year after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed a measure taking away most collective bargaining rights for public workers, labor unions scored a victory as a federal court struck down portions of the law. The court ruled that the state cannot prevent public sector unions from automatically deducting dues from workers’ paychecks and cannot require them to be recertified annually.

The law, known as Act 10, requires most public sector unions to hold annual votes on whether a majority of its members want to recertify the union. It also took away the rights of some unions to automatically collect dues from members’ paychecks.

The court kept most of the law in place, but it ruled that the state did not have the power to pick and choose which unions could deduct dues. Under Act 10, only “public safety unions” — those representing firefighters and police officers — could continue to take out payments automatically.

Full Story Here: Portions Of Scott Walker’s Anti-Union Law Struck Down By Federal Court.

President Barack Obama wrapped up an afternoon fundraising swing through the northeast Friday, declaring his Republican opponents have a go-it-alone attitude that threatens to permanently stifle the country’s middle class.

“They would gut things that we’ve always believed is at the core of making America great – education, science, caring for the most vulnerable.” the president to chants of “four more years” in a packed Portland, Maine gymnasium. “They are wrong.”

“The idea that you would keep doing the same thing over and over, even after it’s proven not to work, that’s the sign of madness,” he also said of Republican-backed economic policies.

Full Story Here: Obama campaigns against GOP ‘madness’ – CNN Political Ticker – CNN.com Blogs.

Wisconsin’s state elections board has officially announced that Gov. Scott Walker will face a recall election this spring.

The Government Accountability Board said this morning that 900,939 valid signatures were collected out of 931,053 petitions to recall Walker, representing a very low failure rate of 3.5%. The total number of signatures was far beyond — 67% more than — the number required.

Full Story Here: Wis. Gov. Walker Recall: It’s On | Common Dreams.

As the only Republican Congressman at a rally for the Equal Rights Amendment on Thursday, Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) gave women an unexpected piece of advice: Give your money to Democrats.

“I think these are very precarious times for women, it seems. So many of your rights are under assault,” he told the crowd of mostly women. “I’ll tell you this: Contribute your money to people who speak out on your behalf, because the other side — my side — has a lot of it. And you need to send your own message. You need to remind people that you vote, you matter, and that they can’t succeed without your help.”

The Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress passed in 1972 but has not yet been ratified by the necessary 38 states, simply says that equality under the law “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) reintroduced the legislation this year in hopes that it would finally become a part of the Constitution.

Full Story Here: Richard Hanna, GOP Congressman, Tells Women To Give Their Money To Democrats.

Robert Reich :-:

Conservatives love to rail against “big government.” But the surge of cynicism engulfing the nation isn’t about government’s size. It flows from a growing perception that government doesn’t work for average people but for big business, Wall Street and the very rich—who, in effect, have bought it. In a recent Pew poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.

That view is understandable. Wall Street got bailed out by taxpayers, but one out of every three homeowners with a mortgage is underwater, caught in the tsunami caused by the Street’s excesses. The bailout wasn’t conditioned on the banks helping these homeowners, and subsequent help has been meager. The recent settlement of claims against the banks is tiny compared with how much homeowners have lost. Millions of people are losing their homes or simply walking away from mortgage payments they can no longer afford.

Homeowners can’t use bankruptcy to reorganize their mortgage loans because the banks have engineered laws to prohibit this. Banks have also made it extremely difficult for young people to use bankruptcy to reorganize their student loans. Yet corporations routinely use bankruptcy to renege on contracts. American Airlines, which is in bankruptcy, plans to fire 13,000 people—
16 percent of its workforce—while cutting back health benefits for current employees. It also intended to terminate its underfunded pension plans, until the government agency charged with picking up the tab screamed so loudly that American backed off and proposed to freeze the plans.

Full Story Here: ‘Big Government’ Isn’t the Problem, Big Money Is | The Nation.

And not for want of opportunity.

After Romney insisted that more drilling in Mexico and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could bring down the cost of gas, The Huffington Post contacted members of Romney’s economic team — two revolving-door lobbyists and two former chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush — to ask if they would vouch for the claim.

“I will pass. Sorry,” prominent macroeconomist Gregory Mankiw, a Romney advisor, replied when contacted by HuffPost about an interview. Other queries were similarly denied or unreturned.

Full Story Here: Mitt Romney Gas Prices Rhetoric Doesn’t Get Support Of His Own Economists.

OPS: Lies so blatant even his own paid shills can’t support them

Kucinich was the first electoral victim of the current round of redistricting, which saw congressional districts redrawn in states across the country after the 2010 Census. A Republican governor and legislature carved up northern Ohio districts with an eye toward eliminating at least one Democratic seat, and they achieved their goal by forcing Kucinich and Kaptur into the same district.

That district favored Kaptur and, after a hard-fought race she prevailed by a fifty-six to thirty-nine margin, with the remainder going to a third candidate.

Though the race in Ohio’s 9th District received scant attention compared with the Republican presidential contest in the state, the result will have national consequences.

Full Story Here: What America Lost When Dennis Kucinich Lost | The Nation.

In 2008, Fox’s coverage occasionally even mirrored the facts: expanding domestic oil drilling will not significantly lower prices, and the only way to reduce our vulnerability to gas price spikes is to use less oil. Perhaps there was more room for reality-based coverage at Fox when there wasn’t an incumbent president to defeat?

Full Story Here: FLASHBACK: Fox News On Gas Prices In 2008 | Media Matters for America.

The new ad, to be featured atop gas pumps in Buchanan’s hometown of Sarasota, Fla., comes after The New York Times admonished Boehner for agreeing to appear alongside Buchanan at a weekend gathering of wealthy GOP donors.

Proceeds from Saturday night’s event will go to benefit Boehner’s leadership PAC, with supporters paying between $500 and $10,000 for a chance to have their photo taken with the House speaker.

Full Story Here: Vern Buchanan Attack Ad: House Dems Hit GOP Lawmaker Over Fundraising Schemes.

The retirement of Olympia Snowe, at the young (by senatorial standards) age of 65, has again dramatized the perilous condition of the Senate moderates. They have been scorned, marginalized, and hunted close to extinction. Yet the striking fact about Snowe’s career is that, far from being shunted to the sidelines, she has wielded, or been given the opportunity to wield, enormous power. She has used it, on the whole, quite badly.

When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.

Full Story Here: Olympia Snowe’s Strange Martyrdom — Daily Intel.

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.

But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (As Santorum and Romney Battle for the Loony Right, the Rest of Us Should Not Gloat).

Republicans are worried this election could be their last chance to stop history. This is fear talking. But not paranoia.

Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining to stop permanent nightfall is dwindling away.

“America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course,” announces the dark, old-timey preamble to Paul Ryan’s “The Roadmap Plan,” a statement of fiscal principles that shaped the budget outline approved last spring by 98 percent of the House Republican caucus. Rick Santorum warns his audiences, “We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.” Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like “We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,” and that this election “could be our last chance.”

Full Story Here: Why 2012 Is the Republicans Last Chance — New York Magazine.

Women make up 50.7 percent of the U.S. population, but they only make up 15 percent of the Senate and 16.6 percent of the House, according to a Congressional Research Services report. This is an obvious increase from 1945, when no women served in the Senate and about 2 percent of House members were women, but the number of women has leveled off recently and even dropped slightly compared to the most recent Congress. As the GOP pursues policies that alienate women, it will be interesting to note how that affects the participation of women in politics.

Full Story Here: Women Account For About 15 Percent Of Congress | ThinkProgress.

Forty-three foreign and Egyptian non-profit workers – including the son of the U.S. transportation secretary – are accused of receiving illegal funds from abroad and carrying out political activities unrelated to their civil society work.

Judge Mahmud Mohamed Shukry adjourned the trial until April 26 at the end of the session in the rowdy chamber, where television reporters crowded around him and an interior ministry official threatened to expel journalists.

His decision could give more time for a diplomatic solution to the case, lawyers said.

Full Story Here: Egypt NGO Trial Adjourned Until April.

OPS: …. then it will be adjourned again until October. Does the term “October Surprise” mean anything to you in this context? Or, “Iranian Hostage Crisis” ?  Let’s hope Obama remembers history and has been tracking republicans in communication with these Egyptians lately. We’ve seen this movie.

But with Santorum – a conservative Roman Catholic and member of Opus Dei – there’s a truly manic edge to his religious pronouncements and activities. It was Santorum and Mrs S, don’t forget, who took their still-born baby home from the hospital and laid it among their living tots, telling them, “he’s with the angels now,” an episode Mrs Santorum later recorded in a memoir.

Santorum doesn’t believe in the right to privacy. Not that Obama has any qualms about taps on your phone and powers of arbitrary arrest, but he probably doesn’t care too much about whatever human combos are being tried out in the bedroom. Santorum frets 24/7 about beastliness and unnatural acts, and yearns to restore full rights to snoops to kick down the motel door, twitch aside the blankets and haul couples off for all manner of moral abominations.

Full Story Here: Time on the Cross With Rick Santorum » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Jeb Bush finds some of the rhetoric in the GOP presidential debates “a little troubling.”

“I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that’s kind of where we are,” said the former Florida governor Thursday while answering a question from the audience during a speech in Dallas, according to Fox News. “I think it changes when we get to the general election. I hope.”

In an interview with a local CBS affiliate, Bush cautioned the contenders not to campaign too far to the right. “I think it’s important for the candidates to recognize though they have to appeal to primary voters, and not turn off independent voters that will be part of a winning coalition,” said the younger brother of former President George W. Bush.

Full Story Here: Jeb Bush Finds 2012 GOP Debate Rhetoric ‘A Little Troubling’.

OPS: Get Ready. He’s going to play the sane-savior of the republican party at the convention.

Matt Taibbi  :-:

How about that race for the Republican nomination? Was last night’s debate crazy, or what?

Throughout this entire process, the spectacle of these clowns thrashing each other and continually seizing and then fumbling frontrunner status has left me with an oddly reassuring feeling, one that I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on. In my younger days I would have just assumed it was regular old Schadenfreude at the sight of people like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich suffering, but this isn’t like that – it’s something different than the pleasure of watching A-Rod strike out in the playoffs.

No, it was while watching the debates last night that it finally hit me: This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It’s as if all of the American public’s bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.

Full Story Here: Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday this morning, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) couldn’t explain why the public rejects large parts of the Republican legislative agenda and instead blamed Democrats for opposing it…..

Watch it:

Full Story Here: Cantor Can’t Explain Why Americans Oppose GOP Agenda | ThinkProgress.

Full Story Here: Reid To Recommend Obama Recess Appoint All Stalled Executive Nominees | TPM Livewire.

Rick Santorum seems to be (if the bloom isn’t off by the time this article comes out) the latest anybody-but-Romney Flavor of the Week, so it’s work taking a look at his economic ideas.

I know, I know: he’s got some interesting, er, cultural baggage.  But I’ll leave that to the culture warriors.

The first thing that strikes me about Santorum’s economics is that, of all the Republican candidates save the admitted long-shot Buddy Roemer (whom I interviewed here), he is the one verbally farthest from the piggy-piggy give-me-more hyper-capitalist mentality and the libertopian fantasy that the Fwee Mocket will solve all our problems if we just give it a chance.

Anyone who knows their history will know that neither of these attitudes are actually required to be a conservative in good standing, or even a good Republican.  There’s not room here for a dissertation on American history, but neither Abraham Lincoln nor Teddy Roosevelt worked this way.

So perhaps what we have here is a rational Republican response to our present economic situation.  Everyone who’s not a hopeless ideologue knows that American capitalism has gone off course in recent years, and somebody is going to have to reform it.  It can potentially be done from the left or the right, but done it must be if we are to avoid national decline.

It’s no secret where Santorum is getting this stuff. Its lineage in Catholic social teaching is obvious. Broadly speaking, it’s distributist economics.  Google “distributism” and you’ll see what I mean. It’s the capitalism of Main Street, not Wall Street.  It has a long intellectual history, and in many ways it’s actually more conservative, with small “c,” than what the current Republican establishment believes in.

Those dollar-sign patriots have been busy selling off the country piece-by-piece for personal profit. There’s a glimmer of hope out there that Mitt Romney represents their quiet repentance, and coming turn towards economic nationalism, but I’m very unsure on this.

So I’m fairly sympathetic with Santorum’s overall mentality on economics.  It’s when I look at his detailed proposals that I start to get worried.  The substance behind his populist pitch isn’t that solid, and a lot of it is clueless.

Let’s take as the baseline of what he thinks this page on his campaign website.  He says, to pick the interesting items out of a sea of Republican boilerplate,

10. Eliminate the corporate income tax for manufacturers – from 35% to 0% – which will spur middle income job creation in the United States and will create a job multiplier effect for workers

Now this is a classic case of doing someone a favor they never asked for.  I work for one of America’s leading organizations devoted to fixing the decline of American manufacturing, so I have some idea of both what would help this sector, and manufacturers want.  And I have never, in the five years I’ve been working this issue, heard any manufacturer say they thought they should be exempt from taxes.

So this is, frankly, bizarre.

What do American manufacturers want?  They want our government to stop the foreign-currency manipulation that puts them at a horrendous (and contrary to treaties) disadvantage relative to their competitors in China and elsewhere.  They want an end to foreign trade barriers that open our markets to the world without getting the same treatment in return. They want an end to the theft of their intellectual property and proprietary technology.  They want an end to the disadvantage of having to compete with nations that don’t impose the cost of serious pollution controls.  They want a reasonable balance of regulations here at home.  They want government programs that serve their sector—like the Manufacturing Extension Partnership—to get at least some token fraction of the largesse that Uncle Sam lavishes on sectors like finance and agriculture.  And they want a public education system that trains the skilled employees they need.

But a free ride on taxes?  No, I never heard that one.  This makes me wonder if Santorum actually even asked any actual manufacturers what would help them.

14. Spur innovation in America by increasing the Research & Development Tax Credit from 14% to 20% and make it permanent.

OK, this is good. It’s a well-established fact (first noted by Alexander Hamilton in 1791) that society should subsidize innovators because they can’t capture the entire value of their innovations, which spill over to benefit the rest of us without our paying.

15. Eliminate all energy and most agriculture subsidies within four years letting the markets work.

Now I’m actually (depending, of course, on that weasel-word “most”) impressed.  Telling people the truth about agricultural subsidies—that they’re a racket—takes a fair amount of bravery, as most people still suffer the delusion that they’re a kind-hearted attempt to rescue family farms from the Dust Bowl.  The reality is that corporate agribusiness pockets most of the cash, and any subsidy that does trickle down to genuine family farms just enables them to stay alive to get squeezed harder by the agribusiness oligopolies that overprice their inputs and underprice their outputs.

18. Pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution capping government spending at 18% of GDP.

This, I am afraid, can only be described as disingenuous and stupid.

For one thing, you can’t even have a true balanced-budget amendment unless you are literally willing to put the federal budget under the control of the judiciary—which, after all, would enforce anything set up as a matter of black-letter law. And I flatly don’t believe any Congress would really allow this.

For another, whatever one may feel about limited government or the desirability of a small public sector, the reality is that if you don’t run deficits during recessions, recessions will be much worse.  John Maynard Keynes doesn’t get much respect from conservatives (except Richard Nixon), but he was right, as shown by the fact that all Republican administrations use his playbook when actually in office.  FDR slammed on the budget brakes in 1937 and got the Recession of 1937-8.

I wish I could dismiss this proposal as mere posturing, but Santorum seems to be going deep with it, as shown by  “31. Audit the Federal Reserve and return it to its original purpose – a single charter to only manage inflation” This indicates a disturbing seriousness of intent.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any document establishing that the sole original purpose of the Fed was to control inflation. It’s not the European Central Bank or its predecessor the Bundesbank—which really does and did have such a mandate.  When the Fed was founded in 1913, the U.S. was on the gold standard anyway, so controlling the value of money wasn’t within its brief; arguments over inflation vs. deflation focused on so-called bimetallism, or the dilution of the gold standard with silver.

Anyhow… the main purpose of proposing a balanced-budget amendment is to win the hearts of fiscal conservatives without actually having to name real budget cuts.  Everyone’s in favor of small government; no-one’s in favor of actually throwing their own mother off Medicare. Proposing such an amendment enables one to keep one’s ideological purity while postponing the cost until some distant future day when it is (supposedly) going to be passed.  Disingenuous.

19. Negotiate 5 Free Trade Agreements and submit to Congress in first year of Presidency

No, no, NO! This is really witless. If Santorum truly got the nature of America’s current economic mess, he’d know that the expansion of “free” (free for them, not for us) trade over the last 15 years has been one of our big economic mistakes.  We need to be dialing back, renegotiating, and withdrawing from trade agreements, not signing more.  (Only Buddy Roemer understands this.)  And this is despite the fact that Santorum has voted against some free-trade agreements in the past.

And as for that “5” ?  Why does the number of trade agreements mean anything?  It’s the dollar amount of the trade that counts, not racking up treaties with a large number of small economies. This minor detail gives me the feeling Santorum doesn’t have advisors who know their stuff on the most basic level. It reads like something strung together by a bunch of bright but inexperienced volunteers.

Santorum’s last item is something I actually agree with:

32. Strengthen our national security and national defense so that we are not dependent upon our foes or competitors for critical manufacturing, technology, energy and other security needs

Forgiving, for a moment, the fact that this quote has the direction of causality between the industrial base and national security backwards, it is correct.  So I’m glad to see Santorum’s heart is in the right place here.  But I’m still not glad that he hasn’t proposed the key measures that would actually make this happen.  To wit:

• He’s actually come out against doing something about Chinese currency manipulation, invoking the old boogey-man trade war.

• He’s against domestic-content laws—which aren’t perfect, but would still be a step in the right direction if rationally implemented.

• He’s denounced the auto bailout—which against wasn’t perfect, but the U.S. simply can’t be a serious industrial power without an auto industry.

All told, my take on Santorum on economics is that he’s partly well-intentioned on some level, but has little grip on the really key policy questions, is susceptible to dangerous Republican clichés pushed by various obsession groups, and is given to posturing.  Better than some of the other candidates, but still no great shakes.

Ian Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank, and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

WATCHING the Republican Party struggling to agree on a presidential candidate, one wonders whether the G.O.P. shouldn’t just sit this election out — just give 2012 a pass.

You know how in Scrabble sometimes you look at your seven letters and you’ve got only vowels that spell nothing? What do you do? You go back to the pile. You throw your letters back and hope to pick up better ones to work with. That’s what Republican primary voters seem to be doing. They just keep going back to the pile but still coming up with only vowels that spell nothing.

There’s a reason for that: Their pile is out of date. The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.

Full Story Here: We Need a Second Party – NYTimes.com.

The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

Full Story Here: The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

The irony is that after this announcement, this very well may become a wedge issue — against Republicans.

That’s because anyone who comes out against the proposal Obama outlined today will be asked a simple question: Are you saying that employers should dictate to female employees whether they should or shouldn’t have access to birth control coverage?

Full Story Here: Birth control may now be wedge issue against GOP – The Plum Line – The Washington Post.

A proposed “personhood” bill in Oklahoma would define human life as beginning at the moment of conception. In response, Oklahoma State Sen. Constance Johnson tried to amend the legislation to make it illegal for men to spill their seed outside a woman’s vagina.

“As a woman and a 31-year veteran of the legislative process in Oklahoma, I am increasingly offended by state law trends that solely focus on the female’s role in the reproductive process,” she explained on The Guardian. “With Oklahoma’s new, never-before-experienced Republican majority, we are seeing enactment of more and more measures that adversely affect women and their rights to access safe medical procedures when making reproductive healthcare decisions. ”

Full Story Here: Okla. lawmaker defends ‘spilled semen’ amendment | The Raw Story.

Greg Palast :-:

The Plan is working.

Mitt Romney’s biggest backer didn’t want him to win.

We know that Paul “The Vulture” Singer, Romney’s Daddy Warbucks, organized the “grassroots” campaign to replace Romney with Gov. Chris Christie back in September.

That flopped, so Singer and the billionaire boys’ club that courted Christie moved over to Romney. Not that they had a choice. They knew Moonrocks Gingrich, who thinks he’s running for Master Jedi, and Saint Santorum who thinks he’s running for pope, would end up road kill in November.

Full Story Here: The Billionaires’ Brokered GOP Convention | Truthout.

I often ask Congressional Democrats these days: “If you agree that your Republican counterparts in Congress are the most craven, corporatist, fact-denying, falsifying, anti-99 percent, militaristic Republicans in the party’s history, then why are you not landsliding them?” Their responses are largely in the form of knowing smiles and furrowed brows.

There are answers that are more specific to account for the large election losses in 2010, the loss of the House of Representatives to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and the prospect of losing the House and the Senate this November. Chief among them is that the two parties are vigorously dialing for the same commercial dollars to finance their campaigns. The resultant inhibitions and self-censorships bring the parties’ real agendas closer together, erasing the bright lines that make elections clearer choices for voters.

Here are eight initiatives that could landslide the Republicans in November’s Congressional contests. It starts with a ringing declaration that recalls the legendary labor rally challenge: “Whose side are you on?” With the two parties often seen as Republicrats or DemReps, due to the lack of credible, distinct differences on military, foreign policy, trade, agribusiness, energy and corporate crime/welfare subjects, among others, such a proclamation of “we the people” helps frame the details of this fresh approach, as follows.

Full Story Here: Can Democrats Landslide Republicans? | Common Dreams.

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

Full Story Here: The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Mitt Romney answered his last question from a voter three weeks ago, and just about every day since then, he has swept through towns across America like a whistling train conductor proclaiming, “All aboard.”

Out are 55-minute town hall meetings. In are 15-minute stump speeches at buffed-up rallies. There are rope lines and hot lights, giant flags and Secret Service agents with wires in their ears. The objective: appear presidential, avoid gaffes and convince Republicans that they have no reasonable option left but to rally around Romney’s winning candidacy.

That was the image he presented here Saturday night with his Nevada caucus victory speech. Hundreds of adoring supporters waved “Nevada Believes” signs as the candidate assailed President Obama. Yet the music playing as soon as Romney finished speaking — “A Little Less Conversation” by Elvis Presley — underscored his new don’t-ask-questions-just- get-on-board mantra.

Full Story Here: On campaign trail, Romney skips questions in taking up mantle of likely GOP nominee – The Washington Post.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) announced Monday that he will unveil “Buffett Rule” legislation this week. President Barack Obama highlighted the need for such a measure at the State of the Union earlier this month and will likely continue to call for it throughout his presidential re-election campaign.

Whitehouse is expected to introduce the Paying a Fair Share Act on Wednesday. His proposal would codify the “Buffett Rule,” named after billionaire Warren Buffett: It would require people who make more than $1 million to pay a 30 percent effective tax rate. Tax loopholes now allow some of the wealthiest Americans to pay lower tax rates than people in the middle class.

“Our tax system is long-overdue for reform,” materials from Whitehouse’s office stated. “In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed adding to the tax code a ‘Buffett Rule,’ which would ensure that millionaires and billionaires pay at least the tax rate paid by middle-class families. Senator Whitehouse’s Paying a Fair Share Act would codify that proposal, bulwarking the system against gimmickry and abuse.”

Full Story Here: Senate Democrats To Push ‘Buffett Rule’ Bill This Week.

The GOP front-runners endorse a plan that could disenfranchise millions of voters—including their own.

As Republican primary voters head to the polls in Florida on Tuesday, both GOP front-runners have endorsed a policy that would contradict existing law and could disenfranchise millions of voters across the country.

During a recent debate, both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney supported getting rid of bilingual ballots when the topic was brought up by the moderator. “I would have ballots in English,” Gingrich said. “And I think you could have programs where virtually everybody would be able to read the ballots.” Romney agreed. “I think Speaker Gingrich is right with regards to what he’s described,” he said.

That wasn’t much of a stretch for Gingrich, who once called Spanish “the language of living in a ghetto.” Yet their glib demand for English-only ballots would require amending the Voting Rights Act and doing away with hard-won legal requirements that have existed for decades. It’s a sharp turn away from the Bush administration, which despite a spotty civil rights record filed more ballot access cases on behalf of non-English speakers than any administration had before.

Full Story Here: Gingrich and Romney Want to Say Adios to Bilingual Ballots | Mother Jones.

Unbeknownst to the press, President Obama met Friday evening with former president George H.W. Bush and his son, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, in the Oval Office.

White House officials did not list the meeting on the president’s schedule but released a photo on Flickr. According to the photo’s time stamp, the meeting occurred shortly after 5 p.m., about the time the president returned to the White House from a fundraiser.

When asked what the men discussed and why it wasn’t on the schedule, the White House released a statement saying, “The three men enjoyed a personal visit in the Oval Office – as they have done on previous occasions when President Bush is Washington.”

The Bushes are in town to attend the exclusive Alfalfa Club dinner Saturday, an annual get-together for Washington power brokers that Obama also is scheduled to attend, according to the Associated Press.

Full Story Here: Obama hosts George H.W. and Jeb Bush at White House – POLITICO.com.

OPS: Making secret ‘back room’ deals with the oligarchy again Barry? How bad did you sell us out THIS time?

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed? Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”? Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?

Full Story Here: Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton | Common Dreams.

Excuse me for not yelling myself hoarse for Obama’s warmed over State of the Union address.

While I agree with his call for economic fairness, there was not much in his speech that was new or all that promising. And there were several troublesome passages for progressives.

First, mentioning John Boehner, Obama said he was still open to a grand compromise on Social Security and Medicare, which would make Americans have to work longer and get less benefits from Medicare and Medicaid. We don’t need a Democrat to hack away at these crucial social programs.

Full Story Here: In Obama’s State of the Union, Troublesome Passages for Progressives | The Progressive.

Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader says Obama’s criticism of income inequality and Wall Street excess fail to live up to his record in office. “[Obama] says one thing and does another,” Nader says. “Where has he been for over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one or two to jail.” On foreign policy, Nader says, “I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. [Obama] was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms.” [includes rush transcript]

Full Story Here: “He Says One Thing and Does Another”: Ralph Nader Responds to Obama’s State of the Union Address.

In today’s On the News segment: Mitt Romney is definitely Wall Street’s favorite guy, 83 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s economic plan laid out in his State of the Union speech, the situation at Fukushima may once again be getting worse, and more.

Full Story Here: On the News With Thom Hartmann: Mitt Romney Is Definitely Wall Street’s Favorite Guy, and More | Truthout.

One has to feel for Romney, thrashing about amidst the Newt horror. Here comes the portly Georgian, brushing aside the Mormon priests guarding Mitt’s hotel suite, kicking open the bedroom door, seizing Romney by the throat…Aaaargh! And then Romney is awake, realizing that this is a cold-sweat nightmare that will last … maybe until they close in Florida on January 31, maybe until Super Tuesday on March 6, when nine states hold their primaries, maybe….

We left Romney amidst the supposed flush of victory in Iowa (now awarded to Santorum), and triumph in New Hampshire, with polls in South Carolina showing him a solid ten points ahead of Gingrich, who made a poor showing in New Hampshire on top of a fourth place in Iowa below Santorum and Ron Paul.

Full Story Here: Here He Comes Again! » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

“An activist Supreme Court, misusing its authority by legislating policy from the bench, ignored decades of legal precedent when it ruled in 2010 that corporations have the same constitutional right of free speech as people,” he said in a statement.

The Supreme Court held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as people, overturning campaign finance laws that restricted the amount of money a corporation could spend in an election.

Full Story Here: Rep. Johnson: Citizens United allowed corporate money to dictate public policy | The Raw Story.

Memo to Republican Establishment:

I would send this memo to each of you individually, but I’m not sure exactly who you are. I’ve been told that you exist and that people like my colleagues Bill Bennett, Karl Rove, and Bill Kristol are charter members of it.

I am assuming you are out there and I assume there are more than three of you. At any rate, I thought I’d take a moment to catch up with you and make some observations on how things are going for your party.

Let me break it to you gently — you’ve got a first-class disaster on your hands. I know you boys thought this thing would work out and you would be able to whip the Republicans in line to fall in behind Mitt (I assume you are all males but if there is a female in the establishment, I apologize.) Not going too good, is it fellows?

Full Story Here: Carville to GOP: You have a disaster on your hands – CNN.com.

Less than a month into its 2012 term, the Indiana General Assembly has become deeply divided, after resurrecting a fight over controversial right-to-work legislation that disrupted the body’s work last year.

On Wednesday, Indiana House Democrats stayed out of session and denied the chamber the quorum necessary to move forward in order to protest their GOP colleagues’ attempts to push through the measure. As a consequence, Democratic members potentially face fines of $1,000 per day until they return.

The current controversy is over Democrats’ attempts to add amendments to the legislation. Democrats wanted the right-to-work issue made into a referendum, so that the people of Indiana would vote on it directly.

Full Story Here: Indiana Right To Work: House Democrats Revolt, Face Fines Of $1,000 Per Day From GOP.

Uprising has ‘potential to rock the politics not just of the state but of the nation in 2012′

Agencies are reporting that organizers of the effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have submitted more than one million signatures, far beyond the number needed to force a recall election.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: It would mark the first such gubernatorial recall in state history and would be only the third gubernatorial recall election in U.S. history. Organizers Tuesday also handed in 845,000 signatures against Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch as well as petitions against four GOP state senators including Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau.

The sheer number of signatures being filed against Walker – nearly as many as the total votes cast for the governor in November 2010 and almost twice as many as those needed to trigger a recall election – ensure the election will be held, said officials with the state Democratic Party and United Wisconsin, the group that launched the Walker recall.

Full Story Here: One Million Wisconsinites: Recall Gov. Walker | Common Dreams.

House Speaker John Boehner, hoping to spare fellow Republicans a second embarrassing defeat over payroll tax cuts, is prepared to navigate around rebellious Tea Party-aligned lawmakers to get a deal, according to congressional aides.

Republicans in the House of Representatives got a public drubbing from critics within and outside the party in December for initially refusing to approve a Senate plan to extend the tax break for 160 million Americans through February.

The party of lower taxes was left on the defensive, countering a barrage of criticism that its unwillingness to compromise threatened an effective tax hike on workers, potentially damaging the fragile economic recovery.

Full Story Here: Tea Party may get rebuffed in tax cut showdown – Yahoo! News.

In a press release announcing the ad, Jon Stewart spoke about his new role as head of the Super PAC:

Full Story Here: Colbert Super PAC Releases Romney Attack Ad In South Carolina (VIDEO).

An effort by the Republican National Committee may further corporatize the electoral process.

The RNC filed a legal brief Tuesday arguing that a ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates is unconstitutional.

The Huffington Post reports:

The ban, part of a 1907 anti-corruption law that helped curb the influence of corporate robber barons, is one of the last bulwarks of campaign finance law left after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision two years ago.

As ThinkProgress notes, an overturning of the ban would have massive consequences:

Full Story Here: GOP Pushes to Further Corporatize Elections | Common Dreams.

Warren Buffett is ready to call Republicans’ tax bluff. Last fall, Senator Mitch McConnell said that if Buffett were feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check.” The jab was in response to Buffett’s August 2011 New York Times op-ed, which made hay of the fact that our tax system is so unbalanced, Buffett (worth about $45 billion) pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Senator John Thune promptly introduced the “Buffett Rule Act,” an option on tax forms that would allow the rich to donate more in taxes to help pay down the national debt. It was, as Buffett told me for this week’s TIME cover story, “a tax policy only a Republican could come up with.”

Still, he’s willing to take them up on it. “It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that [the deficit] can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” he says with a chuckle. So Buffett has pledged to match 1 for 1 all such voluntary contributions made by Republican members of Congress. “And I’ll even go 3 for 1 for McConnell,” he says. That could be quite a bill if McConnell takes the challenge; after all, the Senator is worth at least $10 million. As Buffett put it to me, “I’m not worried.” (See below for a statement from McConnell’s office.)

Full Story Here: Buffett Challenges McConnell, Republicans on Tax Policy | Swampland | TIME.com.

Democrats and many progressives are watching all of this with glee. The Republicans are, it seems, eating their just desserts.

For four years, Republican leaders have fanned the tea party’s destructive flames. They’ve been stoking the rage of the conservative fringe ever since Sarah Palin stood up and told armed, angry crowds of white people that they were the “real America.” When that divisive strategy failed to win the presidency, the party’s establishment happily mounted its tea party tiger and rode roughshod over Capitol Hill. The unvarnished cynicism of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner has been at times obscene; they’ve openly preferred a failed Obama presidency to a successful economic recovery. And the tea party caucus has provided cover for this ugliness, allowing Republican leaders to throw up their hands in helplessness—sorry dude, we’d like to make an effort at governing, but the caucus just won’t allow it.

Full Story Here: Why the GOP’s Spectacular Collapse Isn’t Good for Social Justice – COLORLINES.

Dear Tea Party Movement,

For the last few months, the world has been fascinated by your frenzied search for a presidential candidate who is not Mitt Romney. We know that you find the man inauthentic and that you have buoyed up a string of anti-Mitts in the Iowa polling — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich — buffoons all, preposterous figures whom you have rightfully changed your minds about as soon as you got to know them.

It was quite a spectacle, your quest for the non-Romney — and I think we all know why you undertook it. In ways that matter, Romney is clearly a problem for you. His views on abortion, for example, change with the winds. Ditto, gay rights. He designed the Massachusetts health insurance system that was the model for Obamacare. And he’s even said that he approved of the TARP bank bailout, the abomination that ignited the Tea Party uprising in the first place.

Grievous offenses all, I have no doubt. Still, my advice to you idealists of the right is this: get over it. Not for sell-out reasons like: Romney has the best chance of beating Obama. No. You should get behind the charging Massachusetts RINO (your favorite term for a Republican-In-Name-Only sellout type) because, in a certain paradoxical way, he may turn out to be the truest of all the candidates to the spirit of your movement.

After all, given everything you represent, why wouldn’t you line up behind this quarter-billionaire who’s calling for just a little human love and sympathy for billionaires?  I’m sure you already understand me perfectly well, but just to be certain, let me make the case.

Full Story Here: Pity the Quarter-Billionaire: An Open Letter to the Tea Party | Common Dreams.

The past year has seen an unprecedented wave of Republican bills to drug test the poor and jobless. It also saw a smaller wave of Democratic bills that said in response, “No, you pee in the cup.”

One of the most recent retorts comes from Georgia, where last month Democratic state Rep. Scott Holcomb introduced a bill requiring members of the local legislature to prove they’re not Legislating Under the Influence. Holcomb told HuffPost he came up with the idea because he was struck by a bill from his Republican colleagues to drug test welfare applicants.

“I was really struck by how awful it was,” he said. “I wanted to bring some attention to it.”

Democrats in Florida, Ohio and Tennessee have done the same thing. Tennessee state representative G.A. Hardaway said his bill to test lawmakers was inspired by constituents annoyed with a Republican welfare-drug-testing bill. “They said to me, ‘how do we know y’all aren’t on drugs?’” Hardaway told local TV station WMC-TV. “I thought, well, you don’t.”

Full Story Here: Dems Fire Back At GOP Proposals To Drug Test Jobless: ‘You Pee In The Cup’.

“He has decided not to ‘wade into the swamp,’” according to a source familiar with the Republican president’s thinking, who described Bush’s decision on condition of anonymity.

“He’ll of course support the GOP nominee, but doesn’t really care to weigh in. He likes following politics but doesn’t feel the need to be out there ‘opining, bloviating.’ It’s just not him,” the source told AFP.

Bush handed President Barack Obama the keys to the White House three years ago this month after serving two terms but has kept a strikingly low profile as Republicans battle over who will take on the embattled Democrat in November.

Full Story Here: AFP: Bush to stay out of Republican ‘swamp’.

Republican Mitt Romney’s tax plan would increase taxes on low-income families while cutting taxes for the middle-class and the rich, according to an independent study released Thursday.

On average, households making less than $20,000 would see their taxes increase by more than 60 percent, said the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group that studied the Romney plan.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 would get small tax cuts, averaging 2.2 percent, or about $250, the study said. People making more than $1 million would get tax cuts averaging 15 percent, or about $146,000.

“Virtually everybody with a big income is getting a tax cut,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Full Story Here: Mitt Romney Plan Raises Taxes On Poor Families, Helps Millionaires: Study.

Each and every Republican candidate has called for trillions of dollars in new tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and corporations — all while calling for ending Medicare as we know it and dramatic cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and countless other programs and services that Americans depend on each day.

All of the candidates would take us back to the Bush-era policies that increased income inequality, resulted in the worst job growth in decades, exploded the deficit and national debt, and ultimately crashed the economy. Indeed, the policies proposed by the candidates would not only embrace this failed economic agenda, they would take it even further.

Full Story Here: REPORT: The Republican Candidates’ Economic Agenda For The 1 Percent | ThinkProgress.

In his new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” Tom Frank turns his mordant eye on the unlikeliest political development of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right. The deregulation of Wall Street, championed for 30 years by right-wing leaders, had led to an economic catastrophe so frightening that the country elected a liberal Democrat [OPS: Obama has proven to be a Centrist Republican - if Obama represents the new 'Liberal Democrat' democracy has already ended in this country.] to the presidency. Yet two years later, the most conservative faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, had taken effective control of the House of Representatives, the regulation of Wall Street had stalled, and the champions of economic deregulation in Washington had emerged stronger than ever.

Frank, author of the bestselling book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” provides a pithy and nuanced explanation of what he calls the “hard-times swindle.” He spoke with Salon from his father’s home in Kansas City, Mo.

Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, “We’re all socialists now.” What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?

Full Story Here: The Tea Party’s “utopian market populism” – Salon.com.

The banker’s town, Pottersville, is filled with bars, gambling dens and despair. The people’s town of Bedford Falls is made of hope, hard working middle class families, and their homes financed by the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan.

The film’s happy ending is the people of Bedford Falls banding together to rescue George Bailey and the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan that had given so many of them a leg up over the years. Republicans seek a different conclusion. They find middle class cooperation and community intolerable. They want the banker, Henry Potter, with his “every man for himself” philosophy to triumph. In the spirit of their self-centered mentor Ayn Rand, Republicans are trying to disfigure America so she resembles Pottersville.

Full Story Here: Republicans Try to Impose Selfishness on American People | Truthout.

My political prediction for 2012 (based on absolutely no inside information): Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State — a position he’s apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President.

So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton.

Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (My Political Prediction for 2012: It’s Obama-Clinton).

A recall of controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker now appear inevitable. In just 28 days, activists collected 507,533 signatures. Organizers have until January 17 to collect 540,208 signatures, which is equal to 25% of the state’s 2010 general election turnout. To be safe, recall advocates have set a new goal of 720,277 signatures by the deadline.

The recall efforts success has propted the Scott Walker’s campaign to take aggressive action to invalidate signatures. Walker sued his own Government Accountability Board, arguing the proceedures adopted by the board to review signatures aren’t agressive enough. Without citing any concrete evidence, Walker alleged to Fox News that there was massive fraud in the signature gathering effort. The case is still pending.

Full Story Here: With Over 500K Signatures Already Collected, Recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Appears Inevitable | ThinkProgress.

Just one year ago, Obama sparked a tremendous outcry from progressives for offering up a one-year payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits extension in exchange for two years of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. As 2010 drew to a close, the payroll tax cut — which provides an average of $1,000 a year to 160 million Americans — was viewed as woefully insufficient compared to the potential job-creating revenue from new taxes on the wealthy.

Those meager provisions likely prevented the economy from falling back into recession, but in the year since Obama cut that deal with congressional Republicans, economic growth has averaged a pathetic 1.2 percent. The unemployment rate has fallen from a horrific 9.8 percent to a merely terrible 8.6 percent. But much of that progress is illusory — millions of out-of-work Americans have simply given up all hope of finding a job, a situation that isn’t captured by the unemployment statistics.

Full Story Here: 2011, The Year Washington Lost.

Paul Krugman :-:

One crucial thing you need to understand about political journalists in the United States is that, with some honorable exceptions, they don’t know or care about actual policy.

In a way, that makes sense — the skills needed to cultivate contacts, to get the inside scoop on what’s going on in Congressional scheming or campaign war rooms, are very different from the skills needed to interpret spreadsheets from the Congressional Budget Office.

The problem, however, is that all too often political journalists mistake the theater of policy for reality (or don’t care about the difference).

Full Story Here: Carelessly Mistaking Theater For Policy | Truthout.

 Glenn Greenwald :-:

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

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

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

Full Story Here: Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Today, Mr. Pastor, a miner’s son and a former high school teacher, is a member of a not-so-exclusive club: Capitol Hill millionaires. That group has grown in recent years to include nearly half of all members of Congress — 250 in all — and the wealth gap between lawmakers and their constituents appears to be growing quickly, even as Congress debates unemployment benefits, possible cuts in food stamps and a “millionaire’s tax.”

Mr. Pastor buys a Powerball lottery ticket every weekend and says he does not consider himself rich. Indeed, within the halls of Congress, where the median net worth is $913,000 and climbing, he is not. He is a rank-and-file millionaire. But compared with the country at large, where the median net worth is $100,000 and has dropped significantly since 2004, he and most of his fellow lawmakers are true aristocrats.

Full Story Here: Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capitol Hill – NYTimes.com.

During the Bush presidency, in addition to his support for the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, Nelson voted to restrict marriage rights for gay couples and to make reproductive healthcare more difficult for women. He voted against legislation to raise the minimum wage, against attempts to increase Pell Grants and for the 2005 bill to make bankrupcy proceedings more difficult for ordinary Americans.. He voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and voted in support of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and its draconian attacks on civil liberties for detainees (and everyone else). He voted against President Bush’s bill for comprehensive immigration reform, and voted in support of a bill to establish English as the official language of the United States.

Full Story Here: Ben Nelson’s Christmas Gift to America | The Nation.

Many progressives feel a keen sense of disappointment with the Obama administration, which showed a remarkable willingness to capitulate to conservatives when the Democrats controlled Congress and even more craven behavior once the Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives. Organized labor is aghast at the continuation of the Bush tax cuts and the collapse of legislative efforts to facilitate union recognition, peace groups are appalled by the escalation of the Afghan War and the rise of the Pentagon budget, civil rights groups despair over the absence of anti-poverty measures and the growing restrictions on voting rights, women’s groups deplore the administration’s capitulation on contraception, and environmental groups shake their heads at the administration’s veto of auto emission standards, its green light to offshore oil drilling, and its retreat on reducing carbon emissions. Contrasting the administration’s all-out effort to save Wall Street with its indifference to Main Street, many progressives wonder if they have gained anything worthwhile with Obama’s election.

Full Story Here: What Will the Democratic Left Do in 2012? | Truthout.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has faced scrutiny from his fellow Republican candidates over his career at Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that, despite his retirement, still pays him millions of dollars a year. Bain, and Romney, often raked in profits while companies were shedding jobs, as was the case in New Hampshire and South Carolina, among others.

Anticipating that Democrats and President Obama would pick up on those attacks, Romney told Politico last week how he plans to respond. Apparently, his plan is to toss around blatant falsehoods, as he told reporters that Obama “has not created any new jobs” as president:

“I know that the Democrats will try and make this a campaign about Bain Capital; … 25 million people are out of work because of Barack Obama. And so I’ll compare my experience in the private sector where, net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.”

Full Story Here: Romney Falsely Claims Obama ‘Has Not Created Any New Jobs’ | ThinkProgress.

I spent a week with both “Stop the Machine” and Occupy D.C. in McPherson Park in Washington. I had a chance to get to know these people and I have listened to their stories, stories of unemployment. A 26 year old man named Kevin who lost his job and his home after his IT job was outsourced to India. I listened to a mother who lost her son in Afghanistan and another mother who lost her son through a lack of health insurance. Their list is endless, their grievances are multiple.

President Barack Obama said of the Occupy Wall Street protests, “In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party,” at the recent dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial. President Obama said that the Occupy movement was blaming the wrong people. It is truly amazing, that a man once considered so astute could be so dumb. The complete misunderstanding of this movement, what it is and what it is all about is almost frightening. Barack Obama is supposed to be the good guy here and yet, he’s clueless. Republican Eric Cantor called Occupy Wall Street protestors, “a mob”; Herman Cain told an audience that the occupiers should all blame themselves for not being rich to thunderous partisan applause.

Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Article: The Obama Deception.

Since the days of Richard Nixon, Republicans have pursued an anything-goes brand of politics that often has the look of hostage-taking, with Democrats usually caving in. But, Robert Parry asks, has President Obama finally learned that the only way to stop bullying is to stand up to it?

By Robert Parry

There is a reason why governments refuse to give in to demands from hostage-takers: because otherwise it encourages more hostage-taking. That is an obvious lesson, but it seems it has taken Democrats many years to learn it, as they have faced Republican strategies of grabbing hostages for decades and have quietly given in, paying ransom again and again.

Yet on those rare occasions when Democrats do stand up – such as against House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s government shutdowns in 1995-1996 and against House Speaker John Boehner’s blockage of a payroll tax cut extension this week – the Democrats usually prevail politically.

Full Story Here: The GOP History of Hostage-Taking | Consortiumnews.

Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen 200 GB of e-mails and credit card data from United States security think tank Stratfor, promising a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.

Members of the loose hacking movement known as “Anonymous” posted a link on Twitter to what it said was Stratfor’s secret client list – including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Goldman Sachs and MF Global.

“Not so private and secret anymore?,” the group taunted in a message on the microblogging site.

Anonymous said it was able to get credit details, in part, because Stratfor didn’t bother encrypting them – an easy-to-avoid blunder which – if true – would be a major embarrassment for any security company.

Full Story Here: ‘Anonymous’ Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Weeklong Assault.

The failure is a particularly tough blow to Gingrich, who is a Virginia resident, having lived in the Washington suburb of McLean, Va. for more than a decade. Gingrich said earlier this week that he had reached the 10,000 signatures needed to appear on the ballot, but after a review of his 11,050 signatures, the Republican Party of Virginia announced in a tweet early Saturday that Gingrich “did not submit required 10k signatures and has not qualified for the VA primary.”

Full Story Here: Newt Gingrich Fails To Qualify For Virginia GOP Primary Despite Residency [UPDATED].

Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”

How would this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.

But now consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others.”

Full Story Here: The Post-Truth Campaign – NYTimes.com.

On a recent day in Petaluma, two very different events spotlighted grim results of upside-down priorities from the federal government.

Upwards of 600 people gathered for an early breakfast at the Veterans Memorial Hall to raise money for the Committee on the Shelterless (COTS), a nonprofit organization that last year sheltered nearly 2,000 individuals, served more than 127,000 hearty meals and distributed 800,000 pounds of food to the needy.

We heard moving stories about — and from — people whose lives have been transformed by active compassion, generosity and their own hard work. But, as speakers lamented, COTS must turn away many who need help.

Charities and other nonprofits are struggling to cope with deep economic wounds that have been festering for years. The dire consequences are far more widespread than private agencies can possibly heal.

Only government has the capacity to provide economic remedies for social distress of this magnitude. But government is failing.

Full Story Here: GUEST OPINION: Uncle Sam is making the wrong choices | PressDemocrat.com.

A top ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives on Tuesday defended his party’s support for cutting 20 weeks of unemployment benefits, a position that has escaped much notice in the payroll tax cut debate consuming Washington.

Democrats want the House to pass a Senate bill that would postpone the January expiration of federal unemployment programs for two months. But even if it is reauthorized, one of those programs will automatically phase out next year, unless Congress changes federal law to allow states to keep it, a provision not included in the Senate bill.

“There are things in this bill as we pointed out that we had to make concessions on,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Thursday in response to a question from HuffPost.

Full Story Here: Democrats Defend Cutting Unemployment Benefits.

Adair responds to the critics in the worst possible way.

At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news.

“I listen to Rush and read NewsMax,” he said. “And to make sure I’m getting a balanced view, I watch Fox.”

We’re starting with an anoymous quote from a straw man that Adair met once? Here we go.

My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.

Full Story Here: PolitiFact Weirdly Unable to Discuss Facts.

It’s at this time of the year that generous, big-hearted Americans reach out to aid the less fortunate among us — like those who’ve recently been knocked down by the recession and seen their incomes plummet. I speak, of course, about our nation’s severely squeezed millionaires.

Yes, many in the infamous 1 percent class are no longer feeling like a million bucks. According to a new federal report, the income of these high-living swells averaged a robust $1.4 million in 2007, but after Wall Street crashed in a heap of greed late that year, their average income took a tumble. In 2009, it fell below the millionaire threshold, leaving these poor rich folks struggling to make it on an average income of only $957,000.

Also, talk about getting a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking, the share of our nation’s total income taken by the 1-percenters fell from a whopping 23 percent in 2007 (the highest since the Roaring Twenties) to a mere 17 percent in 2009. How sad for them, huh?

Full Story Here: The Poor Rich and the Scrooginess of Congress | Common Dreams.

At a press conference on Dec. 7, President Obama warned congressional Republicans not to attach a controversial crude oil pipeline from Canada through the U.S. to a bill extending a year-old break on people’s payroll tax.

“Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut, I will reject,” the president said, standing next to his Canadian counterpart, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Ten days later, Republicans, with the help of sympathetic Democrats and lawmakers who just wanted to get a deal done, did just that. By a vote of 89 to 10, the Senate voted on Saturday morning to extend the payroll tax cut for two months. Included in the bill was language requiring the State Department to issue a permit within 60 days to proceed with the 1,700-mile oil pipeline.

Full Story Here: Obama Aides: Keystone Pipeline Inclusion ‘Is Absolutely Not A Blink’.

OPS: “not a Blink”? OK, then he intended to capitulate again, all along.

Seeking to show Americans that he can understand their troubles, multimillionaire GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been harping on the supposedly hardscrabble 30 months he spent in France as a Mormon missionary. Romney said he lived in apartments that were so rundown that he was forced to defecate in a bucket and shower with a hose. “Most of the apartments I lived in had no refrigerators,” Romney said last week at a town hall New Hampshire. “I don’t actually recall any of them having a refrigerator.” Watch it, via Patch:

Full Story Here: Contradicting Romney’s Account, Fellow Missionaries Say Candidate Lived In A ‘Palace’ On Mission | ThinkProgress.

Congress may have come to an agreement on a $1 trillion bill to keep the government funded beyond midnight (when the current round of funding runs out), but there is significantly less common ground on extending the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut. Democrats, in an attempt to prevent a tax increase on working Americans come year end, have dropped their demand that the extension be paid for via a tiny surtax on income in excess of $1 million.

So does that mean Republicans have dropped their demand that an extension be tied to the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline? Of course not:

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Friday that his chamber will not sign off on an extension of the payroll tax cut sought by President Obama without including a provision to speed construction of an oil pipeline, which Obama has opposed…“If that bill comes over to us, we will make changes to it, and I will guarantee you that the Keystone pipeline will be in there when it goes back to the United States Senate,” Boehner said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) joined in, saying, “Frankly, I will not be able to support a package that doesn’t include the pipeline.” Republicans claim that the oil pipeline will be a job creator, but the only independent analysis into the pipeline found that just 500 to 1400 temporary construction jobs will be created, “with a negative long-term economic impact.”

Full Story Here: GOP Leaders Still Holding Middle-Class Tax Cut Hostage For Oil Pipeline, After Democrats Make Major Concession | ThinkProgress.

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of Capitol Hill. A majority of Congress is just about to put the finishing touches on an amendment to the military budget authorization legislation that will finish off some critical American rights under our Constitution.

Here is how two retired 4 star marine generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, described in the New York Times the stripmining of your freedom to resist tyranny in urging a veto by President Obama:

“One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past….

Full Story Here: Congressional Tyranny, White House Surrender | Common Dreams.

Gingrich’s plan would provide small tax cuts to those at the bottom of the income ladder, giving those making less than $10,000 an average cut of $222 under one scenario, the analysis found. The Tax Policy Center is a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two respected think tanks in Washington.

Gingrich’s plan would be most generous to those making more than $1 million a year, delivering an average tax cut of almost $614,000 a year. At the same time, it would give them with a lower overall federal tax rate — 11.9 percent — than most people making less money, that is, everyone making between $40,000 and $1 million.

Full Story Here: Study: Gingrich tax plan would give lion’s share to the rich | McClatchy.

I don’t have time today to thoroughly debunk all the reprehensible, anti-democratic, anti-American horseshit hurled by this FL State Rep. Dennis Baxley — the original sponsor of Florida’s new voter suppression laws, limiting early voting hours and imposing new big government regulations and huge fines against voter registration workers — as seen in the following interview on Al Sharpton’s Politics Nation show on MSNBC this week.

Fortunately, most readers of The BRAD BLOG will be able to smell the bullshit of the smirking, democracy-hating Baxley a mile away even without my point-by-point rebuttal. So I’ll just run the video here for now without much comment, as it needs to be seen to be believed.

Near the front of the interview, Baxley admits that there’s been no voter fraud problem in FL, and by the end he’s charging (without a stitch of evidence, naturally) that the non-partisan League of Women Voters, who have been registering voters in the Sunshine State for some 72 years — but who have now canceled their registration program for 2012 thanks to the onerous new GOP restrictions and fines on registration workers — is actually a partisan Democratic organization! Who knew?

Full Story Here: The BRAD BLOG : State Rep. Dennis Baxley Admits No ‘Voter Fraud’ Probs in FL, Lies About GOP’s New Suppression Laws.

Congrats to all voters of Ohio for successfully pushing back against the GOP’s efforts to keep you from voting in next year’s Presidential election! It’s another win for democracy, and another loss for the Buckeye State’s Republican Gov. John Kasich (following on the recent landslide loss of his anti-union bill at the polls last month.)

Today, Secretary of State John Husted (R), officially certified that opponents of HB194 — the anti-voting bill that would have shortened early voting hours and imposed other big government restrictions on the exercise of the franchise in Ohio — were successful in their effort to place the law on the ballot for a voter referendum in 2012. Thus, the act, passed by the GOP legislature and signed by Kasich earlier this year, is officially suspended for now.

As we noted in September, after opponents of the bill had turned in more than 300,000 for certification to the Sec. of State, ThinkProgress’ Tonya Somander summarized the bill’s restrictions on voting this way:

Full Story Here: The BRAD BLOG : It’s Official! OH’s GOP Voter Suppression Law Now On Hold, Will Face Referendum on 2012 Ballot.

Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It should have welcomed new financial regulation as a means of restoring public trust. Instead, it’s busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever.

The Street’s biggest lobbying groups have just filed a lawsuit against the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, seeking to overturn its new rule limiting speculative trading.

For years Wall Street has speculated like mad in futures markets – food, oil, other commodities – causing prices to fluctuate wildly. The Street makes bundles from these gyrations, but they have raised costs for consumers.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (The Remarkable Political Stupidity of the Street).

Thousands of people who have been voting for years and college students eager to vote will find themselves shut out next year.

Even as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich resemble jousting mastodons, clumsily trying to knock each other down, more than a dozen state legislatures in such key battleground states as Florida have been kicking aside eased voting procedures.

Although the laws vary, the obvious aim is to make it tougher for minorities and young people to vote.

Full Story Here: ANN MCFEATTERS: Too many states making it harder to vote » Standard-Times.

The top Republican candidates share a single, radical vision: to trash the environment, shred the safety net and aid the rich.

By all rights, 2012 ought to be a cakewalk for the GOP. Unemployment is pandemic. Riot police are confronting protesters in public squares and on college campuses. In an epic fail of foresight, the Democratic convention will be held in one of the world’s banking centers, Charlotte, North Carolina – setting the stage for violent clashes not seen since the streets of Chicago, 1968. “I hope they keep this up,” gloated Grover Norquist, one of the Republican Party’s most influential strategists. “Hippies elected Nixon. Occupy Wall Street will beat Obama.”

But don’t go writing the president’s political obituary just yet: He may wind up being resurrected by the GOP itself. The Republican Party – dominated by hardliners still cocky after the electoral sweep of 2010 – has backed its entire slate of candidates into far-right corners on everything from the environment and immigration to taxation and economic austerity. Whether the GOP opts for Mitt Romney or an “anti-Mitt” is almost entirely beside the point. On the major policy issues of the day, there’s barely a ray of sunshine between any of the viable Republicans, not counting those who have committed the sin of libertarianism (Ron Paul) or moderation (Jon Huntsman). No matter who winds up with the nomination, it appears, Obama will face a candidate to the right of Barry Goldwater.

Take it from one of the most divisive figures in the history of GOP presidential politics: “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off,” the televangelist Pat Robertson warned recently. “They’re forcing their leaders, the front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.” Robertson knows fringe politics: In 1988, he ran for president on a platform that included abolishing the Department of Education and adopting a constitutional amendment to prohibit deficit spending. At the time, Robertson was dismissed as an unelectable candidate of the far right. Today, he would be somewhere to the left of Texas governor Rick Perry. And that way lies ruin: “You’ll appeal to the narrow base, and they’ll applaud the daylights out of what you’re saying,” Robertson cautioned. “And then you hit the general election and they say, ‘No way!’ They’ve got to stop this!”

Full Story Here: The GOP’s Crackpot Agenda | Politics News | Rolling Stone.