We Fight Low Information
Tom Hall: Is Boehner learning, now that he has given control to the bosses, that they have little further use for him? After working his way up the system, how does it feel to have young messenger boys from corporate bosses giving him instruction on how to act?
Tom Hall: While Faux News and right-wing blowhards fabricate against wikileaks for publishing the truth, the Republican Party voted to reaffirm its opposition to ending discrimination in the military, even if such discrimination hurts the nation’s security.
Tom Hall: So the Tea Bag Republicans have pivoted. No longer are they demanding transparency and openness. No longer do they want people to know what government is doing with their resources.
Tom Hall: Sure, the Tea Party will win this fall’s election cycle. Yes, they will do every thing they can to disrupt any progressive efforts of the President. But even now, before their election victories have been counted, they are already beginning to war amongst themselves. They are eagerly acting to disprove any belief in the “values” they proclaim. Their hypocrisy will be their undoing.
Tom Hall: Every time that they’ve had the chance, Republicans have given our tax dollars to corporations for the specific purpose of moving our jobs to China and other anti-democratic Asian nations.
Tom Hall: “Restoring honor” for today’s Tea Party Republicans means trying to return to the days when a man could sit and watch Father Knows Best, while his wife did the laundry, kept the kids under control and fed and satisfied him, without the worry that Chet and David would warn him about uppity coloreds demonstrating in someplace he couldn’t identify.
Tom Hall: Tea Bag Republicans were coached for months to shout about “restoring the Constitution,” without ever risking any details of what parts of the Constitution need “restoration.” But the growing influence of the Tea Bag faction has forced the party managers to be more specific.
Tom Hall: If discouraged, disillusioned progressives stay home in November, we yield our governance to the cowardly, hate-filled, ignorance-embracing Jims, who will crawl out of their trailers and divert their pick-ups from night riding to drive to the polls. It is still our country, proud, free and diverse, unless we cede it to them.
Tom Hall: As the new Tea Bag Republicans virtually guarantee gridlock and a forced double dip depression, the voters will again turn on them, giving a chance, in 2012, to candidates who offer real solutions, real progress, real hope. If we can find any.
Tom Hall: A conservative Republican judge, appointed by George H.W. Bush has done what the Tea Party activists have been demanding – he restored the Constitution. Judge Vaughn Walker held that the U.S. Constitution, and its provisions requiring equal protection of the laws, required that Proposition Hate be stricken down.
Tom Hall: BP had a hand in the Exxon Valdez. BP also operates a pipeline across Alaska’s wilderness areas that ruptured. The investigators found that BP had refused to do routine inspections and maintenance.
Tom Hall: In the same week that 48 states agreed to a proposal to have national education standards, Chuck Wilkerson said that we should be busting teachers’ unions, slashing teacher salaries and turning education over to private enterprise, to make a profit. 48 States. That’s every state except Alaska and Texas, even the most “red” states want some minimum standards. But the Teabag position is that public education is bad and should be ended.
Tom Hall: This Memorial Day, the head of the Republican Party has called the 13th Amendment a perversion of our Constitution. The Republican members of the Texas School Book Commission have voted to teach that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was the real hero of the Civil War, and that those Union soldiers died in vain. In Tennessee and here in California, Tea Party candidates are campaigning on a platform plank that the 14th Amendment should not apply to brown children whose parents are immigrants.
Tom Hall: Even as the extreme right wing of the Republican Party has gained control, it’s hard to know exactly what they want from the system. They call themselves fiscal conservatives and libertarians but they were horrified by Bill Clinton’s balanced budget.
Tom Hall: Republican activist Dick Armey claims that he built the Teabag movement to energize Republican right wing activists. Is there an army of Teabaggers eager to wear T-shirts proclaiming “I’m a soldier in Dick Armey’s army of dicks!”
Tom Hall: In fairness to Rekers, it should be pointed out that he says he hired the rentboy just to carry his bags. (His teabags?) Rekers wants to have it both ways. On one hand, he wants to say he just wanted a luggage carrier. On the other, he wants to parade himself to other gay men as someone so well hung that when he travels, he needs someone along to carry his sack.
Tom Hall: Like today’s Teabaggers, the Know Nothings wanted their Constitutional rights, but got angry when anyone asked them to actually discuss constitutional issues and governance. And like today’s Teabaggers, the Know Nothings shouted that if their candidates just got elected, everything would be better.
Tom Hall: There has been a campaign to politicize loyalty. Those who hate government are loyal. Those who cling to old fashioned ideas that politics should be “of the people, by the people, and for the people” are disloyal. Those who question no-bid contracts for inadequate body armor, unsafe housing for our troops in war zones, or Bush’s $7++ billion gift to Wall Street bankers, are enemies of freedom.
Tom Hall: There has been a campaign to politicize loyalty. Those who hate government are loyal. Those who cling to old fashioned ideas that politics should be “of the people, by the people, and for the people” are disloyal. Those who question no-bid contracts for inadequate body armor, unsafe housing for our troops in war zones, or Bush’s $7++ billion gift to Wall Street bankers, are enemies of freedom.
Tom Hall: The corporate media is talking about the tragic coal mine “accident.” That’s a lot like saying that the junkie’s gun accidentally went off during the 7-11 robbery. Except that the junkie had an uncontrollable biological urge. And the junkie had not spent years thumbing his nose at the safety regulations and at the state and federal government agencies that tried to impose those regulations.
Tom Hall: One reason that there has been so little outcry about this complete abandonment of the capitalist ideals of the Reagan years is that there is no longer any press competition in the United States. All the broadcast and cable networks are now owned by about five multinational corporations. And in every major city, the same corporations own all of the television and radio stations and the cable systems. Most cable systems have no competition at all.
Tom Hall: Televangelists, mega-church pastors, and the backers of Proposition Hate go on and on about Reagan’s devotion to traditional family values and the sanctity of marriage. They don’t mention that, as governor of California, Reagan signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act, permitting women to make their own health care decisions. Or that Reagan signed the nation’s first law permitting no-fault divorce.
Tom Hall: Cameron is a closet Republican. While mouthing anti-corporate platitudes, he embraces the “Party of No” stance that all social strife can be solved with more force, less thought, simple sloganeering and appeals to fear and anger. And, like his Republican compatriots, he rakes in the dough with a stirring yarn which evades, rather than deals with, real social problems.
Tom Hall: Progressives do not need to believe in religion to understand that the values that Jesus taught and that Dr. King and Senator Kennedy lived, are beneficial to the world whether or not there is a God or an afterlife.
Now President Obama tells us that the oil wars have cost us $10 trillion. If we believe the most strident Republican critics, just $1 trillion would pay for a decade of real health reform and care for everyone.
The Reds responded to such ridicule with paranoia and increasingly strident attacks, claiming that their opponents were dishonest and morally corrupt. Red governments proclaimed that the moral bankruptcy of non-Red societies would lead inevitably to the collapse of all but the Red states.
Our village could afford to provide health care to everyone, if we weren’t spending so much to fund the war profiteers who keep us living in fear. The village providing health care to everyone would be the Public Option.
Civilization didn’t collapse when traditional Jews had multiple wives in Biblical times or when Moslems had four wives as permitted by the Quran, or when Utah was founded by men with plural wives. Civilization didn’t collapse with the end of legally enforced segregation. And it hasn’t collapsed in the states which allow same-sex marriage.
Dan Bluemel: Women’s rights advocates entered a Walgreens pharmacy this week in downtown Los Angeles to protest the Obama administration’s efforts to restrict access to the emergency contraceptive commonly known as the morning-after pill.
Robert Reich: Is the central goal of his second term to achieve a grand bargain on the budget deficit? Or progress on gun control? Or restore jobs? Or reform the immigration laws? It is difficult to tell.
Brent Budowsky: Ryan famously tried to employ Catholic theology on behalf of his budget austerity against the poor, and was quickly forced to retreat as the absurdity of this view became obvious.
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