AlterNet.org: Tea Party and the Right

White Suburban Soccer Moms Love NSA Surveillance

Falguni A. Sheth, Salon — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:49:00 -0700

Why should they care if the government has their data? They don't fear becoming innocent targets of persecution.

A frequent response of those untroubled by the revelations of the National Security Agency program is: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Perhaps we need to translate that phrase, along with the relative colorblindness through which the entire series of revelations has been scrutinized, as: “If your last name isn’t Khan, and you have no family in Pakistan/India/Iran, etc., you have nothing to fear.”

The revelations of NSA’s collection of “metadata” — as cybersecurity expert Susan Landau explained on “Democracy Now” — is, in fact, even more invasive than actual content collection. She gives an example of how that can be the case: Even if all the NSA does is trace the one or more calls from your home to your doctor on a day when you would normally be at work, followed by one or more calls from your phone that is now located at the doctor’s office to your family, that information strongly suggests that the content of the call was bad news.

Similarly then, if the NSA collects metadata of all calls and online traffic in the U.S., they are probably much less interested in a person living in New Paltz, N.Y., who calls Barcelona eight times a week than they are in biweekly calls from an Indo-Pak restaurant owner in Edison, N.J., to a “terrorist-heavy” locale in Pakistan — say, Waziristan. Clearly, in both cases, the pattern reveals the obvious: that both the New York and New Jersey residents have some connection to folks in the receiving nation. But what does it tell the NSA about who they are? To judge from the NSA’s data-mining project, the intensity of NSA surveillance is heavier in Pakistan than in Europe. Thus, even if the calls from New Paltz are to a terrorist cell in Barcelona, it seems more likely that the calls to Waziristan (say, to the restaurant owner’s mother and brother, and his family) will be more suspicious — of course due to the U.S.’s framing of where the War on Terror must be waged. Still, the latter would be, as Marcy Wheeler discusses in a related issue, “false positives.”

What is the starting framework that informs the NSA to target your call? That folks with close/frequent connections to Pakistan should have their calls monitored? That these same folks have an increased likelihood of being terrorists/sympathizers? Or, alternately, that if one is an Iranian migrant, from a family that left sometime around the Revolution, yet retains close friends who work for the Iranian state (even as low-level civil servants), then their calls should be the subject of targeting (because as Dianne Feinstein has now announced, Iran is a terrorist state)? Or, as she has also stated, it allows the state to keep records of people who become terrorists later (à la “Minority Report”)?

I can hear the liberals now: “Of course, there she goes, making it all about race again.” Um, no. The NSA is making it about race/religion/ethnicity – as these are uniquely combined in the conceptual category of “Muslim Terrorists.” Other branches of the state have long established that terrorism is a unique category that, while defined race-neutrally as having to do with international or domestic political violence targeted against the U.S. government or its citizens, is almost uniquely and singularly applied to Muslims. We’ve seen evidence of this at other levels of government, as in the case of the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims (in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and internationally). Most recently, we saw this with the immediate rush to assume that a Saudi national that fled the Boston bomb blasts must have been the person who set them — before he was cleared the next day.

If this is the framework that underlies the massive dragnet, then I’m hardly the one making it about race. Meanwhile, as is so often the case, Marcy Wheeler and Rayne (writing at emptywheel.net) have each been presenting some of the most careful and detailed analysis of these programs. While the PRISM program is limited to collecting data from non-U.S. persons — and what that means is still unclear; does U.S. persons include non-citizen residents from India/Pakistan/Iran, etc., residing legally? — as Rayne asks:

Does this mean that all communications between individuals who do not have an Anglo-Saxon name are likely to be sniffed if not collected?
Does this sketchy “(foreign) + (less than 3 hops)” approach executed by humans explain known false-positives? Could the relationships between the false-positives be as tenuous as shopping at the same store? What happens in the case of targets possessing a highly common name like “Ahmed” — the equivalent of Smith in terms of frequency among Arabic surnames — in collection so large it could be called a dragnet?

As others have pointed out, some of these details are hardly new, although the names and scope of the program have changed. As far back as 2005 (yes, under an order signed by then-President Bush), USA Today was reporting details of the NSA’s data collection, warrantless wiretapping, and telecom companies turning over data to the feds. It’s also true that there was hullabaloo about it (though not as loud in mainstream media) by those who are labeled hardcore “privacy freaks” — folks like the ACLU, etc. At some level, we may not have heard that much “new” information, but between Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and Glenn Greenwald, we now have unquestionable, tangible proof that the intelligence dragnet has been extensive and long-standing even after Bush’s executive order was rescinded.

Ultimately, the political celebration of NSA’s surveillance programs appears to rest on the same old tired flackery parroted by Sen. Lindsey Graham: “I don’t care if the NSA collects my data.” Of course, Graham doesn’t care. Of course, DiFi thinks NSA data collection is crucial to catching terrorists. Of course, white suburban soccer moms are more interested in the intrigue of Snowden’s (ex?)girlfriend. Why should they care? They don’t worry that they will awake some morning and find themselves on the wrong side of the state — and certainly not because “they’re not doing anything wrong,” but rather because they’re not the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong family. (Remember former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki’s death? “He should have been born to a far more responsible father.”) But of course.

That’s why Lindsey Graham, DiFI and the white burbie housewives think that NSA surveillance is a great idea. They’re not politically vulnerable (OK, that’s an understatement). They’re officially in favor of the War on Terror. And certain under this administration and the previous one, their calls to the doctor and to family (or even Graham’s hypothetical call to Waziristan) are not registering as the “suspicious” activity that the NSA is looking for.

As I’ve said before, this all comes down to a familiar form of American privilege:

“[T]he privilege of not having to know (or know about) foreign nationals or feel particularly obliged to them, or know about the harms done to them, simply because the wars, jingoism, and aggressive foreign policy of the U.S. empire won’t affect you.”

The other side of the NSA leaks has to do with what we know or can infer about the profiles of people who get top-security clearance. If the NSA’s dragnet is designed to look for “suspicious” activity, then besides being directed toward foreigners and foreign threats, it should also be looking for people like Snowden (of course I’m not endorsing this; just considering the logic of the hunt): seeming “one of us” kinda guys — conservative, a believer in American ideals as decided and executed by the U.S. government, a former troop, a “regular guy” with top national security clearance. Who, as it turns out, doesn’t like what he is coming to learn in the course of his work, and is beginning to take serious issue with the size and scope of the project. Except that all the national security surveillance in the world didn’t catch him before he flew to Hong Kong to meet with reporters and turn over evidence of these secret slides that document an out-of-control surveillance program. Whoops.

Atheists Can Be Just As Obnoxious As Christians

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:47:00 -0700

Just because you’re in the right doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk about it.

Just because you’re in the right doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk about it. Today’s case in point: the battle going on right now in Florida’s Orange County over who gets to be the biggest loudmouth.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Central Florida Freethought Community had a perfectly valid point recently when they challenged the distribution of Bibles in the local high schools. Earlier this year, a Collier County judge ruled in favor of “passive” dissemination of the Bibles, allowing them to be laid out on tables for the taking. That’s a clearly stupid move; one that suggests the judge has zero grasp on the term “separation of church and state.” One does not leave Bibles willy-nilly around schools, any more than one leads a Christian prayer session in school — another battle the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently fought and won. (The victory was somewhat mitigated by a local valedictorian’s defiant recitation of the Lord’s Prayer during graduation anyway.)

But after “1,700 students left school with Bibles” in the wake of one of those “passive” distributions in 11 schools last winter, the atheist groups decided to make a point. They asked for permission to distribute some materials of their own, including books and pamphlets with titles including “An X-Rated Book,” “Jesus Is Dead” and “Why I Am Not a Muslim.” Which if I’m not mistaken is a douche move.

A district spokesman said that the groups were in fact permitted to distribute “a number of fliers critical of religion,” but drew the line at the more incendiary books and materials, arguing they “could cause a disruption.” David Williamson of Central Florida Free Thought Community told the local news station WFTV Thursday, “We had no intention of filing a lawsuit, and we are not interested in filing a lawsuit, but we have no other choice at this point.” They just couldn’t help it! In the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s statement Thursday, the organization acknowledged that “distribution of limited freethought literature was allowed on May 2, the National Day of Prayer,” but said it had filed the suit “for censoring distribution of [other] freethought materials while allowing unfettered distribution of the Christian bible.”

The district’s haziness on what constitutes appropriate school material is self-evident. It’s patently absurd and offensive that the World Changers of Florida organization, a Christian group with the hilariously inaccurate stated purpose of furthering “the biblically based founding fathers constitutional vision” has been allowed to run roughshod over the district and impose its vision at taxpayer-funded schools. This should never have happened in the first place.

But idiocy isn’t fixed with more idiocy. A petulant strategy of “You let them do this and if we can’t do that we’re going to sue” is absurd and immature. The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s threat that the “plaintiffs intend to repeat the distribution every school year, unless the school prohibits all such distributions, including bibles” doesn’t sound like a blow for freedom of expression; it just sounds whiny. And when you say you’re “committed to the cherished principle of separation of state and church” and you’re fighting to distribute anti-religious materials in state-run facilities, you’re not separating church and state either. You’re promoting an explicit agenda.

I get that a point is being made here about the selectivity of the school board’s permissiveness. I get that it should not rain Bibles in schools. You know why I get it? Because I’m a concerned parent. Because I have two children I’m trying to protect from aggressive hotheads trying to shove their ideologies upon them. At their schools. I resent that, and I sure as hell don’t respect that, regardless of the source.

You know that thing about being the change you want to see in the world? Yeah, that. You want to make a statement? Is there a way you could do that that wouldn’t involve being all aggro toward minors? If you’re concerned that inappropriate materials are being handed out to kids, you don’t threaten to do the same thing. You don’t get in a pissing contest over who can be more obnoxious. And you don’t use schoolchildren as your pawns.

How Right-Wing Ideology Has Suckered Millions of Americans into Hating Their Own Government

Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:59:00 -0700

Pervasive propaganda is doing great harm to one of the few solutions the people have to deal with their problems: government

My wife and I have family in Barcelona, Spain, including a seven-month-old grandson. We also have a family member who is a successful artist and has a piece in this year’s famous Venice biennial art show. Thus it was that my wife and I went from Barcelona to Venice at the end of May.

We decided to travel from one city to the other by sea and so ended up on the Regent Line’s Seven Seas Mariner, a relatively small ship with only 700 passengers. This turned out to be a very odd cruise, and that is the subject of this essay.

For, as it turned out, some 270 of the passengers on board were fans of the libertarian right-wing talk show host and Fox TV commentator Neal Boortz. This was Boortz’s retirement celebration cruise, and his most devoted fans were on the Seven Seas Mariner, at their own expense, to help him celebrate.

Until his recent retirement, Neal Boortz (aka The Mouth of the South, aka The Equal Opportunity Offender, aka Mighty Whitey) was the seventh most popular talk show host in the United States. His show was nationally syndicated and averaged 4.25 million listeners per week.

The positions he has taken to achieve this status are remarkably diverse and often contradictory. For instance, Boortz has a rather progressive stance on some social issues (angering most conservatives), such as abortion rights, same-sex marriage, ending the “war on drugs,” and supporting various other civil liberties. Yet at the same time he is adamant about reducing the federal government’s tax and regulatory powers (pleasing most conservatives).

When it comes to taxes, Boortz advocates doing away with income tax, payroll taxes, estate taxes and the like and replacing them with a national retail sales tax. He has written a book on the subject, co-authored with Georgia Congressman John Linder, entitledThe Fair Tax Book.

Leaving aside his tax-reform idea for the moment, Boortz’s view of the regulatory powers of the federal government is dangerously naive. He seems unaware that in the United States the ability to create and protect the civil liberties he supports comes from the legislative action of a strong federal government that then oversees the implementation of those laws against historically prejudiced, racist state and local governments.

The same dangerous naivete is revealed in Boortz’s promotion of “small government” and “deregulation” of the economy so as to promote “personal responsibility.” These are typical Tea Party positions and they too betray historical ignorance.

It has become clear to the less ideologically driven economic historians that, ever since the end of World War II, the only thing that has prevented another Great Depression (and, in essence, smoothed out potential depressions into periodic economic recessions) is, once again, effective and consistent government regulation.

As the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980s and 1990s and other more recent bank crises have shown, if you start deregulating strategic parts of the economy (as happened under Ronald Reagan), the capitalists will immediately revert to acts of maximum (and self-destructive) greed.

When it comes to foreign policy, Boortz favors an aggressive, interventionist approach to “fight terrorism” and “spread freedom.” After the 9/11 attacks, Boortz repeatedly complained about the “lack of Muslim outrage” over the event. In this Boortz shares an almost universal American provincialism. He fails to realize the causal connection between traditional American foreign policy in the Middle East (and elsewhere) and the terrorist attacks the U.S. has suffered.

He is also ignorant of the fact that after the 9/11 attacks Muslims worldwide condemned terrorism and expressed sympathy for the American victims. At the local level this sympathy was expressed by thousands of mosque-based sermons declaring that the al-Qaida attacks were “un-Islamic.”

Of course, many of these expressions of outrage and sympathy were made in Arabic and, what is more important, went untranslated and unreported in the American media. Even those issued in the English language were often unreported. This explains Boortz’s ignorance, but it does not excuse it. As such a well-known critic, he should have taken the time to fact-check the issue before repeatedly focusing the attention of 4.25 million listeners upon it.

Fans of Neal Boortz

If the 270 fans of Neal Boortz traveling on Regent’s Seven Seas Mariner can be taken as a reliable sample of his listening public, we may draw the following general conclusions:

– They are mostly from the American South.

– They are generally a polite group in one-to-one situations.

– Of all the positions taken by Boortz, the one they are primarily interested in is his tax-reform scheme. I must confess that I have no idea if his tax plan would be better or “fairer” than the present arrangement. However, it should be noted that the U.S. income tax was “allowed” by the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and so to replace it with Boortz’s “Fair Tax” might necessitate a rewording of this amendment. This could be a complicated task.

The fact that almost everyone I encountered in the Boortz group fixated on the issue of taxes tells us something important about conservative Americans: they are generally suspicious of demands that they financially contribute to the upkeep of their own communities (particularly in the area of social programs).

This might sound odd, but it is an attitude rooted in history. The U.S. revolution was not made over issues of oppression and deprivation. It was made over the issue of the British Parliament’s right to impose relatively moderate taxes on their American colonial subjects. Ever since that time there has been a conservative portion of the U.S. public which sees any taxes beyond those needed for very basic services as illegitimate.

Indeed, they see such taxes as a form of theft. Just ask John Boehner, the Republican Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Refusing to negotiate a reasonable budget with President Barack Obama, Mr. Boehner said that the real issue is “how much more money do we want to steal from the American people to fund more government.”

In terms of economic history, this makes Boehner and his cohort throwbacks to the dark ages of 18th-century economic theory, when it was believed that the only legitimate things for which central government could tax was national defense, the court system and the police. All other social issues were the responsibility of the individual who was “free” to become rich or to starve to death without government interference.

To say that such a point of view, applied today to a society of 300 million-plus citizens, is disastrous is an understatement. Take away the “safety net” created by the New Deal and expanded by the “welfare state,” and replace it with freewheeling, deregulated capitalism and “personal responsibility” alone, and what you have is a formula for widespread suffering and civic unrest.

Yet none of the conservatives I met on board the Seven Seas Mariner had any knowledge of economic history or theory. All they had were their personal experiences and the feelings those had produced: that the federal government was too big, too intrusive in their businesses, and that it pampered too many people, all with their tax dollars.

This is one of the consequences of what I call “natural localism.” We live our lives locally. This local existence conditions us to see the world in certain limited ways. And then, on the basis of that local conditioning, we interpret the rest of the world. However, our local experience is often a very poor basis for understanding the larger problems that confront our communities.

Neal Boortz is fond of disclaimers. Some of them are potentially useful, as when he tells his listeners “Don’t believe anything you . . . hear on The Neal Boortz Show unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or unless you have taken the time to research the matter to prove its accuracy to your own satisfaction.”

The problem is, as with so much of the information media, the audience is self-selected. The reason millions listened to Mr. Boortz in the first place was because what he said was already “consistent” with what they “know” to be true. But was/is it true? Believing something is true does not make it true. As to the suggestion that the listener do research, well, not many will bother if the opinion at issue sounds and feels right.

Boortz also occasionally suggests to his audience that they “take no heed nor place any credence in anything he says” because, in the last analysis, he is just an “entertainer.” However, he cannot escape responsibility so easily for the influence he has wielded weekly over an audience of more than four million.

Ours is an age of “infotainment,” and the more entertaining media personalities, politicians and even government officials are, the more their “info” is received favorably. Just think of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on the liberal side of the spectrum.

Conservative America is out there in many forms. Some are organized around religion, some around various forms of xenophobia, and some around the fear of government, its taxes and regulations. They are mostly white, mostly middle class, and don’t be at all surprised if you run into them on your next vacation.

Washington Has Been Stopped in Its Tracks by Republican Tea Party Types, and It's Destroying the Country

Robert Reich, RobertReich.org — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:17:00 -0700

It's as if an entire branch of the federal government—the one that's supposed to deal directly with the nation's problems—has gone out of business.

Conservative Republicans in our nation's capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They've basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.

It's as if an entire branch of the federal government—the branch that's supposed to deal directly with the nation's problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law—has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called "sequester" that's cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation's poor, and national defense.

The window of opportunity for the president to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.

But the nation's work doesn't stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which are far less gridlocked than Washington. Last November's elections resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor's offices in all but 13 states -- the most single-party dominance in decades.

This means many blue states are moving further left, while red states are heading rightward. In effect, America is splitting apart without going through all the trouble of a civil war.

Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for example, now controls both legislative chambers and the governor's office for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative session that ended a few weeks ago resulted in a hike in the top income tax rate to 9.85 percent, an increased cigarette tax, and the elimination of several corporate tax loopholes. The added revenues will be used to expand early-childhood education, freeze tuitions at state universities, fund jobs and economic development, and reduce the state budget deficit. Along the way, Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and expanded the power of trade unions to organize.

California and Maryland passed similar tax hikes on top earners last year. The governor of Colorado has just signed legislation boosting taxes by $925 million for early-childhood education and K-12 (the tax hike will go into effect only if residents agree, in a vote that is likely in November).

On the other hand, the biggest controversy in Kansas is between Gov. Sam Brownback, who wants to shift taxes away from the wealthy and onto the middle class and poor by repealing the state's income tax and substituting an increase in the sales tax, and Kansas legislators who want to cut the sales tax as well, thereby reducing the state's already paltry spending for basic services. Kansas recently cut its budget for higher education by almost five percent.

Other rightward-moving states are heading in the same direction. North Carolina millionaires are on the verge of saving $12,500 a year, on average, from a pending income-tax cut even as sales taxes are raised on the electricity and services that lower-income depend residents depend on. Missouri's transportation budget is half what it was five years ago, but lawmakers refuse to raise taxes to pay for improvements.

The states are splitting as dramatically on social issues. Gay marriages are now recognized in 12 states and the District of Columbia. Colorado and Washington state permit the sale of marijuana, even for non-medical uses. California is expanding a pilot program to allow nurse practitioners to perform abortions.

Meanwhile, other states are enacting laws restricting access to abortions so tightly as to arguably violate the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Alabama, the mandated waiting period for an abortion is longer than it is for buying a gun.

Speaking of which, gun laws are moving in opposite directions as well. Connecticut, California, and New York are making it harder to buy guns. Yet if you want to use a gun to kill someone who's, say, spray-painting a highway underpass at night, you might want to go to Texas, where it's legal to shoot someone who's committing a "public nuisance" under the cover of dark. Or you might want to live in Kansas, which recently enacted a law allowing anyone to carry a concealed firearm onto a college campus.

The states are diverging sharply on almost every issue you can imagine. If you're an undocumented young person, you're eligible for in-state tuition at public universities in 14 states (including Texas). But you might want to avoid driving in Arizona, where state police are allowed to investigate the immigration status of anyone they suspect is here illegally.

And if you're poor and lack health insurance you might want to avoid a state like Wisconsin that's refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government will be picking up almost the entire tab.

Federalism is as old as the Republic, but not since the real Civil War have we witnessed such a clear divide between the states on central issues affecting Americans.

Some might say this is a good thing. It allows more of us to live under governments and laws we approve of. And it permits experimentation: Better to learn that a policy doesn't work at the state level, where it's affected only a fraction of the population, than after it's harmed the entire nation. As the jurist Louis Brandies once said, our states are "laboratories of democracy."

But the trend raises three troubling issues.

First, it leads to a race to bottom. Over time, middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy will become disproportionately burdened as the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to reverse course. If the idea of "one nation" means anything, it stands for us widely sharing the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship.

Second, it doesn't take account of spillovers -- positive as well as negative. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without background checks in one state can easily find their way to another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the citizens of one states is likely to move to another state where job opportunity are better. We are interdependent. No single state can easily contain or limit the benefits or problems it creates for other states.

Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century "states rights" has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally, devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of modern-day white supremacists.

A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national government. The Tea Partiers and other government-haters who have caused Washington to all but close because they refuse to compromise are threatening all that we aspire to be together.

Fight Rages On for Medicaid Expansion in Texas—State with Highest Rate of Uninsured

Khalil Abdullah, New American Media — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:48:00 -0700

Gov. Rick Perry and Tea Party have postponed debate in legislature to 2015, unless public pressure can change minds.

Health care advocates and business groups, whose efforts failed to move Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas legislature to expand the state’s Medicaid population under the Affordable Care Act, are digging in for a protracted struggle that might extend until 2015 or beyond.

Had Medicaid expansion been enacted during the legislative session that ended last week, individuals earning between 0 and 138 percent of the federal poverty level (an individual earning up to roughly $15,000, or, for a family of four, up to $31,000) would have been eligible for Medicaid health coverage beginning in 2014. The federal government would have paid the entire cost of Texas’s expansion for the first three years through 2016, and 90 percent in years thereafter.

Texas’s Tea Party-driven political leadership shunned an estimated $100 billion over time, money that would have assisted in providing health insurance to an additional one million Texans, according to the state’s Health and Human Service Commission, at a proportionately small cost to the state.

“When the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) first got approved as a federal program, Texas didn’t take it, but we kept on working and working, and finally they did take it,” said Rev. Vincent Fana, Community Projects Facilitator for Texans Together Education Fund, Inc., a civic and community advocacy organization based in Houston that serves the city and its metropolitan area, where about a third of the state’s 3 million African Americans reside.

“So we need to use our efforts on CHIP as the model, in terms of how to get Medicaid expansion. We need to educate people about what it was the [federal] government was trying to bring in and who opposed it.”

Given that the Texas legislature meets every other year, Medicaid expansion won’t come up again for consideration until 2015, unless public pressure persuades Perry to moderate his position. He could call legislators back to Austin for a special session to consider the issue, as he has already done this year on redistricting. Such sessions are typically used by governors only to promote legislation they support, and Perry’s opposition to Obamacare has been unwavering.

Texas leads the country in the highest rate of those without health insurance – 26 percent out of a total population of 26 million. And of the 6 million residents who are uninsured, 58 percent – or 3.6 million – are Latino, including 1.3 million children under age 18.

Juan Flores, executive director of the San Antonio-based La Fe Policy Research and Education Center, notes that the Latino community has scored some success in reducing the total percentage of uninsured Latino children from 26 percent to 19 percent. He credits the drop to increased enrollment in the state’s CHIP program. Yet, coverage of Latino children still lags behind Whites and African Americans, where the uninsured rates have fallen to 10 percent.

Flores said that Texas has historically moved very slowly on health and human service issues, with low per capita investment compared to other states, a trend he blames for perpetuating a longstanding pattern of marginalizing the state’s Latino community.

Bruce Lesley, President of First Focus, a Washington DC-based research and advocacy organization promoting children and family issues, fears the Texas decision means that many parents will now assume their kids don’t qualify for any federal health care assistance and therefore may be less inclined to seek out services. “Texas doesn’t do a fabulous job on outreach,” the Texas native explained. “There are a large number of kids in Texas who are eligible for assistance but not enrolled.”

Rev. Fana agrees that people need to be pro-active about determining their eligibility. “One aspect of our campaign is to put together a basic outline of all the things that the ACA brings to people even without Medicaid expansion,” he says, ticking off free mammograms, colonoscopies, blood testing, glucose and diabetes testing. “But nobody knows about that down here.”

Fana said advocacy groups will encourage those who qualify for federally subsidized health insurance to enroll in the state’s health insurance exchange, which is scheduled to begin operating Oct. 1 but has yet to be set up by the federal government. (Texas opted not to establish its own exchange.)

Nonprofit advocacy organizations are not alone in clamoring for Medicaid expansion. Eva DeLuna Castro, Senior Budget Analyst at Texas’s Center for Public Policy Priorities, says Medicaid expansion “had enormous support from chambers of commerce, from local, county, and city governments,” which were anxious to avoid increasing property taxes to cover the uncompensated costs of emergency room care for the uninsured. Including charity care, that cost was $5.4 billion in 2011, according to a Texas Hospital Association survey.

Then, too, the decision not to expand Medicaid means that those between 100 percent and 138 percent of the federal poverty level, who are currently uninsured, will now be funneled into the state insurance exchange but at a higher cost to businesses, according to a new report by tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt.

DeLuna Castro explained that without Medicaid coverage, companies that employ more than 50 individuals but do not provide health insurance could face between $299 million and $448 million each year in penalties paid to the federal government just to cover employees who earn between 100 percent and 138 percent of the FPL. They now qualify for sliding-scale premium help in the exchange, but had the state opted for Medicaid expansion, they would have been covered by that and no penalties would be owed.

For Anne Dunkelberg, Associate Director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, that people above the poverty line will be eligible for sliding-scale taxpayer subsidies while those below the poverty line will now get nothing is one of the gross inequities resulting from the state’s rejection of Medicaid expansion. She and other advocates like Lesley of First Focus believe the issue will resonate with people.

Flores is reserved about Medicaid expansion’s short-term prospects. Like DeLuna Castro and other observers, he noted that hospitals and the medical establishments have teamed with businesses and local jurisdictions to make the case, but he said the political dynamics are now worse than ever.

“The governor, the Speaker of the House, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, almost a supermajority of legislators in the House and Senate oppose the ACA altogether and certainly oppose Medicaid expansion,” Flores observed.

Dunkelberg, whose organization supported Medicaid expansion, says no one in the health advocacy community is throwing in the towel. “I think it’s going to take continued pressure from the vast majority of Texans who favor Medicaid expansion – a higher level of engagement.”

In a poll conducted for the American Cancer Society earlier this year, 85 percent of the state’s African Americans and 73 percent of its Latinos supported accepting federal money to bring more Texans into Medicaid coverage, as contrasted with 47 percent of its white residents. Overall, 58 percent of Texans favor taking federal money, but that sentiment hasn’t translated into sufficient political power to force the issue.

Rev. Fana, again referring to the advocacy community’s prolonged courtship of the state before CHIP was embraced, understands the relatively sluggish pace of change and the political battles ahead. “Unfortunately, that’s going to have to be the Texas way.”

IRS Should Outlaw All "Social Welfare" Political Fronts—Left and Right

Jim Hightower, Creators Syndicate — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 06:49:00 -0700

"Little Koch Brothers of Plutocracy" should not receive tax exempt status.

If you're covered in political stink, it might be prudent to avoid yelling "dirty politics" at others.

Lately, a mess of right-wing tea party groups have been wailing nonstop that they have been targeted, harassed and denied their civic rights by partisan, out-of-control, Obamanistic IRS thugs (no adjective too extreme when assailing Obama or the IRS). The groups certainly are right that it's abhorrent for a powerful agency to run a repressive witch hunt against any group of citizens just because of their political views. After all, liberals have frequently felt the lash of such official repression by assorted McCarthyite-Nixonite-Cheneyite forces over the years, and it must be condemned, no matter who the victims.

In this case, however, the right-wing groups were not targeted by government snoops and political operatives, but tagged by their own applications to be designated by the IRS as 501(c)(4) "social welfare" groups. This privileged status would allow them to take unlimited bags of corporate cash without ever revealing to voters the names of the corporations putting up the money. The caveat is that 501(c)(4)s are supposed to do actual social welfare work and cannot be attached to any candidate or party, nor can politics be their primary purpose.

Forget what the rule says, though. Such notorious political players as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have cynically set up their own pretend-welfare groups, openly using them as fronts to run secret-money election campaigns. Suddenly, hundreds of wannabe outfits were demanding that they be given the special hide-the-money designation, too, brazenly lying about their overt political purpose. Some even asserted that they were engaged in no political activity, when their own websites bragged that they were.

It was these groups' stupidity and audacity that prompted the IRS inquiries, and their current hissy fit about the agency is really just a PR effort to let them continue their "social welfare" fraud.

I think of a "social welfare charity" as being an altruistic enterprise, like The Little Sisters of the Poor -- not the avaricious Little Koch Brothers of the Plutocracy.

Yet the brothers have created their very own 501(c)(4) charity, which they used last year as a political front group for funneling $39 million into campaigns against Democrats. Interesting, since, the law bans these tax-exempt entities from spending more than 49 percent of their funding on political efforts to promote their "issues."

Yet, there they are -- hoards of political (c)(4)s, mostly right-wing, operating primarily as political pipelines for secretly gushing corporate money into raw, partisan campaigns. Their hocus-pocus lawyers and congressional consiglieres have badgered the IRS into handing them the (c)(4) get-out-of-jail-free card, then defied the agency to stop them as they dump millions of corrupt dollars into our elections.

For example, American Action Network, a "charity" created by Wall Street lobbyists, has spent two-thirds of its revenue on elections, including putting up $745,000 from secret donors to elect Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. How ironic, then, that Johnson is now one of the tea party mad dogs howling at IRS officials.

It's scandalous, Johnson shrieks, that some tea party groups have not been given (c)(4) status, because IRS agents have had the temerity to question whether the groups actually are charitable enterprises -- or just rank political outfits fraudulently posing as charities.

While tea party groups should not be singled out for IRS scrutiny, neither should they be allowed to cheat in elections by shamefully masquerading as Little Sisters of the Poor. That's the real IRS scandal.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Fox News Commentator: Breadwinning Women Are “Hurting our Children"

Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress — Fri, 31 May 2013 10:11:00 -0700

Erick Ericson's neanderthalian views of gender roles will really make you scratch your head.

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson earned himself a lot of detractors Wednesday night when, responding to the news that a record number of families rely on women’s income, he argued on Fox News that it was “natural” for men to take the “dominant role” and that women being the primary breadwinner for families is “hurting our children, and it’s going to have impact for generations to come.”

But Erickson stood by his comments on Thursday, first tweeting, “Husbands and wives should play complimentary roles w/ dad as breadwinner,” and then penning a longer piece on the site he edits, Red State, making the case for why women shouldn’t be the primary earner in a household. In it, he said that single mothers currently are able to handle parenting on their own solely because society “will subsidize their doing it all”:

In modern society we are not supposed to say such things about child rearing and families. In modern society we are not supposed to point out that children in a two-parent heterosexual nuclear household have a better chance at long term success in life than others. In modern society, we are supposed to applaud feminists who teach women they can have it all — that there is no gender identifying role and women can fulfill the role of husbands and fathers just as men do.

[...]
Feminists and politicians on both sides of the aisle view these statements as insulting to single moms and antithetical to their support for gay marriage. What should be insulting to single moms is for society to tell them they can do it all and, in fact, will subsidize their doing it all. I know a number of wonderful, nurturing single mothers. They do as best they can. Most of them have wonderful children. But not one of them prefers to be a single mother.[...]

Actually, American society is far from subsidizing the lives of single mothers. In fact,compared to other wealthy nations, single mothers fare terribly in America. Twenty five percent of single parents hold low-wage jobs, and there is a huge wealth gapbetween dual parent and single parent homes. Single parents also suffer from the United States’ lack of paid parental leave, since when they are forced to leave the workforce to raise an infant, they lose their only source of income.

Erickson has a long history of making remarkably sexist, anti-woman remarks. Last year, he referred to an all-female line up of speakers at the Democratic National Convention as “The Vagina Monologues,” a comment that prompted over 100,000 people to call on CNN — where Erickson is a contributor — to fire him.

Why the Right Hates Government

Robert Parry, Consortium News — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:17:00 -0700

The Right's ideological hatred of government originated in the founding era, when the South fought to justify and protect the institution of slavery.

One reasonable way of looking at democratic governance is that it carries out the collective will of a society, especially in areas where the private sector can’t do the job or needs regulation to prevent it from doing harm. Of course, there are always many variables and points of disagreement, from the need to protect individual rights to the wisdom of each decision.

But something extreme has surfaced in modern American politics: an ideological hatred of government. From the Tea Party to libertarianism, there is a “principled” rejection – at least rhetorically – of almost everything that government does (outside of national security), and those views are no longer simply fringe. By and large, they have been embraced by the national Republican Party.

There has also been an effort to anchor these angry anti-government positions in the traditions of U.S. history. The Tea Party consciously adopted imagery and symbols from the Revolutionary War era to create an illusion that this contempt of government fits with the First Principles. However, this right-wing revision of U.S. history is wildly askew if not upside-down. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, and even many of their “anti-federalist” critics, were not hostile to an American government. They understood the difference between an English monarchy that denied them representation in Parliament and their own Republic.

Indeed, the key framers – James Madison, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton – might be called pragmatic nationalists, eager to use the new Constitution, which centralized power at the national level, to build the young country and protect its fragile independence. While these framers later split over precise applications of the Constitution – Madison opposed Hamilton’s national bank, for instance – they accepted the need for a strong and effective federal government, unlike the weak, states’ rights-oriented Articles of Confederation.

More generally, the founders recognized the need for order if their experiment in self-governance was to work. Even some of the more radical founders, like Sam Adams, supported the suppression of domestic disorders, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Adams' and his cohorts' logic was that an uprising against a distant monarch was one thing, but taking up arms against your own republican government was something else.

But the Tea Partiers are not entirely wrong when they insist that their hatred of “gubmint” has its roots in the founding era. There was an American tradition that involved resisting a strong and effective national government. It was not, however, anchored in the principles of “liberty,” but rather in the practice of slavery.

Southern Fears

The battle against the Constitution and later against an energetic federal government — the sort of nation-building especially envisioned by Washington and Hamilton – emanated from the fears of many Southern plantation owners that eventually the national political system would move to outlaw slavery and thus negate their massive investment in human bondage. Their thinking was that the stronger the federal government became the more likely it would act to impose a national judgment against the South’s brutal institution of slavery. So, while the Southern argument was often couched in the rhetoric of liberty, i.e. the rights of states to set their own rules, the underlying point was the maintenance of slavery.

This dollars-and-cents reality was reflected in the debate at Virginia’s 1788 convention to ratify the Constitution. Two of Virginia’s most noted advocates for “liberty” and “rights” – Patrick Henry and George Mason – tried to rally opposition to the proposed Constitution by stoking the fears of white plantation owners. Historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg recount the debate in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, noting that the chief argument advanced by Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected” and that this danger was exacerbated by the Constitution’s granting the president, as commander in chief, the power to “federalize” state militias.

“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”

Henry floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal government might employ to take away black slaves from white Virginians. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg wrote:

“Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population, and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: ‘Every black man must fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of existence.
“Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North should have its way.”

Madison, a principal architect of the new governing structure and a slaveowner himself, sought to finesse the Mason/Henry arguments by insisting that “the central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’ …

“Yet Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’ with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.”

Right to Bear Arms

Despite the impassioned arguments of Henry and Mason – and after Madison gave assurances that he would propose amendments to address some of these concerns – Virginia’s delegates narrowly approved the Constitution on a 89-79 vote.

The key constitutional revision to allay the fears of Southern plantation owners was the Second Amendment, which recognized that “a well-regulated militia [was] necessary to the security of a free State,” echoing Mason’s language about “domestic safety” as in the protection against slave revolts.

The rest of the Second Amendment – that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – was meant by definitions of the day to ensure the right to “bear Arms” as part of a “well-regulated Militia.” Only in modern times has that meaning been distorted – by the American Right – to apply to individual Americans carrying whatever gun they might want.

But the double-talk about the Second Amendment didn’t begin in recent years. It was there from the beginning when the First Congress acted with no apparent sense of irony in using the wording, “a free State,” to actually mean “a slave State.” And, of course, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” didn’t apply to black people.

The Second Congress enacted the Militia Acts, which mandated that military-age “white” men must obtain muskets and other supplies to participate in bearing arms for their state militias. Thus, the South was guaranteed its militias for “domestic safety.”

Yet, the South still faced the broader political imperative of constraining the power of the federal government so it would never get so strong that it could end slavery. So, during the early decades of the Republic, leading Southern politicians tried to sabotage many of the federal plans for strengthening the United States.

For instance, when James Madison pressed ahead with his long-treasured plan to use the Commerce Clause to justify federal road-building – and thus improve national transportation – he was mocked by Thomas Jefferson for his excessive support of government, as Burstein and Isenberg noted in their book. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution, Madison gradually pulled out of the Washington-Hamilton orbit and was drawn into Jefferson’s. The key gravitational pull on Madison was Jefferson’s opposition to federal initiatives grounded in the agrarian interests of the slave-owning South.

Madison’s realignment with his Virginia neighbor, Jefferson, bitterly disappointed Washington and Hamilton. However, after Jefferson gained the presidency in 1801, he and Madison joined in one of the biggest federal power overreaches in U.S. history by negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France – despite the absence of any “enumerated power” in the Constitution that envisioned such an act by the central government.

March Toward War

As the national divisions over slavery sharpened, the South escalated its resistance to federal activism, even over non-controversial matters like disaster relief. As University of Virginia historian Brian Balogh noted in his book, A Government Out of Sight, Southerners asserted an extreme version of states’ rights in the period from 1840 to 1860 that included preventing aid to disaster victims.

Balogh wrote that the South feared that “extending federal power” – even to help fellow Americans in desperate need – “might establish a precedent for national intervention in the slavery question,” as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted in a May 22 column.

As it turned out, the fears of Patrick Henry, George Mason and like-minded Southerners proved prescient. The federal government would become the enemy of slavery. As the United States grew in economic strength, the barbaric practice became a drag on U.S. global influence.

With the election of Abraham Lincoln from the anti-slavery Republican Party, Southern states saw the writing on the wall. Defense of their beloved institution of owning other human beings required extreme action, which manifested itself in the secession of 11 Southern states and the enactment of a Confederate constitution explicitly enshrining slavery.

The South’s defeat in the Civil War forced the Confederate states back into the Union and enabled the Northern states to finally bring an end to slavery. However, the South continued to resist the North’s attempts to reconstruct the region in a more race-neutral way. The South’s old aristocracy reasserted itself through Ku Klux Klan terror and via political organization within the Democratic Party, reestablishing white supremacy – and oppression of blacks – under the banner of “states’ rights.”

There were, of course, other American power centers opposed to the intrusion of the federal government on behalf of the broader public. For instance, the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries used their money and their political influence inside the Republican Party to assert laissez-faire economics, all the better to steal the country blind. That power center, however, was shaken by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Recognizing the abject failure of the “free market” to serve the nation’s broader interests, the voters elected Franklin Roosevelt who dealt a New Deal that stimulated the economy, imposed securities regulations and took a variety of steps to lift citizens out of poverty.

In the post-World War II era with the United States asserting global leadership, the South’s practice of racial segregation became another eyesore that the federal government haltingly began to address under pressure from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. By the 1960s, the South had lost again, with federal laws prohibiting racial segregation.

The momentum from these two government initiatives – intervention to create a more just economy and racial integration – helped build the American middle class and finally fulfilled some of the grand principles of equality and justice espoused at the founding. However, the energy behind those reforms began to fade in the 1970s as right-wing resentment built.

Finally, in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the combined backlash against Roosevelt’s New Deal and King’s new day prevailed. Too many whites had forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression and had grown angry over what they viewed as “political correctness.”

Over the last several decades, the Right also built an imposing vertically integrated media machine that meshes the written word in newspapers, magazines and books with the spoken (or shouted) word on TV and talk radio. This giant echo chamber, resonating with sophisticated propaganda including revisionist (or neo-Confederate) history, has convinced millions of poorly informed Americans that the framers of the Constitution hated a strong central government and were all for “states’ rights” – when nearly the opposite was true as Madison, Washington and Hamilton rejected the Articles of Confederation and drafted the Constitution to enhance federal power.

Further, the Right’s hijacking of Revolutionary War symbols, like yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, confuses the Tea Party rank-and-file by equating the founding era’s resistance against an overseas monarchy to today’s hatred of an elected U.S. government.

Amid this muck of muddled history, the biggest secret withheld from the American people is that today’s Right is actually promoting a set of anti-government positions that originally arose to justify and protect the South’s institution of slavery. The calls of “liberty” then covered the cries of suffering from human bondage, just as today’s shouts of outrage reflect resentment over the first African-American president.

"They're not rational": 80-Year-Old Educator Speaks About Her Arrest in “Moral Monday Protests” Against Extreme Right-Wing Agenda in North Carolina

Jessica Ferrer, Naked Capitalism — Thu, 30 May 2013 08:51:00 -0700

A senior citizen endures an ordeal to protect equality and quality in the public school system.

Yves here. NC intern Jessica Ferrer interviewed 80 year old Barbara Parramore, who was one of 57 arrested in North Carolina on May 20 as part of what has become weekly protests at the state General Assembly called “Moral Mondays”. Background courtesy Daily Kos:

These acts of civil disobedience are in protest of the Republican supermajority’s ramrodding of nearly 2,000 bills — many of them designed to decimate public education, deny/restrict access to health insurance, kneecap labor rights, seize local control from elected municipal governments, restrict women’s access to reproductive healthcare, expand firearms permissions, eviscerate oversight boards, permit exploitation of public lands, implement “fracking” and other environmental abuses, and suppress voter rights — through the state legislature since the end of January.

Her bail was posted by the NAACP. I was told by her daughter Lynn Parramore that the police were for the most part “not hostile” but the process was designed to intimidate. She was put in zip handcuffs, which made it hard for her to balance when climbing stairs. She was frisked twice, X-rayed and scans of her fingers and hands were added to a Federal database.

Here issome footage from the protest. The police move in around 5:20:

Jessica’s interview:

Next Monday will mark the 5th “Moral Monday” demonstration in North Carolina. These nonviolent protests organized by the NC NAACP and its coalition partners are taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina—the capital—and the call for morality isn’t for rebellious teenagers. Protesters are marching to the legislative building to ask their public officials to rethink the laws they are trying to pass. 80-year old Barbara Parramore worked in the North Carolina public education system for close to 40 years. She participated in the last Moral Monday and was arrested for civil disobedience.

Jessica Ferrer: Barbara, you were a teacher for North Carolina for how many years?

Barbara Parramore: I had 37 years, ranging from being an elementary school teacher, middle school teacher, to a school counselor and then elementary school principal, but then I completed my doctorate and went to the College of Education at NC State University, where I was for 25 years.

Jessica Ferrer: And your experience as a teacher and a counselor, principal and a professor led you to participate in Moral Monday?

Barbara Parramore: Yes. And after I retired, for about 10 years I was active in doing curriculum audits with a team that went to different school districts. Also during the 1980s, when I was on campus, I was president of the North Carolina Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and another time for two years I was president of the North Carolina Teachers for the Social Studies, so I’ve been very active on a statewide basis for most of my career as well.

Jessica Ferrer: But what is the meaning of the name “Moral Monday”? What does that mean?

Barbara Parramore: That issues at stake with the range of legislative acts being passed and proposed are beyond just a legal question. There’s a moral aspect to this of what is fair and equal. Equality under the law, you know we say that, but to have laws that are implemented that are against equal opportunity raises it to a moral issue. In other words, the laws by being unconstitutional and violating human rights are going beyond human law, which makes it a moral issue. And I consider what I was doing a moral responsibility to speak up and to be willing to be arrested. It is a moral issue with me to be silent when I know laws being implemented are going to hurt children and youth.

Jessica Ferrer: When you heard about Moral Monday, what made you want to be a part of that?

Barbara Parramore: Well, having come to Raleigh in 1954 to teach, and that was the year that the Brown vs Board of Education decision was made in May, and then so my license to practice in education began when there were a lot of changes underway in education. And then when I was a school principal, the first school for special education students serving the whole city was at my school and the teacher’s salary was paid by the Woman’s Club, Senior Woman’s Club. So I’ve always been involved with activities sort of pushing ahead on what needs to be done, and also emphasis on the least among us. I’ve always been involved in education for the goals that we have that all children have an opportunity for a quality education. Now I keep up with the legislature when it’s in town and pay a lot of attention to public policy as well as laws, and so I’ve been concerned, ever since the General Assembly began working this spring, with the kinds of things they were considering and some of the laws they passed and then some that are proposed. I just believe strongly that we’re turning the hands back on the clock.

Jessica Ferrer: But you were arrested for civil disobedience.

Barbara Parramore: Yes. Yes.

Jessica Ferrer: Can you explain that?

Barbara Parramore: Well, I realized that was a possibility, and I’ve known some of the – like the first publication of arrests showed the picture of Bill Chafe from Duke University, who’s a retired history professor, and I knew him, and I thought well he’s paying attention to this, I need to pay even more attention. So I was willing to be subject to arrest. However, I do believe that I have a right to go into the legislative building and in the center part where we went. Now I know you can’t go into the chambers. So I think there’s a Constitutional question, the North Carolina Constitution, whether or not that we were really trespassing. And I made a pledge to myself when I went in that I would not sing or chant or say anything, so I never said a word during the whole time, although others were doing that, and some people were making talks after the Reverend Barber made a talk, like the economics professor from Chapel Hill spoke, a woman on the school board in Durham School spoke, a girl who just graduated from college spoke, and two others. But I never said a word. So in my own way I was doing a silent protest, although I was a member of that group. So I feel that if people like me with my background and experience and commitment to education don’t stand up, then who’s going to?

Jessica Ferrer: And you said that you believed that the legislature is moving backwards.

Barbara Parramore: Some of the laws are – well, there’s no need to have a separate law for the teaching of the multiplication tables and cursive writing. That’s up to the school board that’s appointed by the governor, and the superintendent of public instruction is elected by the people. That’s where policy for curriculum development should occur, and I just think that’s just a narrow-minded approach to checking on what’s taught in schools. There have been other laws in the past that I’ve objected to that were very specific, targeted at some special interest. For example, we had more liberal or responsible approaches to health education in the high schools and home economics, and there was a period when there was a lot of activity and the teachers were forbidden by law to mention anything about family planning or birth control, and I’ve forgotten how many years it was finally repealed, but again that was denying knowledge and information to young, you know, teenagers who certainly have a right to, you know, knowledge and facts. So that’s just an example of the legislature trying to be the super school board. There’s just a lot of things that seems to me are going to short- change the children in the long run.

Now, another thing I’m really concerned about: I am appalled at the wholesale criticism of teachers. It’s a demanding job in our society and I would say important. And yes, in large groups you may have a few who are not as effective as others, but there’s either a pending or just passed law to have teachers’ bonuses for AP classes depend on the test performance of the students. Okay, now let’s say I’m an AP teacher and I’m going to get a bonus if my students who take my history class, or chemistry, whatever it is, score well. Well, what is that going to encourage me to do? Not to include marginal students who might have undiscovered interests and talents, and so again making it more exclusive, less inclusive, and short change some children who might wake up to doing very well.

Jessica Ferrer: You’re 80 years old, correct?

Barbara Parramore: Yes.

Jessica Ferrer: And so, you’ve seen a lot of changes –

Barbara Parramore: Listen, you know, if I live 10 more years, it’ll be nearly a century. I have lived through – I could start with 1950, the last 60 years, 60+ years, and I’ve lived through it.

Jessica Ferrer: And so you’ve seen those changes, the Brown vs Board of Education, you know, getting –

Barbara Parramore: Yes. And the movement for special education. The point I’m making is that change that is substantive and meaninngful you’re taking the long term, it takes a while to change things. These little quick fixes, it seems to me, are very short-sighted.

Jessica Ferrer: Do you view the changes that the legislature is trying to make as quick fixes?

Barbara Parramore: Many of them are, and they are narrowly focused. Like the charter schools, a separate board for that. We don’t need but one head of the school system. See, it’s the North Carolina school system. It’s not individual. In other words, each local district is a part of the state. They’re not independent. In some other states they have independent school districts which means that they raise their own money and have taxes and so the local folks can vote their taxes and so on. But in North Carolina, it’s a statewide system. And the proposal to allow charter schools to be run by for-profit people or organizations is another thing that is – I mean, we should not be having anybody making a profit off of the public school tax dollars. And not all of them are doing that, of course, you know there are some very fine charter schools, and the purpose of the charter school movement I don’t have any quarrel with, but how it’s been implemented, again, is short changing some of the students that ought to be treated better than they are, narrowly focused purpose and – anyway the for-profit idea of it isn’t a bad one – as well as having teachers who are not necessarily qualified to teach.

Jessica Ferrer: So what was your arrest like?

Barbara Parramore: I had had the opportunity of reading what the faculty member the week before had experienced, so that gave me an idea. I was impressed with the professionalism of all of the law enforcement officials, officers. They were courteous. I didn’t feel any hostility or even impatience, because I know, you know, we were adding a lot of work, 55 or however many there were of us. I did, I was surprised at the – that there were two series, two different parts of having us frisked and fingerprinted and photographs made. I don’t understand that.

Jessica Ferrer: What do you think it would take for Governor McCrory and the legislature to see and hear from the protesters?

Barbara Parramore: I think a large, a greater number, a larger number of people. Because they’ve got to feel that a large percentage of the public is upset or concerned. In other words, as long as they think that it’s just a small number of people who have these strong feelings, it’s not going to matter to them. The protests have to get enough information out to convince people that the legislature needs to slow down.

Jessica Ferrer: And so would you protest again?

Barbara Parramore: Oh yes, yes. Now I’m forbidden to go anywhere near the legislative building, that whole complex, while this session is underway. I had to sign that in order to be released. But I can do other things.

Jessica Ferrer: Like what?

Barbara Parramore: Well, I’m communicating with a lot of people. I had another, two other inquiries wanting to know if I would be willing to be interviewed. What I’ll do is keep responding positively to any inquiry or messages like that.

Jessica Ferrer: But I have a question for you. The Republican platform is less government involvement, no big government, less regulation, and it seems that here in North Carolina there seems to be more regulating from a Republican governor, the first Republican governor in North Carolina in over 20 years, and then also a majority Republican legislature. Why do you think that is?

Barbara Parramore: They’re not thinking straight. They’re not rational. And they’re wanting to regulate more than even, you know – it just doesn’t make sense. And if they stopped to think about it, it’s going to increase government too. If these laws are passed they’re going to have to have somebody who has oversight and so on. However, I must tell you, I have had since Tuesday three different people, older, you know, senior folks who are Republicans tell me that they don’t agree with what’s going on. They weren’t mad at me. But I did get an e-mail today calling me, saying bullshit was the message, so I’m wondering how much of that I’m going to get. The question of how a thoughtful, educated publicly elected official could be so inconsistent is beyond me.

Jessica Ferrer: Do you think any of the changes will get made that they’re trying to pass?

Barbara Parramore: Well, they do have the power, and if they’ve got the money they can do some implementation.

Tea Party's Idea of Joke: "Shoot" Senator Who Supports Immigration

Esther Yu-Hsi Lee, Think Progress — Thu, 30 May 2013 08:26:00 -0700

Right-wing extremists see no need to dial back violent rhetoric.

In a Tea Party-sponsored conference call held on Wednesday night, a participant called for the assassination of Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) over her support for immigration reform. Prominent conservative policymakers Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)’s communications director Stephen Miller and Heritage Foundation research fellow Robert Rector also joined the call, hosted by the conservative Eagle Forum group.

The most jarring and unexpected moment of the night was when the moderator opened up the phone lines to callers:

BOB FROM MAINE: I’m from Maine and our Tea Party will be meeting up next week. What is the best way that we can get our senator to listen to us?
ANOTHER CALLER: Shoot her. [laughter]
MODERATOR: Yes, we will shoot her with…(inaudible) and phone calls.

After the anonymous statement was made, no one on the call voiced their opposition. Instead, the threat was met with laughter and “oohs.” (At the time of the incident, Sessions’ communications director had apparently left the call.) Calling for the assassination of a senator is a federal crime punishable by five years of jail and may require a Secret Service investigation.

Collins was the sole Republican to co-sponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT)’s withdrawn amendment that would allow bi-national, same sex couples to petition for immigrant visas for their significant others.

Despite the “joking” nature of the caller, this is not the first time that Tea Partiers have made explicit threats toward government officials. A Tea Partier once threatened a state senator for supporting a bill he believed would lead to government seizure of land, and famed Tea Partier Glenn Beck also called for the use of Special Ops to incite a revolution.

Christian Radio Host Says Husbands Should Get Their Sense of Worth from Outearning Their Wives

Steven Hsieh, AlterNet — Thu, 30 May 2013 06:15:00 -0700

"That's the way God set it up."

During yesterday’s Focal Point, conservative radio host Brian Fischer expressed his discomfort with news that a record 40 percent of women act as breadwinners for their families.

“From a biblical standpoint, it is very clear that men are designed to be the breadwinners for their families,” Fischer lamented. “That’s the way God set it up. That’s the way he designed it.”

Fischer explained that men were, by divine grace, granted “mental abilities” to “provide for their families.” He added that, “The biblical pattern is for a wife and mother to focus her energies—devote her energies to making a home for her husband.”

Directly addressing the new data showing steps toward gender equality, Fischer said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think it’s a healthy dynamic to have a wife outearn her husband, because so much of his sense of worth as a male is tied up with what he does vocationally.”

“If there’s a wife that outearns him, I think that’s going to put some stress on his psyche,” Fishcer said. “It’s going to put some stress on his marriage.”

h/t Right Wing Watch

Ohio School District May Add Glenn Beck Conspiracy Theories To Curriculum

Igor Volsky, Think Progress — Mon, 27 May 2013 14:51:00 -0700

The ACLU is on the case.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is challengingan Ohio school district for considering a “controversial issues policy” that would require teachers to encourage discussions about creationism and conservative conspiracy theories about U.N. Agenda 21.

Springboro Community City School District’s new curriculum — part of an effort to help students think critically and learn to “identify important issues” — mandates that “[a]ll sides of the issue should be given to the students in a dispassionate manner” to help “students to be taught to think clearly on all matters of importance, and to make decisions in the light of all the material that has been presented or can be researched on the issues.” Controversial issues include:

religion when not used in a historical or factual context, sex education, legalization of drugs, evolution/creation, pro-life/abortion,contraception/abstinence, conservatism/liberalism, politics, gun rights, global warming and climate change, UN Agenda 21 and sustainable development, and any other topic on which opposing points of view have been promulgated by responsible opinion and/or likely to arouse both support and opposition in the community.

Teachers would have to provide equal weight to widely-accepted scientific theories like evolution and right-wing conspiracies advanced by Glenn Beck. Under the policy, students could not learn about sustainable development without also assessing the impact of U.N. Agenda 21, a series of non-binding U.N. recommendations for ensuring that economic growth does not undermine the environment, which conservatives believe will destroy American sovereignty and freedom. The Agenda was developed at a summit in Brazil in 1992 with support from President George H.W. Bush.

The ACLU criticized the district for adding evolution to the “controversial issues” list, noting that the policy “appears to explicitly permit the teaching of creationism.” “It has been firmly established that this practice is unconstitutional, in violation of the Establishment Clause,” ACLU legal director James L. Hardiman explained in a letter.

In 2011, the school board “backed away from plans to teach creationism under public pressure” from the ACLU. It plans to vote on this proposal in early June and is facingsimilar criticism from parents and students. (HT: Raw Story)

Why Does the NYT Refrain from Explaining the Predatory Motives of a Billionaire-Backed Think Tank?

Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet — Mon, 27 May 2013 08:19:00 -0700

By concealing the Peterson Institute's ideological bias, the paper of record is muddling the record.

One of the all-time greatest hits of right-wing pundits is the insistence on a “liberal bias” in the media. Journalist and historian Eric Alterman exposed this myth in his 2003 book, What Liberal Media? yet it persists, often resulting in mainstream media outlets caving to a strategy known as “working the refs,” in which shrill cries of bias cause journalists and pundits to privilege right-leaning perspectives so they won’t be accused.

A disturbing example of this trend haunts the pages of the New York Times, in which the pernicious work of the decidedly right-wing Peter G. Peterson Institute is treated as ideologically unbiased while that of other organizations across the spectrum are consistently mentioned along with an ideological tag; often one designed to misguide readers on the actual nature of the organization’s agenda.

Let’s take a tour of the NYT archives.

When the Koch-backed Cato Institute is mentioned, the label “libertarian” tends to appear. An article about Ben Bernanke’s stance on China’s currency undervaluation, for example, tells us that “speakers at a conference in Washington, organized by the libertarian Cato Insitute warned that the Fed’s monetary policy could lead to asset-price bubbles….” The ideological tag alerts the reader to take the assertion with a grain of salt. The obviously right-wing Heritage Foundation is usually tag-less and never characterized as “right-leaning,” but occasionally the term “conservative” will appear when it is mentioned.

The Obama-supporting Center for American Progress is alternatively described as “liberal” or “center left” as in this article: “The center-left Center for American Progress opened in 2003 when the Democrats were in political exile.” The Institute for Policy Studies is called a “left-leaning think tank in Washington.” (AlterNet, on the rare occasion it is mentioned, is described as a “left-leaning news site.”)

Third Way, a big money front group whose governing board is totally dominated by Wall Street financiers, is absurdly characterized as a “moderately left-wing think tank,” when in fact, as Bill Black has pointed out, it is dedicated to a right-wing agenda of shredding the social safety net and imposing self-destructive austerity on America.

Which brings us to the case of the Peter G. Peterson Institute, which, according to SourceWatch, is "founded, chaired, and funded" by Pete Peterson, a conservative Republican billionaire who made his money as a Wall Street hedge fund manager and served as secretary of commerce under President Richard Nixon. He has devoted himself and his billions to promoting deficit hysteria and convincing the public that programs like Social Security and Medicare will destroy the economy. His economic policies come from the far right and he has been dedicated to producing propaganda masquerading as serious research. He has a huge and well-paid staff (and one of them will be contacting me after the publication of this article attempting to brow-beat me into telling lies about their boss).

The mythology promoted by Peterson has done incalculable harm to America. His belief in the absurd efficient market theory, in which financial markets magically regulate themselves, has helped produce widespread and continuing fraud epidemics. He has consistently pushed austerity (based, as we now know, on the discredited research of Harvard economists Reinhart and Rogoff), which has led to job loss, economic stagnation and untold misery for millions. Austerity-champion Carmen Reinhart is, incidentally, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute.

Yet something interesting happens when you type "Peterson Institute” into the New York Timesonline archives. When you see a descriptor, it’s one of praise – Adam Davidson of the NYT Magazine, always eager to show off his affection for economic quacks, refers to the Peterson Institute as a “prominent Washington policy group.” The fact that the Peterson Institute never receives an ideogical tag conveys that its positions are neutral, and therefore highly credible.

Which is absolute bunk.

On Saturday, May 25, the NYT ran a front-page story purporting to examine a new trend in Chinese economic policy, a topic of great importance to readers. Quotations in the article come from bank officials, a Chinese government website, politicians, and exactly one think tank representative, Nicholas R. Lardy, “a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and an authority on the Chinese economy.” The reader is not informed that the positions of the Peterson Institute will tend to include free market fundamentalist economic theories that focus on discrediting economic stimulus, driving down wages and curbing regulation. All of these positions appear in the article, without any counterweight.

For what many people still consider the paper of record, this kind of reporting merely muddles the record and allows propaganda to disguise itself as truth.

6 Key Facts That Have Been Lost in the IRS Scandal

Justin Elliott, Kim Barker, ProPublica — Sat, 25 May 2013 11:17:00 -0700

Dark money groups continue to warp politics and get tax exemptions without having to name their donors.

This originally appeared on ProPublica.

In the furious fallout from the revelation that the IRS flagged applications from conservative nonprofits for extra review because of their political activity, some points about the big picture -- and big donors -- have fallen through the cracks.

Consider this our Top 6 list of need-to-know facts on social welfare nonprofits, also known as dark money groups because they don’t have to disclose their donors. The groups poured more than $256 million into the 2012 federal elections.

1. Social welfare nonprofits are supposed to have social welfare, and not politics, as their “primary” purpose.

A century ago, Congress created a tax exemption for social welfare nonprofits. The statute defining the groups says they are supposed to be “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” But in 1959, the regulators interpreted the “exclusively” part of the statute to mean groups had to be “primarily” engaged in enhancing social welfare. This later opened the door to political spending.

So what does “primarily” mean? It’s not clear. The IRS has said it uses a “facts and circumstances” test to say whether a group mostly works to benefit the community or not. In short: If a group walks and talks like a social welfare nonprofit, then it’s a social welfare nonprofit.

This deliberate vagueness has led some groups to say that “primarily” simply means they must spend 51 percent of their money on a social welfare idea -- say, on something as vague as “education,” which could also include issue ads criticizing certain politicians. And then, the reasoning goes, a group can spend as much as 49 percent of its expenditures on ads directly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate for office.

Nowhere in tax regulations or rulings does it mention 49 percent, though. Some nonprofit lawyers have argued that the IRS should set hard limits for social welfare nonprofits -- setting out, for instance, that they cannot spend more than 20 percent of their money on election ads or even limiting spending to a fixed amount, like no more than $250,000.

So far, the IRS has avoided clarifying any limits.

2. Donors to social welfare nonprofits are anonymous for a reason.

Unlike donors who give directly to politicians or even to super PACs, donors who give to social welfare nonprofits can stay secret. In large part, this is because of an attempt by Alabama to force the NAACP, then a social welfare nonprofit, to disclose its donors in the 1950s. In 1958, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP, saying that public identification of its members made them at risk of reprisal and threats.

The ACLU, which is itself a social welfare nonprofit, has long made similar arguments. So has Karl Rove, the GOP strategist and brains behind Crossroads GPS, which has spent more money on elections than any other social welfare nonprofit. In early April 2012, Rove invoked the NAACP in defending his organization against attempts to reveal donors.

The Federal Election Commission could in theory push for some disclosure from social welfare nonprofits -- for their election ads, at least. But the FEC has been paralyzed by a 3-3 partisan split, and its interpretations of older court decisions have given nonprofits wiggle room to avoid saying who donated money, as long as a donation wasn’t specifically made for a political ad.

New rulings indicate that higher courts, including the Supreme Court, favor disclosure for political ads, and states are also stepping into the fray. During the 2012 elections, courts in two states -- Montana and Idaho -- ruled that two nonprofits engaged in state campaigns needed to disclose donors.

But sometimes, when nonprofits funnel donations, the answers raise more questions. It’s the Russian nesting doll phenomenon. Last election, for instance, California’s election agency pushed for an Arizona social welfare nonprofit to disclose donors for $11 million spent on two California ballot initiatives. The answer? Another social welfare nonprofit, which in turn got the money from a trade association, which also doesn’t have to reveal its donors.

3. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision meant that corporations could pay for political ads, anonymously, using social welfare nonprofits.

In January 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions could spend money directly on election ads. A later court decision made possible super PACs, the political committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from donors, as long as they don’t coordinate with candidates and as long as they report their donors and spending.

Initially, campaign finance watchdogs believed corporations would give directly to super PACs. And in some cases, that happened. But not as much as anyone thought, and maybe for a reason: Disclosure isn’t necessarily good for business. Target famously faced a consumer and shareholder backlash after it gave money in 2010 to a group backing a Minnesota candidate who opposed gay rights.

Many watchdogs now believe that large public corporations are giving money to support candidates through social welfare nonprofits and trade associations, partly to avoid disclosure. Although the tax-exempt groups were allowed to spend money on election ads before Citizens United, their spending skyrocketed in 2010 and again in 2012.

A New York Times article based on rare cases in which donors have been disclosed, sometimes accidentally, explored the issue of corporations giving to these groups last year. Insurance giant Aetna, for example, accidentally revealed it gave $3 million in 2011 to the American Action Network, a social welfare group founded by former Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican, that runs election ads.

Groups that favor more disclosure have so far failed to force action by the FEC, the IRS, or Congress, although some corporations have voluntarily reported their political spending. Advocates have now turned to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is studying a proposal to require public companies to disclose political contributions.

The idea is already facing strong opposition from House Republicans.

4. Social welfare nonprofits do not actually have to apply to the IRS for recognition as tax-exempt organizations.

With all the furor over applications being flagged from conservative groups -- particularly groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12” in their names -- it’s worth remembering that a social welfare nonprofit doesn’t even have to apply to the IRS in the first place.

Unlike charities, which are supposed to apply for recognition, social welfare nonprofits can simply incorporate and start raising and spending money, without ever applying to the IRS.

The agency’s nonprofit wing is mainly concerned about ferreting out bad charities, which are the biggest chunk of nonprofits and the biggest source of potential revenue. After all, the IRS’s main job is to collect revenue. Charities allow donors to deduct donations, while social welfare nonprofits don’t.

Most major social welfare nonprofits do apply, because being recognized is seen as insurance against later determination by the IRS that the group should have registered as a political committee and may face back taxes and disclosure of donors. A recognition letter is also essential to raise money from certain donors -- like, say, corporations.

But some of the new groups haven’t applied.

The first time the IRS hears about these social welfare nonprofits is often when they file their first annual tax return, not due until sometimes more than a year after they’ve formed.

In many cases, the first time the IRS hears about these groups is a full year after an election.

5. Most of the money spent on elections by social welfare nonprofits supports Republicans.

Of the more than $256 million spent by social welfare nonprofits on ads in the 2012 elections, at least 80 percent came from conservative groups, according to FEC figures tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

None came from the Tea Party groups with applications flagged by the IRS. Instead, a few big conservative groups were largely responsible.

Crossroads GPS, which this week said it believes it is among the conservative groups "targeted" by the IRS, spent more than $70 million in federal races in 2012. Americans for Prosperity, the social welfare nonprofit launched by the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, spent more than $36 million. American Future Fund spent more than $25 million. Americans for Tax Reform spent almost $16 million. American Action Network spent almost $12 million.

Besides Crossroads GPS, each of those groups has applied to the IRS and been recognized as tax-exempt. (You can look at their applications here.)

All of those groups spent more than the largest liberal social welfare nonprofit, the League of Conservation Voters, which spent about $11 million on 2012 federal races. The next biggest group, Patriot Majority USA, spent more than $7 million. Planned Parenthood spent $6.5 million. VoteVets.org spent more than $3 million.

None of those figures include the tens of millions of dollars spent by groups on certain ads that run months before an election that are not reported to the FEC.

6. Some social welfare groups promised in their applications, under penalty of perjury, that they wouldn’t get involved in elections. Then they did just that.

Much of the attention when it comes to Tea Party nonprofits has focused on their applications and how the IRS determines whether a group qualifies for social welfare status.

As part of our reporting on dark money in 2012, ProPublica looked at more than 100 applications for IRS recognition. One thing we noted again and again: Groups sometimes tell the IRS that they are not going to spend money on elections, receive IRS recognition, and then turn around and spend money on elections

The application to be recognized as a social welfare nonprofit, known as a 1024 Form, explicitly asks a group whether it has spent or plans to spend “any money attempting to influence the selection, nomination, election, or appointment of any person to any Federal, state, or local public office or to an office in a political organization.”

The American Future Fund, a conservative nonprofit that would go on to spend millions of dollars on campaign ads, checked “No”in answer to that question in 2008. The very same day the group submitted its application, it uploaded this ad to its YouTube account:

Even before mailing its application to the IRS saying it would not spend money on elections in 2010, the Alliance for America’s Future was running TV ads supporting Republican candidates for governor in Nevada and Florida. It also had given $133,000 to two political committees directed by Mary Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president.

Another example of this is the Government Integrity Fund, a conservative nonprofit that ran ads in last year’s U.S. Senate race in Ohio. Its application was approved after it told the IRS that it would not spend money on politics. The group went on to do just that.

For more on the IRS and nonprofits active in politics, read our story on how the IRS's nonprofit division got so dysfunctional, Kim Barker's investigation, "How nonprofits spend millions on elections and call it public welfare" and our Q&A on dark money.

10 Crazy Things the Right Did This Week

ThinkProgress — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:13:00 -0700

It's been another week of the insane, inane, and outright offensive.

It's been another week of the insane, inane, and outright offensive. Here's your top ten:

Pennsylvania governor can't find any Latinos to work for him. Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) told a Spanish-language newspaper this week that he didn't have any Latinos working for him. There are approximately 18,000 Latinos just in the Harrisburg, PA area alone.
Pennsylvania governor remembers single Latino who works for him. A day after saying he didn't have any Latinos working for him, Corbett suddenly remembered a single Latino appointee working in his administration.
Conservatives freak out over Boy Scouts decision to admit gays. Here'sthe ten best conservative freak-outs over the group's decision to admit gay scouts while maintaining a ban on gay leaders.
Tea Party congressman mansplains his anti-abortion views. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), speaking at a hearing about an unconstitutional ban on abortion after 20 weeks that House Republicans are championing, told a witness that she should've been forced to wait and give birth rather than have an abortion even though her fetus had no brain function.
Top Republican called Obama's national security speech "a victory for terrorists." The comments were made by Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Chambliss defeated a decorated, triple amputee veteran in 2002 by running an ad juxtaposing his opponent with images of Osama bin Laden.
Texas GOP continued its obsession with limiting women's rights. The Texas GOP introduced another 24 anti-abortion bills this year, but thankfullynone of them advanced.
This man could be the next Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. Virginia Republicans nominated an extremely anti-gay, anti-abortion minister who has a long history of making insensitive and inflammatory comments. Here's his20 craziest tweets.
RNC chair melts down. In an effort to attack the president, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus threw out attacks so over the top that the Morning Joe crew called him out.
GOP senator says implementing Obamacare is just like an illegal coverup. Because of her efforts to implement Obamcare, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) likened Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to convicted criminal Oliver North.
GOP senator defends Apple's efforts to avoid billions of dollars in U.S. taxes. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), in a move reminiscent of Rep. Joe Barton's infamous apology to BP in the wake of its disastrous oil spill, apologized to top Apple officials for being called in front of the Senate to explain how they use complex structures and gimmicks to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

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