AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

It doesn't matter what the company is or was. All was asking was whether the services of a prostitute could be counted as a legitimate but non-specified business expense.

No. Prostitution is/was illegal under federal laws. Also illegal drugs cannot be claimed as a deduction.

Ya beat me to it! I could add that no contract can be formed for an illegal purpose. That doesn't mean the hooker is advised to stiff her pimp, but it's not a legally enforceable contract.

Even under the umbrella category of entertainment?

It's still against the law(s), but I'm sure some companies allow those kinds of "expense." If they get caught, the penalties and interest should discourage future hanky panky.

The reason I asked was I heard the rant someone in Congress was making about federally funded abortions. It reminded me of that conversation. I was thinking that while people might not mind the cost of prostitution included in their products . . . well . . . who knows.

Thanks.

Bill Maher and Joy Behar discuss the current political state of affairs. Some zingers but the clip is slightly more than 8 minutes long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8-2MLR_jG0

You should realize by now how the conservatives will include everything in the frying pan to see what sticks - in teflon. It's politically motivated, and nothing else. Anybody looking at the conservatives of today with open eyes would see they are extremists.

It is the radical and liberal Left that are extreme, imposter. In fact, the very idea that you would label conservatism extreme renders you extreme.

No. That you can write something like the above shows that you are at best naive, at worst totally ignorant both of political science and human nature.

You have demonstrated over and over again that you have no learning and no interests. You might as well be an 8-year-old. That is the level of sophistication you demonstrate.

You can not have good without evil. You can not have the left without the right. Think of the ying and yang symbol, if you know what it is. http://www.fotosearch.com/illustration/yin-yang.html

Heavens, you can't have male without female.

As much as I think the American right is led by people who are consciously evil, we need both the left and the right.

What do you think compromise is? What do you think government is?

Since last summer was "The Summer of Recovery", what is the slogan going to be for this summer? Any dems heard anything?

People from the American Way:
the Right Wing's favorite rewriter of American history, David Barton
insists that the United States was founded as a Christian nation ... and that the Bible and Jesus's teachings directly oppose progressive taxation, the capital gains tax and collective bargaining rights for unions.

David Barton's influence on the Right has been steadily rising. Glenn Beck has called this faux historian "the most important man in America." He has the ear of several possible GOP presidential candidates and many members of Congress -- Michele Bachmann has even invited him to deliver a "history" lesson to her Tea Party caucus. And he has been instrumental in efforts to replace sound history with right-wing propaganda social studies textbooks and curricula in public schools across the country, most visibly in Texas last year.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published a high-profile article about Barton which linked to our report, Barton's Bunk. While our report exposes this charlatan for what he is, the Times report unfortunately focused too much on Barton's personal life and not enough on the insidious threat posed by his lies about American history, our Constitution and the Founders.

Barton appeared as Jon Stewart's guest on The Daily Show. This was a follow up to Mike Huckabee's guest appearance when Stewart made Barton a big topic of the discussion. Stewart challenged Huckabee on previous statements he had made praising Barton. In fact, Huckabee's praise was so emphatic that at one speaking engagement, he said that he wished "all Americans would be forced -- forced at gunpoint no less -- to listen to every David Barton message." Huckabee's over-the-top endorsement is just one example of the importance with which the conservative movement treats Barton.

Even as deft an interviewer as Jon Stewart couldn't keep up with Barton's lies and distortions. The shear volume of the lies pouring out of Barton was incredible, as was the egregiousness of those lies.

Good thing our Right Wing Watch blog was there to fact check. Using our extensive past coverage of Barton on Right Wing Watch, as well as our Barton's Bunk report, we have been able to offer point-by-point refutations of distortions and falsehoods Barton so shamelessly peddled on The Daily Show.

Barton told Stewart that he "never had to retract a single thing" But we've provided a ong list of times when Barton has had to retract his statements and assertions, as well as times that he has been directly called out for misrepresenting quotes and lying about historical events and figures.

Barton has been deeply involved in recent battles over the content of textbooks in Texas and the nation. The Texas State Board of Education notoriously redesigned the state’s social studies curriculum to have it conform more closely to a right-wing view of American history, even though some changes sought by Religious Right activists like Barton were inaccurate and dismissive of the civil rights movement. The Religious Right activist who had chaired the Board of Education named Barton an “expert” and backed efforts by Barton and preacher Peter Marshall to purge figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez from the curriculum. Barton’s involvement with the textbook controversy also provided evidence of the naked partisanship behind much of his work: he demanded that because the founders hated and feared democracy, and created a republic instead, that textbooks should not refer to “democratic values” but “republican” ones.

Sloppy Scholarship
Credible historians, writers, and even religious groups have denounced Barton’s shoddy, misleading, and politically-motivated “scholarship,” which misquotes and misleadingly portrays historical figures and documents. Here is a sampling of Barton’s critics:

Derek Davis, director of the J.M. Dawson Institute on Church-State Studies at Baylor University, said Barton “can be very convincing to an uninitiated audience. He’s intelligent. He’s well-spoken. But a lot of what he presents is a distortion of the truth.”

John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, has criticized Barton and Peter Marshall, who worked with Barton to influence Texas textbooks: “I’m an evangelical Christian, and I think David Barton and Peter Marshall are completely out to lunch. They are not experts on social studies and history. Neither of them are trained in history. They are preachers who use the past and history as a means of promoting a political agenda in the present.”

J. Brent Walker, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee, argues in a critique of Barton’s teachings on church-state issuesthat Barton’s work is “laced with exaggerations, half-truths and misstatements of fact. As more individuals, congregations and elected officials are influenced by Barton's claims, the threat of his campaign becomes more real...”Baptist blogger Don Byrd said “having Barton lecture the House of Representatives on religious liberty issues and the Constitution is a bit like having the fox lecture the hens on proper coop construction.”

Former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter wrote in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that Barton’s “pseudoscholarship would hardly be worth discussing, let alone disproving, were it not for the fact that it is taken so very seriously by so many people.”

Mark Lilla, a scholar who has taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, has publicly criticized the “schlock history written by religious propagandists like David Barton, the author of the bizarre pastiche The Myth of Separation, who use selective quotations out of context to suggest that the framers were inspired believers who thought they were founding a Christian nation.”

The Anti-Defamation League found that Barton’s “ostensible scholarship functions in fact as an assault on scholarship: in the manner of other recent phony revisionisms, the history it supports is little more than a compendium of anecdotes divorced from their original context, linked harum-scarum and laced with factual errors and distorted innuendo. Barton's ‘scholarship,’ like that of Holocaust denial and Atlantic slave trade conspiracy-mongering is rigged to arrive at predetermined conclusions, not history.”

Historian Richard V. Pierard of Indiana State University has called Barton’s claims that the Founding Fathers were mostly evangelical Christians “ridiculous” since the term was not used at the time, contending that “to try to take a later definition and impose it on these people is a historical anachronism.”

I bet the slogan won't be 8% or less unemployment with the stimulus. Isn't it still about 9% as of April, 2011? Its been over 2 years now since the president took office. Not only that, the U6 rate is still over 15%.

The dumbmasses fell for that sales pitch big time and look what it got us

okie, Do you know how to read graphs? No, you don't. If you knew how to read graphs, you would realize that the uptick in unemployment started with the Great Recession started by GW Bush. That Great Recession affect the world's economy and unemployment in all countries - even China, because the importing countries could not buy Chinese goods.

The miracle, if we can call it that, is that Obama was able to stop the bleeding of jobs in two years - and put a break on unemployment at about 16 to 17.5%.

Do you understand anything about macro-economics? No, you don't. You make it obvious by your ignorant posts about the whole subject of unemployment.

Do yourself a favor - to stop making yourself look the fool you really are - and stop posting bull ****.

This is a graph that shows presidents ratings, and GW Bush was below 30% when he left office. Do you understand the significance of that? Also, look at Obama's rating after two years with all the other presidents. Gee, isn't that something!



GW Bush got a boost when he started his Iraq war, but immediately saw a drop in ratings very quickly. Do you know why?

Yes I can read graphs, and I have a suggestion for you. Take your own suggestion and quit posting your own bs. Try posting something that is interesting and informative. Another suggestion, check out the information about Herman Cain and watch his youtube speech about "We the People," and you will hear somebody that actually inspires, not something that Obama would tell us in "uhs, erhs, uh, erh, etc."

Would that be,

"We the people, before we were part of the we, had already started raping and pillaging foreign lands. Now that we are part of "we the people", sort of anyway, I've decided to throw my lot in with the Repugs because they are best at doing the raping and pillaging and I figure that's my best shot for getting some of that loot in my pocket.

Ain't America just the bestest."