Race War!

During a roundtable discussion on Friday, Fox News’ Lou Dobbs agreed with a network contributor who argued that Americans need to access military-style assault weapons to protect themselves from an Iranian invasion.

Ridiculous.  Anyway, everybody knows right-wing gun nuts hoard munitions of war not to protect themselves against a foreign invasion, but instead to prepare for insurrection against our own government.  Fact of the matter is the civil war didn't turn out quite like they had hoped and they want another bite at the apple.  A multi-cultural and upwardly mobile society runs contrary to their core beliefs and they openly fantasize about taking it over in a blaze of gun glory.  Republican party leadership encourages mistrust of government by the people and the fact this crowd is more partial to the Confederate flag than the American flag should be a giant red flag at the voting booth. 

Keepin' em' Stupid

Think Progress:  For five years since the Great Recession, states have drastically cut funding for public universities, with long-lasting consequences for the U.S. economy. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that every state except North Dakota and Wyoming is spending less per student than before the recession. As a result, students are paying much higher tuition, while quality of education has suffered from faculty cuts, closed campuses, eliminated course offerings and shut down educational resources like libraries and computer labs.

This is a simple yet highly illustrative picture of Republican rule.  We all know they're anti-science, basically hate public education, and publicly brand anybody who's highly educated as some kind of foreign elite.  They've spent the entire Obama presidency getting rid of as many public school teachers as possible. They're happy to see sequestration result in even less education. 

Undereducated populations provide the conservative movement with Walmart/drive through/McJob wage slaves and they don't think too critically about the crappy results of Republican party public policy.  But they kill the country.

Public education is a vital and indespensible investment in the future competitiveness of the nation and a pillar of upward mobility.  It's an investment that pays off many time over.  Only people who are not actually interested in the success of the country, or the ideal of the American dream, would cut it to pay for tax cuts for the super-rich and the transnational corporation.  Remember that when you vote. 

Fascists

Daily Kos:  Emily Ramshaw at the Texas Tribune writes:

As recently as 2003, the president of the Greater Fort Bend County Tea Party had a very different title: director of propaganda for the American Fascist Party. James Ives, a prominent Tea Party activist who has hosted statewide rallies and political debates and has been a regular contributor on conservative radio, was the AFP's fourth in command, commenting about the party’s principles on a fascist message board. An image of Ives in what appears to be a black uniform with yellow shoulder patches can be seen in a 2006 promotional video for the party.

Ives tells a more nuanced story; the Richmond, Texas, resident says he stumbled across the fascist party — which supports extreme right-wing authoritarian regimes — online in the early 2000s as an “amateur political science student and frustrated novelist” and was merely curious.

We have long said the GOP is a fascist political party.  We would like to thank James Ives for helping to make that case. 

Still With Us

Huffingtonpost:  Days after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a decision repeated by many other Americans around the country: He was going to enlist in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who had helped coordinate the deaths of nearly 3,000 men, women and children.

Less than three years later, Young's Army service placed him not in Afghanistan -- where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated -- but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young's convoy was attacked by insurgents. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again, and in fact, for the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks that allowed him to survive only with the help of extensive medical procedures and the care of his wife, Claudia.

The incident turned Young into one of the most vocal veteran critics of the Iraq War. He has, however, saved his most powerful criticism for what he claims will be his last. Young says he'll die soon, but not before writing a letter to Bush and former Vice President Cheney on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.   From Young's letter, published on TruthDig:

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Powerful stuff.  But it wasn't just Bush and Cheney.  It was the entire GOP establishment that pushed us into this tragedy.  They all felt it would be good for their political fortunes and in fact they used it to get elected, raise money, and pay their cronies, for multiple election cycles.  Most of those people are still Washington DC Republicans.   

Wage Slavers

TPM: House Republicans unanimously voted down a measure Friday that would have raised the federal minimum wage, from its current $7.25 per hour to $10.10 by 2015.

Every-single-damn-one-of-them.  Well, they have their masters and their masters tell them not pass any law that says they have to pay people above poverty wages.  This is bad for the economy because the people getting minimum wage would pretty much be forced to spend the extra money, and it's bad for the GOP because this will make God hate them even more. 

How's He Voting On Gay Rights Issues?

Raw Story: A Anti-marijuana Republican lawmaker in New York who has a record of voting against medical marijuana legalization has been arrested and charged with possession of marijuana.

That's just great.  Vote to put people in jail for doing something medically helpful while you're doing the same thing for recreation.  Typical conservative.  Usually we hear of anti-gay conservatives caught being gay, so this is just another variation on that theme.  Hopefully this is the end of his career.

Terrorist

WASHINGTON: -- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex) says that he is expecting a vote Wednesday on his amendment to defund Obamacare until economic growth is restored, adding that he is willing to risk a government shutdown if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Barack Obama stand in the way.

This is ridiculous. You don't get to hold the government hostage like that.  That's what terrorists do.  The GOP lost the election.  The American people want affordable healthcare. That's the way they voted.  To hold them hostage at the point of the gun that is the for-profit medical industry massive profit margins, and threaten their government, should really disqualify him from public.   

Additionally, we do have economic growth.  We have restored growth with our Democratic public policy.  It had to be restored because his team put us into complete economic and fiscal meltdown with the same public policy he's advocating for right now.  He's being deceptive by implying otherwise. 

Last, he's pushing public policy that history has already proven to be a disaster for the country.

Quite a guy...