If you are old enough to remember the 1990s when the Republican party did everything in their power to destroy President Bill Clinton and his wife, you know what’s going to happen if the Democrats lose control of Congress in this year’s election. It’s going to be all-out war against President Obama. The government will cease to function. We might actually see another Newt Gingrich-esque shut down of the federal government entirely. There will be one investigation after another and the White House will be unable to govern, and that’s the point.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is correct, it’s going to be a witch hunt.

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.

Read Krugman’s column.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio

At least one Republican is campaigning on the promise that if you elect him, he will lay you off. Another Republican, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, called police, teachers and firefighters “special interests” just looking for another handout from the government. Oh those stinking public servants putting out fires, educating children and fighting crime, they really are the worst of the worst – fire them all.

Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins covers this odd campaign strategy nicely.

Over the past few months, Congressional Republicans and skittish Democrats who’ve lingered too long at the Deficit Panic Kool-Aid Stand have made life extraordinarily difficult for the most vulnerable members of society — the nation’s unemployed.

Rather than extend unemployment benefits so that the millions of Americans who are out there busting their humps to find the needle-in-a-haystack that is a job of any kind, they’ve demanded that those benefits be offset, essentially punishing the unemployed for the deficits they giddily ran up for years.

Read Linkins’ post here.

I'll be rich some day too. Yeah!

I don’t know if Democrats will lose seats in the House and the Senate in November, nobody does. But if they do, it will be more evidence that the dumbing down of America is reaching terminal velocity. If Republicans take control of Congress, it will be because Americans are just plain stupid. There’s no other answer, just dumb.

Bob Cesca outlines the GOP platform and contradictions in a Huffington Post column. In a nutshell, Republicans are selling voters a bag of goods and a lot of people apparently are snatching it up like those gold coins Glenn Beck peddles on his show.

Anybody that’s been following politics for more than a few years knows that the party plagued by the most glaring contradictions is the GOP. They hate the government, but they support subsidies for the oil industry, as well as, draconian laws requiring people prove they’re citizens. Republicans claim to be for small businesses, yet they support legislation that makes big business more powerful and it more difficult to compete as a small business. The contradictions are endless and obvious, yet they continue to win elections while representing just 1 or 2 percent of the wealthiest people in the country.

It’s mind-boggling, but check out Cesca’s story, he lays it all out.

Sharron Angle Tea Party Candidate Arizona

In this YouTube video mashup from yesterday’s show, Rachel Maddow exposes the hypocrisy and idiocracy of the GOP’s deficit hawk lameness.

Washington Post Ezra Klein

While the pundits will extrapolate only god knows what from Tuesday’s primaries, one thing that is clear is that the GOP got its ass handed to it.

Pete Sessions, NRCC chairman, said in a statement, “Tonight’s result was undoubtedly disappointing, but we will take the lessons learned from this campaign and move forward in preparation for November.”

Here’s the TPM story about Tuesday’s primaries.

A lot of the wonks, like Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, are claiming that yesterday’s primaries were a repudiation of incumbents. I don’t know – maybe. Trying to gauge the mood of the country by a couple of primaries is difficult and somewhat pointless. It’s OK if we don’t know yet what’s going to happen in November.

Klein wrote: “The country is turning against incumbents from both political parties, as you saw with Rand Paul in Kentucky and Bill Halter in Arkansas and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, except when it isn’t, as you saw when Rep. Jack Murtha’s aide Mark Critz blew past expectations to easily win his deceased boss’s congressional seat.”

I don’t know. I don’t buy it that Sestak’s win over Specter was evidence of an anti-incumbent mood. Perhaps, Sestak ran a better campaign, and maybe Specter had some serious problems with his party switching strategy. It’s not as if Sestak is some sort of outsider riding in on his white horse laden with tea bags. He is, after all, a sitting US congressman. He also worked in the Clinton administration on the National Security Council.

In Kentucky, Rand Paul’s win could be a repudiation of incumbency, but it isn’t, I think it’s more of a repudiation of the GOP. Senator Mitch McConnell(R-KY) and the Republican Party threw their full support behind Trey Grayson. Grayson ended up with 35 percent of the vote. You see, there was no incumbent running. This was a race to take over the seat of retiring Senator Jim Bunning. So I fail to see how Paul’s victory over Grayson has anything to do with incumbency since Grayson wasn’t the incumbent.

If there’s anything to take from these primaries is that it was bad news for the Republican party – that’s about it. Anybody claiming to be able to read the tea leaves to predict what will happen in November is a blowhard.

I’m the first to admit that we have an immigration problem in this country. The problem is that we have too many people coming here and living in the shadows. The vast majority of these people are coming here to fill jobs that Americans can’t or won’t fill themselves.

Now the reason Americans won’t do these jobs is because the companies that provide them can’t, or won’t pay a living wage. If companies were prevented from hiring undocumented workers and were forced to pay people a living wage to pick fruit, wash dishes, lawn work and for the low-skill construction jobs – that would be great. The downside of that would be more expensive food at the grocery store and restaurants. Prices would go up throughout the economy, but more people would have better paying jobs too.

But that’s not going to happen. The government, state and federal, is never going to crack down on businesses hiring undocumented workers – a little here and there, but for the most part – governments give businesses a pass.

The efforts to stop immigrants from coming here are focused on the border with Mexico. Build a wall! Send in the troops! Keep “those” people out! It might be worth noting that it’s not just Mexicans crossing the border with Mexico. We have Guatemalans, El Salvadorians, Brazilians, and the list goes on, but in America it’s easier to just lump them all together as “Mexicans.”

Politically, immigration is like abortion and gay marriage. Conservatives love these issues and they’ll never do anything to actually “fix” them. If Roe were overturned, it would take away a powerful rallying cry for their base. The same for gay marriage and immigration. These are the wedge issues that the Republican gets to roll out when their intellectually dishonest market-based solutions are falling on deaf ears.

You might have noticed that immigration is now being touted as the reason state budgets are so screwed up. It has nothing to do with the recession that happened when the Republican party controlled Congress and the White House. Oh no, it was “those people” pillaging our hospitals and schools. Of course, if that’s the case, why didn’t Republicans do something about immigration? See previous paragraph for answer.

But what I really want to talk about is the economics of immigration. An overwhelming number of Americans believe that immigrants are destroying the economy and taking our jobs. “They tuke er jobs!”

Here’s the summary of a Fact Check report on immigration headlined “Does Immigration Cost Jobs?”

Do immigrants take American jobs? It’s a common refrain among those who want to tighten limits on legal immigration and deny a “path to citizenship” — which they call “amnesty” — to the millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. There’s even a new Reclaim American Jobs Caucus in the House, with at least 41 members.

But most economists and other experts say there’s little to support the claim. Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.

Read the Fact Check report – it’s worth it.

Sarah Palin Boston Commons April 14, 2010

Now that thousands of barrels of oil are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico by the hour, Republican senators are pretending that “Drill, Baby, Drill” was never a party slogan.

“I think there was a candidate that used that,” Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said. “I think our phrase was ‘drill here, drill now,’ meaning here in the United States and as quickly as oil and gas leases are going,” reported The Hill’s E2 Wire blog.

Read this entire story on Examiner.com.

I for one have never believed that the Democrats are going to get their asses handed to them this November.

But if you watch Fox News, MSNBC, CNN or read the New York Times, Washington Post or consume any political news analysis, you’ve being assured that Democrats will in fact lose seats in the Senate and the House this November.

To the pundits, political hacks, pollsters and wonks, it’s a guaranteed that the party that controls the White House loses seats in Congress in the first off-year election. It has to be true because the over-paid dorks who spit and sputter on cable news say it is.

I think what most of these “experts” are thinking about is 1994 when Republicans took control of the House and the Senate for the first time in decades following Bill Clinton’s historic victory in 1992. But what these boobs fail to realize is that 2010 is not 1994. In 1994, the GOP actually had a platform to run on. Newt Gingrich had his “Contract with America.” The GOP had positioned itself as a Reagan-esque it’s “Morning in America” part deux.

In 2010, what does the GOP have as a platform? Repeal health care reform? That lasted about a week. Immigration? Sorry, but the truth is most Americans just aren’t as racist and fearful of immigrants as we once were. Will they dust off their old fail-safes: abortion and gay marriage? Maybe, but what has Americans nervous isn’t gays, abortion, immigration or even health care – it’s the economy.

In this year’s election, Democrats will show chart after chart of how well the economy is doing since they’ve been in charge and how poorly it did when Republicans were in charge. There’s data after data after data that proves that the GOP messed up the economy in a very real and serious way. It’s not that the Democrats share none of the blame for the current economic crisis, but only in the sense that they were enablers not the actual junkie.

What will Republicans campaign on? Maybe they’ll talk about tax cuts, but while trickle down economics might still have its backers, it just doesn’t sell like it used to. Reagan could sell it, but Mitch McConnell?.

When Reagan ran the country in the 1980s and the GOP ran Congress from 1994 until 2006, the economy was never as bad as it now. Most Americans know exactly why the economy that was once fairly stable isn’t so anymore. You know that it’s because of deregulation and out-of-whack income inequality that has turned our economy into a boom-and-bust one.

So how will the GOP convince you to vote for them? And who will do the convincing? Michael Steele. Mitch McConnell. John Boehner. Marco Rubio. John McCain. Sarah Palin. Rush Limbaugh. Glenn Beck.

The Democratic leadership is more than happy to go along with the message that they’re going to lose seats in November because it will help motivate their base to get out and vote, but my money is on the Democrats gaining seats in both chambers.

Sarah Palin Boston Commons April 14, 2010

Whether like it or not, Sarah Palin gets to say whatever she wants, and the mainstream media will simply regurgitate it.

The Associated Press ran a story on Sunday about how Sarah Palin was taken aback by President Obama’s comment regarding the US as a superpower. What she said was a total misrepresentation of the facts and the AP story just went with it.

Here’s what’s got Palin all riled up.

Obama said earlier this week that the United States must do its best to help resolve conflicts peacefully around the world, because if we don’t, it will fall on our shoulders – militarily and economically – to fix the problem.

Obama said:

But what we can make sure of is, is that we are constantly present, constantly engaged, and setting out very clearly to both sides our belief that not only is it in the interests of each party to resolve these conflicts but it’s also in the interest of the United States. It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.

Here’s what Palin said on her Facebook page:

Mr. President, is a strong America a problem?

Asked this week about his faltering efforts to advance the Middle East peace process, President Obama did something remarkable. In front of some 47 foreign leaders and hundreds of reporters from all over the world, President Obama said that “whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.”

Whether we like it or not? Most Americans do like it.

Maybe Palin really is just as dumb as a box of hammers and she just doesn’t understand what the president said, but what Obama meant was that whether we like it or not, the US will get pulled into international conflicts because of our superpower status if we don’t work to resolve conflicts peacefully.

And if we do get drug into a conflict, it will cost American lives and treasure.

Maybe that’s the part Palin really likes – seeing people killed and taxpayer money spent on international conflicts – and any attempt to prevent that is just un-American gosh darnit.

Thanks John McCain. Thanks for introducing Sarah Palin to us, because now we get to spend an inordinate amount of time debunking her outrageously ignorant lies. It’s not like we don’t have anything else to do.

Keith Olbermann Apr. 14, 2010

Here’s more evidence that the Tea Party movement is not a movement but merely a political operation geared towards getting Republicans elected and making lobbyists rich.

On Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night, Olbermann interviewed Politico’s Kenneth Vogel about his story on Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Express and the lobbyists who are backing it. As it turns out, this so-called grassroots movement is little more than a well-funded old-school political operation funded by Republican political consultants Russo Marsh + Rogers out of Sacramento, California. That’s the same group that helped boot out Democratic Governor Gray Davis in 2003.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tea Party follower Portland, Maine

I’ve been scratching my head as to what this Tea Party thing is all about since it started last April 15 with people protesting paying their taxes, it didn’t make sense to me then, but I’ve got it figured out now.

What has had me perplexed, besides the contradictions in their message, is why the Tea Party people crawled out of the woodwork now. I mean, we’ve been paying taxes for a long time. Congress has been wasting our money for as long as there’s been a Congress. None of the issues that they complain about are new. So why now?

At first I thought, it’s because we have a black president and a lot these people are just old white racists who can’t stand seeing a black man in the White House. While that’s undoubtedly a motivating factor for some Tea Partiers, it doesn’t explain it all – it’s too simplistic an answer.

Here’s why the Tea Party exists today, and it didn’t in 2008.

Once the Democrats took over the Congress and the White House, really really rich people started freaking out in their really really rich people way; they hired lobbyists and agitated a faction of the American population.

One of the lobbyist they hired was former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Armey is the chairman of FreedomWorks. FreedomWorks is a lobbying organization headquartered in Washington, DC and it’s a major backer of the Tea Party movement.

To get enough white people riled up, the scared filthy rich folks then turned to Fox News. The cable “news” channel not only covered the events, Fox News employees even egged on the crowd to shout louder, louder and louder while the cameras were rolling. Rupert Murdoch’s news network sponsored and promoted Tea Party rallies with virtually 24-hour coverage of Tea Party events.

Fox News commentators and anchors banged the drum that President Obama is a socialist, a communist, a Nazi, not really American, a Muslim, etc. They successfully created the illusion that Obama isn’t legitimate. He’s not one of them. He has no right to tell you what to do. That’s where the subtle racism comes into play.

So with the money and organization flowing through FreedomWorks and the propaganda spewing forth from Fox News the Tea Party movement was born.

It has the illusion that it’s just a grassroots organization that just popped up out of nowhere, but no, this is a political organization funded by scared rich white people who need these angry lower and middle class white people to travel around the country to do their bidding, which is to stop government regulation of their industries and taxing their billion dollar bonuses.

It’s really the same old story, people with money convince average Americans to rally for their cause despite the fact that what the average person needs is exactly what they’re fighting against.

A perfect historical example of this was slavery. The average poor white southerner not only didn’t benefit from cheap slave labor, but it drove down their own income potential, yet, plantation owners convinced them to protect slavery and even fight a war over it.

The Tea Party backers have been able to tap into existing animosity towards Congress, and now a black President, to push their real agenda which is to stop any and all Democratic policies. If the Democrats lose the Congress and the White House, the Tea Party will fade into the background – at least that’s what the GOP and rich and powerful hope.

Anybody can tell you this, but it’s clear that the current economy recession is not just a normal economic downturn. For many Americans, this is a depression. All told, the US is down 11 million jobs and the deficit hawks are circling above hoping to prevent any real recovery. Why? Who knows.

According to Bob Herbert:

The evidence is stark. More than 44 percent of unemployed Americans have been out of work for six months or longer, the highest rate since World War II. Perhaps more chilling is a new analysis by the Pew Economic Policy Group that found that nearly a quarter of the nation’s 15 million unemployed workers have been jobless for a year or more.

The sad reality of our political climate is that getting anything important done is unrealistically difficult. We have the Teabaggers on one hand (many of home could use a job) bemoaning taxes and government spending. On the other hand we have Democrats who are all-too-often scared or incompetent to make a coherent argument for spending money to create jobs.

Herbert wrote:

Everything in Washington is a heavy lift. The successful struggle to pass last year’s stimulus package fended off an even worse economic disaster, and the Democrats have managed to enact their health care initiative. But the biggest threat to the health of the economy — corrosive, intractable, demoralizing unemployment — is still with us. And the deficit zealots, growing in strength, would do nothing to counter this scourge.

The bottom line is that if the federal government doesn’t spend money right now to create jobs, we aren’t going to have a meaningful recovery. And for Democrats, they will have to do this alone – just like health care. They’ve been bolstered by the health care reform win and they need to carry that momentum forward.

Herbert said:

Right now there is no plan that can even remotely be expected to result in job creation strong enough to rescue the hard-core groups being left behind. These include: long-term unemployed workers who are older; blue-collar workers of all ages; and younger people in the big cities, in the rust belt and in rural areas who are jobless and not well educated.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that they can’t pass another big bill so they’ll have to do it piecemeal.

“You can do smaller pieces,” she said. “You can break the task up into segments, into discrete pieces of legislation. If size is a problem, we should not let it be an obstacle.”

Republicans will blame Democrats. Democrats will point their fingers at Republicans. Whoever is at fault, incumbents are set up to lose big in November’s mid-term elections – maybe.

A new Gallup shows that only 28 percent think members of Congress deserve to be re-elected. Conversely, 65 percent of registered voters want to see current members of Congress back next year.

Gallup April 8, 2010

What most pundits and political wonks see when they read these polls is that Democrats are going to be swept out of power in November, but I’m not so convinced. I actually think that it’s the GOP who will take a beating this mid-term, despite the conventional wisdom that the party in power usually loses in these off-year elections.

For starters, these poll results have never been seen before. Look at 1994 poll results when the GOP took over Congress with its “Contract for America.” The numbers don’t look at all like they do today. Now look at the stats on what Republican voters are saying in 2010.

Gallup April 8, 2010

That’s 83 percent of Republicans who want to send members of Congress home.

The numbers look better for incumbents when voters are asked if they want to see their individual member re-elected. Forty-eight percent of Republican voters want to re-elect their legislator. Fifty-eight percent of Democratic voters say they’ll re-elect their representative.

Gallup said this poll shows that Democrats are going to get beat-up in the voting booth this November, but I read it differently. I see the GOP as a fractured party with moderates unsure what to make of the Tea Partiers, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. This confusion, I think, will result in voter turnout among Republicans being down this year, while Democrats will come out strong and re-elect their legislators who delivered on health care reform, and possibly financial regulatory reform. The unknown is how the economy will be doing in November.

Read the Gullup poll results and decide for yourself.

Or check Ezra Klein’s take on a different set of graphs and numbers that will play into this year’s elections.

Michael Steele RNC Chairman

When it’s convenient, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele claims his race is a non-issue, and when he needs to do so, he uses his race to slither out of a tight spot.

The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein has the story.

On Monday, the RNC chairman told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that, as an African-American, he is being held to a higher standard than his white peers.

“The honest answer is, ‘Yes,’” Steele said. “Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. A lot of folks do. It’s a different role for me to play and others to play and that’s just the reality of it. But you just take that as a part of the nature of it.”

The remark capped a week’s worth of largely unfavorable stories about Steele’s competence to manage the party. They also introduced the element of race into a conversation that truly had nothing to do with the topic — in the process inviting another debate about whether or not skin color plays a role in political discourse.

The fact is that obviously the RNC’s choice to put an African American to lead the party’s primary fund raising organization to blunt President Obama’s race.

Stein reported.

Steele has expressed similar criticism of Democrats on multiple occasions. Indeed part of his appeal when he was picked for his current job was that a black Republican would be the perfect foil for a president who was insulated from criticism due to his race. When he was running for the chair, Steele more or less accused Obama of building his campaign on top of this pedestal.

“[T]he Obama campaign played the race card, and it worked beautifully,” he told a conference call of conservative bloggers. Charges of racism, he said, hurt Bill Clinton, “tripped up Hillary Clinton,” and “stymied” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) because he refused to bring up Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

The sad truth is that race does matter. Post-racial? I think not. Pretending race doesn’t matter is political correctness for political correctness’ sake and Steele can’t have it both ways. Regardless of his skin color, Steele has failed as the leader of the RNC and should step down. I predict Steele will be forced to resign.

Tea Party Protester Apr. 1, 2010

Tea Party Protester Apr. 1, 2010

The Tea Partiers will fail because for them to succeed we would need to shred the US Constitution and start over. That would require a revolution, and that’s not going to happen.

You just have to examine what they stand for. They claim to be strict constitutionalists, but they can’t stop screaming that what Democrats are doing is unconstitutional – against the will of the people.

The Tea Partiers must have forgotten that Democrats won two elections – one in 2006 and another one in 2008.

Obama and Congressional Democrats campaigned on health care reform. So it’s disingenuous for the Tea Partiers to now claim that Democrats are defying the will of the people by pursuing the agenda that they campaigned on.

In a representative republic, the people’s will is determined by elections and not protests – just ask liberals who rallied by the tens of thousands to stop the Iraq war in 2003.

But if the Tea Partiers have their way, no matter who gets elected, a radical right-wing agenda must be adhered to. If not, bricks will be thrown, guns will be drawn, politicians spat on and death threats – thinly-veiled  and otherwise – will be hurled.

The problem with the Tea Party is that they have no faith or respect for our democracy. They seem to not realize that when liberals win elections, they have not only a right, but an obligation, to implement the agenda that they campaigned on.

C-SPAN's Bill Scanlan

I hate call-in programs because rarely does a caller make a valid or intelligent point. On Monday, C-SPAN’s Bill Scanlan got a call from North Carolina complaining that “80 percent of your callers” are black and that C-SPAN should change its name to BLACK-SPAN.

The caller said that he was just making “a little respectful criticism,” and Scanlan thanked the caller for his comment.

Scanlan should have just cut this guy off and moved on. He certainly shouldn’t have thanked him for his racist diatribe, but that’s C-SPAN for you.

SarahPAC Crosshairs on Democrats

Where does the GOP go from here? Now that the party has been taken over by conspiracy nuts, racists and other loons, where does that leave them?

Over the weekend a “Christian militia” was taken out by the FBI over its plot to murder a police officer and then attack the funeral procession with IEDs.

In a matter of hours, Greg Reynolds at Instadick Instapundit defended these homegrown terrorists.

THE TIMING APPEARS CONVENIENT: FBI stages domestic raids.

Convenient for what exactly?

Here’s what Media Matters for America figures.

Reynolds, along with other right-wing bloggers, suggested the arrests were politically motivated. The theory seemed to be that the bust was part of a government plot to, I guess, make the Christian militia look bad, as well as conservatives in general.

So does that mean that any time a right-wing lunatic fringe group is raided by the FBI – it’s not to stop a terrorist plot but to make conservatives look bad? Why would this make conservatives look bad? And why would the FBI want to make conservatives look bad? That assumes that the FBI has now been infiltrated by leftists. I find that hard to believe, but then again, I’m not a conspiracy nut.

All I can say is that, while the raid didn’t initially make conservatives look bad, it sure does now.

They did the same thing when that guy in Texas crashed his plane into an IRS building.

The GOP has a real nutcase problem.

Media Matters for America

I hate cable news. At least 99 percent of all cable news is a bag of throwaway garbage that serves no purpose other than to confuse, distract, misinform and stink up the room. The same can be said about talk radio. It’s not that broadcasting can’t be used to inform and educate the populous, sometimes it is, but the trend has been to simply chase ratings and fill airtime with whatever is cheap and easy.

And what’s the cheapest and easiest content to produce? Opinion masquerading as news, or as Glenn Beck likes to say ‘Truth.’

Take this story for example. It’s easy for me to sit here and blast out an opinion story bemoaning the horrors of cable news, but if I actually wanted to do an investigative piece about cable news and why it got this way, well, that would take time and money – none of which I have.

But I’m not Rupert Murdoch. He does have money. He could pay people to investigate stories and produce in-depth analysis segments on things like health care reform, the Iraq war or the nation’s struggling education system. So could GE’s MSNBC and CNN, but they don’t do that.

I know, I’m taking a long time getting to my lead, so let’s get down to it.

Today, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog organization, published a story detailing the conservative nervous breakdown we’re watching unravel across this once great nation. The thesis of Boehlert’s story is that conservatives believed their own hype, and now they’re freaking out that they weren’t able to kill health care reform. Now they’re worried about what else they won’t be able to stop the liberals from doing.

What happened was that Fox News, along with other right-wing media, convinced the Tea Partiers that they were winning. They believed Fox News when they said 2 million people rallied in the nation’s capitol last September, even though there might have been 100,000. They believed Fox News and Rush Limbaugh when they were assured that after the gun-touting town hall screamers had shouted down Democratic politicians that health care reform was dead.

I believed them too. Not more than a month ago, I was convinced that health care would not happen.

But what everyone forgot is that the people get to speak in the voting booth and that’s pretty much it. Anti-war protesters couldn’t stop the Iraq war no matter how many people rallied against it because George W. Bush was elected, well sort of, in 2000, and Congress was controlled by the GOP. In a republic, the people vote for their representatives in November and it’s up to those elected leaders to lead. And leading doesn’t mean changing your mind every time the New York Times or Fox News publishes a public opinion poll. Depending on your point of view, that’s either the upside or the downside of living in a republic.

And so now that health care reform has passed, conservatives are losing their shit.

Boehlert said:

After all, late last week the nation stood on the precipice, just three “days away from the United States of America being over as we’ve all known it,” according to Rush Limbaugh, who warned that reform would drive every private insurance company out of business. Glenn Beck also went full tilt, warning that the bill represented a “turning point,” like the Civil War and Peal Harbor, while colleague Sean Hannity pinpointed the health care vote as the ‘very hour’ that America turned ‘completely towards socialism.’

The Washington Times likened reform to the “Black Plague,” and the online reaction was somehow even more unhinged. It was “RIP USA,” because with the vote, America would become “occupied by a hostile foreign power.” Indeed, a “socialist putsch” had been sprung and “America’s Day of Wreckoning [sic]” was at hand. Why? Because the Democrats’ health care legislation “will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage.”

Basically what Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Partiers want is to run the government regardless of whether or not they win elections. To them, it doesn’t matter who gets elected, what matters is that politicians do what they tell them to do. And because Fox News effectively created the illusion that they were winning the debate, right-wing fringers are now throwing a hissy fit.

When health care reform passed Congress, Boehlert wrote, “It was the sudden and rude realization that, instead, they’d spent the past few months trapped inside an echo chamber, I think, that created the volcanic and unhinged response we’ve seen play out in recent days. It’s the kind of childish and hysterical reaction I didn’t think we’d ever witness from a major political movement.”

So the Tea Partiers and other conservative groups out there need to understand that in order effect change in this country they’re going to have to organize into a political movement. It takes more than a few gun-touting fanatics to pass legislation, and most people would agree, that’s a good thing. So turn off Fox News and actually engage in the process or you’ll be left on the corner shouting to no one.

Read Boelhert’s story.

Pres. Ronald Reagan

I know many Americans hate progress, change, liberals, equality and workers, but it still surprises me when I see so many regular folks fight so hard to protect wealthy executives and corporations.

I wonder if CEOs for big pharma and health insurance companies sit around drinking scotch and laughing their asses off watching YouTube videos of all the boobs rallying to protect their positions of power.

I mean think about it, the Tea Partiers fought tooth and nail to protect health insurance companies so they can deny them – the protesters – health care, to take away their health care when they need it and to bankrupt them when they get sick.

It makes no sense.

And who do we have to thank for this mind-boggling insanity? President Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t so much the man as it was the time. Reagan, like all presidents, don’t create movements but they ride them.

The 1980s was the “Me Decade.” It was a time when the Baby Boomers were coming of age and they wanted, not just their slice, but the entire American pie. It was a decade plagued with un-checked greed and individualism. Either you were a Gordon Gekko, you wanted to be him or at the very least respected his tenacity and ruthlessness.

The last thing we needed was government intervention and taxes to slow down our quest for all of the money in the world.

There’s no doubt that this anti-government sentiment was rooted in the 1960s and 1970s when the government was doing some pretty horrible things. We had the Vietnam war and we lost. We had Watergate and we lost again. We did get civil rights legislation and Medicare, but the GOP successfully leveraged that as part of its “southern strategy.”

Animosity towards the government was strong on both sides of our political spectrum, and so when Reagan came in saying that it’s “morning in America,” people liked it.

Taxes for the wealthy were slashed and slashed and slashed again. Banking regulation was relegated to the garbage heap. We didn’t want to pay taxes, we wanted voodoo economics.

The idea behind voodoo economics was that by reducing government spending (that didn’t happen), reducing taxes (that did happen), reducing regulation (that happened) and controlling inflation (see Federal Reserve) the wealthy would get so rich some of that money would trickle down to the workers.

That’s called a top-down approach to economics – make the rich really rich and we all benefit. The problem is that it didn’t work.

Emmanuel Saez report on income inequality

What happened is that income inequality skyrocketed. While the rich were paying less in taxes, government spending wasn’t reduced and therefore deficits went up and the burden was placed squarely on the shoulders of the middle class. The money did trickle down. It trickled a little here and a little there, but unfortunately, trickle-down economics is just that – a trickle.

And so for the last 30 years, the rich got really rich and the rest of Americans were left with bailing out the Saving and Loans institutions that failed in the ’80s, the hedge fund debacle in the ’90s and the most recent Wall Street bankers who ushered in the Great Recession.

History should be our guide to economic and tax policy. When the rich don’t pay their fair share, like they didn’t in the “Roaring Twenties” which lead to the Great Depression. While we were under the spell of voodoo economics, we all suffered the consequences with the Great Recession. We can’t have an economic system that encourages economic inequality.

You see, one of the fundamental components of a tax system is to distribute the wealth. Either wealth goes up to the rich or down to the masses. Under Reaganomics it went up. Wealth redistribution is not socialism. It’s not communism. It’s how taxation works. And as a society we have to decide who should get the money – the wealthy or the rest of us.

A progressive taxation system is a bottom-up approach. It’s a belief that the real economic engine of this country isn’t the 1 percent of us who are wealthy, but the 99 percent who aren’t. If we have money, we buy a new car every couple of years. We buy new clothes. We go out to dinner. We go on a vacation with our family. The richest among us already do those things regardless of their tax burden, but the rest of us don’t.

It’s the workers of this nation that make this economy strong. When we have money, we spend it.

But the tide is changing. Americans have realized that slashing taxes on the wealthy doesn’t lead to economic prosperity but just the opposite. And when President Obama signed health care reform into law yesterday, he was saying that he supports the workers – the middle class. He said it’s time for the wealthy to start paying their fair share.

Now Obama needs to repeal the Bush tax cuts and then some. What America needs is a return to a progressive tax system and an end to laissez-faire government regulation of our financial system. Obama has a lot of work to do, because Americans don’t want voodoo economics anymore, but those who control the wealth and the GOP surely do, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep things as unfair as possible.

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In Health Care Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Barack Obama has been talking about health care reform since 2007. Back then he talked about single-payer and universal health care – and you elected Obama with a landslide victory. While you didn’t get universal health care or single-payer – you did get health care reform.

Last night’s vote in the House of Representatives to pass health care reform was historic. But what makes it so amazing is that the Democrats didn’t cave – they actually passed a huge piece of important legislation despite the lies and fear mongering spewing from the mouths of Republicans and so-called “conservatives.”

The campaign to misinform you about health care was quite effective. Support for health care reform did fall substantially as more and more Americans started to believe Republican liars. Sarah Palin kicked off the “death panel” lie. And who knows where all the crazy numbers about the cost of the bill came from – yesterday someone said the bill could cost $10 trillion. Abortion, the GOP’s old fallback position, became a central theme for the opposition. Some Republicans even said that this bill will not only fund abortions but it will “promote” them – as if you’re going to see ads on TV for abortions next to ads for Viagra.

The list of outright lies are too many to list but they’re irrelevant now.

What is relevant is that Democrats did what they needed to do and they didn’t cower in the face of the vicious hate-filled opposition to health care reform. They didn’t quit when they were called socialists, communists, niggers, faggots, baby killers and when they were spit on. So if you have a moment, send your member of Congress an e-mail or call them on the phone and say thank you.

And remember that while it’s easy to say that there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans – there is. Paul Krugman made a great point in his column today by highlighting a fundamental distinction between what Democrats and Republicans believe.

The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made … And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine.”

And on the other side, here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.

The GOP sees the world in purely cynical political terms. They don’t see you. They don’t see your family. They only see the next election and the next tax cut or war profit. And maybe Gingrich is right, maybe passing civil rights legislation was wrong politically, but who, besides racists, can argue that it wasn’t the right thing to do.

Looking back at our nation’s history, how many politically challenging decisions were still clearly the right choice? Civil rights, Medicare, Social Security, and let’s not forget that great Republican President Abraham Lincoln who ended slavery despite a nation that had yet to cleanse itself of overt racism. President Lincoln was murdered for that decision.

No, despite the cynicism of people like Gingrich and Karl Rove, politicians sometimes need to make unpopular decisions, even if that means they will lose their seat in Congress. That’s what a republic is. To paraphrase James Madison, a republic is virtuous men making virtuous decisions in spite of what an excited faction may want.

So please, call your members of Congress and tell them you’ve got their back. Tell them you will vote for them in November. While you’re at it, why not sign up to volunteer for them too?