Tears of Rage

The Tea Party Pork Binge

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Republican leadership’s tether to the Tea Party, flutters the hearts of the government-bashing, budget-slicing faithful with his relentless attacks on runaway federal spending. To Cantor, an $8 billion high-speed rail connecting Las Vegas to Disneyland is wasteful “pork-barrel spending.” The Virginia Republican set up the “You Cut” Web site to demonstrate how easy it is to slash government programs. And he made the Department of Housing and Urban Development the poster child for waste when he disclosed that the agency was paying for housing for Ph.D.s.

But away from the cameras, Cantor sometimes pulls right up to the spending trough, including the very stimulus law he panned in public. Letters obtained by Newsweek show him pressing the Transportation Department to spend nearly $3 billion in stimulus money on a high-speed-rail project—not the one he derided in Nevada, but another in his home state. “Virginia ... will demonstrate that this historic investment in rail will create jobs, reduce congestion, spur economic growth and improve our environment,” says a letter he signed with other Virginia members in October 2009, cribbing President Obama’s own argument for the stimulus.

Cantor signed several such letters, including an earlier one seeking rail funds a month after he went on national television attacking the Vegas project. He also signed a letter in October 2009 seeking $60 million to build commercial ships, some likely along Virginia’s coastline. As for his bashing of HUD, until last year he owned as much as $50,000 in preferred stock in a real-estate company that receives federal housing assistance from the department.

As the government showdown over debt continues—the so-called congressional supercommittee negotiating cuts has been floundering for weeks—Newsweek found about five dozen of the most fiscally conservative Republicans, from Tea Party freshmen like Allen West to anti-spending presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Ron Paul, trying to gobble up the very largesse they publicly disown, in the time-honored, budget-busting tradition of bringing home the bacon for local constituents.

The stack of spending-request letters between these GOP members and federal agencies stands more than a foot tall, and disheartens some of the activists who sent Republicans to Washington in the last election.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” says Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, when told about the stack of letters from members, many of whom he supported in 2010. “We sent many of these people there, and really, I wish some of our folks would get up and say, you know what, we have to cut the budget, and the budget is never going to get cut if all 535 members of Congress have their hands out all the time.”

Many of the letters seek to tap the stimulus, clean-energy loans, and innovation grants—programs the same Republicans have accused Obama and the Democrats of using to bloat government and jeopardize America’s future.
More: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/30/conseratives-brought-nation-to-default-ask-for-govt-handouts.html

This Charlie Chaplin speech features what appears to be a man portraying Chaplin. I find his resemblance to Hitler unsettling, but love the speech.

The Young Turks
Go ahead, you tell me what I told you. They are going to keep the Bush tax cuts for the rich and cut deductions for the middle class instead. Both parties work for the top 1%. Then they'll call it sensible, bipartisan compromise and all of Washington will cheer. They make me sick. -Cenk
Super Committee Democrats Offer To Scrap Bush Tax Cut Debate In Exchange For $650 Billion In Revenue
www.huffingtonpost.com
WASHINGTON -- Under their latest proposal to the deficit reduction super committee, Democrats would agree to undertake comprehensive tax reform that included a pledge to avoid letting Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire. According to a private document, the authenticity of which was confirmed b.....

Scalia and Thomas dine with healthcare law challengers as court takes case
www.latimes.com
The day the Supreme Court considered the politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to Obama’s healthcare law, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court. ..

Super Committee Members Say The Only Deficit Deal They’ll Make Is — Benefit Cuts for the Middle Class & Lower Taxes for the Rich
The Republican supercommittee Co-Chair couldn’t be clearer about his party’s priorities for deficit reduction—the GOP will only agree to a deficit plan that includes massive cuts in middle-class benefits combined with even lower taxes for the wealthy. With just days left before its deadline, it is obvious that the only deal that will come from (...)
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Saudi woman beheaded for ‘practicing witchcraft’
www.rawstory.com
RIYADH: A Saudi woman was beheaded Monday after being convicted of practising sorcery, which is banned in the ultra-conservative kingdom, the Interior Ministry said...

Strapped to the 'Devil's Chair' and 'pepper-sprayed to death': Horrific fate of mentally ill grandfather 'tortured by police until he died'Nick Christie, 62, was detained by Florida police in March 2009
Had been suffering depression and had a 'mental breakdown'
No-one has ever been charged following the incident
Relatives now suing Lee Country Sheriff's Department for 'wrongful death'

How a Filthy Rich 196 People Will Buy Our Election
In 2011, 196 individual donors provided nearly 80 percent of the money raised by super PACs.
February 16, 2012 |
At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation -- drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% -- electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.

If 2008 was the year of the small donor, when many political pundits (myself included) predicted that the fusion of grassroots organizing and cyber-activism would transform how campaigns were run, then 2012 is "the year of the big donor," when a candidate is only as good as the amount of money in his super PAC. “In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires,” wrote Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

“This really is the selling of America,” claims former presidential candidate and Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean. “We’ve been sold out by five justices thanks to the Citizens United decision.” In truth, our democracy was sold to the highest bidder long ago, but in the 2012 election the explosion of super PACs has shifted the public’s focus to the staggering inequality in our political system, just as the Occupy movement shined a light on the gross inequity of the economy. The two, of course, go hand in hand.

“We’re going to beat money power with people power,” Newt Gingrich said after losing to Mitt Romney in Florida as January ended. The walking embodiment of the lobbying-industrial complex, Gingrich made that statement even though his candidacy is being propped up by a super PAC funded by two $5 million donations from Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. It might have been more amusing if the GOP presidential primary weren’t a case study of a contest long on money and short on participation.

The Wesleyan Media Project recently reported a 1600% increase in interest-group-sponsored TV ads in this cycle as compared to the 2008 primaries. Florida has proven the battle royal of the super PACs thus far. There, the pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, outspent the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, five to one. In the last week of the campaign alone, Romney and his allies ran 13,000 TV ads in Florida, compared to only 200 for Gingrich. Ninety-two percent of the ads were negative in nature, with two-thirds attacking Gingrich, who, ironically enough, had been a fervent advocate of the Citizens United decision.

With the exception of Ron Paul’s underdog candidacy and Rick Santorum’s upset victory in Iowa -- where he spent almost no money but visited all of the state’s 99 counties -- the Republican candidates and their allied super PACs have all but abandoned retail campaigning and grassroots politicking. They have chosen instead to spend their war chests on TV.

Tears of TROLLs. Rage of truth.

I understand your pain, Edgar.
In the end we can only deal with our own existence.
Compassion / suffering.
Can only be treated one act at a time.

I thought at the time it was as bad as it could get, but not so.

Unfortunately, I have accepted that there is no end to what humans will do to each other. It is in our nature. May be the end of us all one day. But, we will all end and we must make our own way. You don't have to carry the world. In fact it will distract from the good you can do. I agree though, the political climate in our country now is disturbing.

I live on several levels. Political, literary, social and so forth. Mostly, one does not tread upon the other.

Obama is no progressive. He's a Democrat by title alone.

Birds without wings
David Gray

Wishing that something would happen
A change in this place
'Cause I’m tearing off the fancy wrapping
Find an empty package

Take for a while
Your trumpet from your lip
Loosen your hold
Loosen your grip

On your old ways
That have fallen out of step
In a changing time
Hoist a new flag, hoist a new flag

Angry sun burn down
Judging us all
Guilty of neglect and disrespect
And thinking small

And death by boredom
And death by greed
If we can’t stop taking
More than we need

But across the fractured landscape
I see the same things tired ideas
Birds without wings

Birds without wings
Birds without wings

And these are just thoughts
Of lack luster times
I’ve no interest
In excuses you can find

Like you’ve had a hard day
Now you’re too tired to care
Now you’re too tired to care
You’ve had a hard day

Well, across the fractured landscape
I see the same things
Tired ideas broken values
Many with the notion that to share is to lose

A hollow people bound by a lack
Of imagination and too much looking back
Without the courage to give a new thing a chance
Grounded by this ignorance

(And the cat comes)
We’re just
Birds without wings
Birds without wings
Birds without wings

Love it. Thanks for introducing it to me.