Part I addressed the invasive and dangerous power and influence of billionaires Charles and David Koch and Rupert Murdoch and their powerful grip on the GOP, especially its tea party wing.
As we have learned from recent national media reports, barring Fox cable TV "news" of course, self-serving billionaires have invested millions of dollars in a single minded effort to support right wing causes, especially the tea party wing of the Republican party. The main goal of the pervasively powerful corporate potentates is to seek out and find political tools and loyal enablers that will carry their water.
The Republican Party has enthusiastically clicked its heels, while courageously stepping up to selflessly volunteer to serve the potentates of money, power and influence. In so doing the GOP also showed its unbridled willingness to throw everyday Americans into the ditch if such abandonment of constituents better serves the Party's corporate masters.
At least we can now understand the rationale for the Republican servants willful and stubborn obstruction of legislation that would fuel our economic recovery.
The GOP enabling shills have snapped to attention because the puppet masters have given its talking points to lawmakers ranging in rank from Mitch McConnell to John Boehner to half-term governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, and TX Gov. Rick Perry the Secessionist. The billionaire ventriloquists that speak through the voices of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, understandably yearn for a return to the unfettered Wall St. days of W.
H/t to Disarray over at Daily Kos for the above video.
From the perspective of a conservative and economist.
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative and an economist recently wrote an article in Forbes Magazine entitled:
The Misinformed Tea Party Movement
It seems that the anti-tax crew knows very little about how much revenue the federal government receives from taxpayers.
Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions. They got 57 responses--a pretty good-sized sample from a crowd that numbered between 300 and 500 people. (Survey results are here.)
Question 1: How much does the federal government receive in taxes as a percentage of the GDP?
Teabagger answer:
Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.
The facts.
According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.
Who would have thought? In its true and hypocritical form The Party of No and Obstruction opposes President Obama's proposed fees on banks.
Dick Cheney must be hard at work at that printing press in his undisclosed basement.
Prominent Republicans are coming out in opposition to President Barack Obama's proposal for a $90-billion fee on large banks that took bailout money, a move that political observers say could force the GOP to choose between their traditional anti-tax position and populist anger over the bailout.
On Thursday, GOP Chairman Michael Steele declared that the bank fee -- which would be levied only on banks that took bailout money and have more than $50 billion in assets -- is "another tax on the American public."
The GOP is standing by fat cat the banker in yet another effort to oppose President Obama. Republicans demonstrate time and time again that they are willing to put politics ahead of working on solutions to solve the daunting challenges that we face on local, state and national levels.
Liz Cheney, whose father served as one of the architects of two wars, one of which is unnecessary and which has broken us in terms of blood and treasure, and her father, who had also received five deferments during the Vietnam War, attacked President Obama for greeting our fallen soldiers at the Dover Air Force Base.
Only a Republican could turn a respectful and well-meaning Presidential act into an inappropriate or self-serving one.
How low can they go? Apparently the pit is bottomless, as readers will see later in the post.
Veterans over at Daily Kos have much to say about Liz Cheney and her father.
The poll's findings are a monumental embarrassment for Texas and the South. It should also be extraordinarily humiliating for the Republican Party to know that it has become a regional rump Party of the South comprised largely of old folks and and a majority of the racially intolerant and xenophobes.
As I've written before, Republicans don't want us talking about torture and so they are creating a fiction about Nancy Pelosi and her lying about torture.
Hats off to diarist Muzikal203 over at Daily Kos for sharing the incredible video clip of Jesse Ventura's appearance on The View.
Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.
First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought. A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others. In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.
A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:
The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.
This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.
Finally, a jackass is one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.
