Van Jones, the former White House green jobs adviser and activist, is the lefty Boogeyman that Glenn Beck returns to again and again and again. To hear Beck tell it, Van Jones is some Darth Vader-type evil overlord behind the dark forces of Liberalism, right up there with George Soros hisself. Jones gave a fantastic speech at the Netroots Nation convention last week, where he first called Beck out:

I issue a personal challenge to my beloved brother Glenn Beck. I will debate you anytime, anywhere, at any point. I’ll give you an hour, you give me five minutes. And I will stand up for our values. But you would have to stop talking about us and start talking to us.

You got one week left before your show goes off. My phone is ringing. Call me! Call me, Glenn Beck! And let’s have this fight. Let’s have this discussion. Let’s have this argument. Let’s have this battle of ideas. Battle of ideas. And let’s fight for liberty and justice for all.

It was Beck more than any other conservative mouthpiece who hounded Jones into resigning from his White House post, but now Jones is challenging Beck to a debate. MoveOn is trying to raise money to air this 30 second spot during the final days of Beck’s Fox News program.

Fantastic, this is a debate I’d LOVE to see. If you’d like to see this, too, you can donate to MoveOn here.

A debate of IDEAS? I wonder if Beck will accept the challenge?
 

 
Take a look at Jones’ inspirational Netroots Nation speech and see if he lives up to Beck’s characterization of him as an evil Commie or not.
 

 
As I’ve admitted on this blog before, I was a teenage Ayn Rand fanatic. I owned all of her books, cassette tapes of her lectures and every single issue of The Objectivist, The Objectivist Newsletter and The Ayn Rand Letter. I’m not exactly proud of this fact, but what can I do? Thankfully it didn’t take me that long to outgrow this nonsense, but for good or ill, I still to this day have a pretty good working knowledge of her philosophy and life’s work.

This morning it popped into my head, appropos of nothing, how much Ayn Rand railed against Ronald Reagan before she died and I recalled one particular essay from one of the final issues of The Ayn Rand Letter where she asked her readers not to support Reagan and instead to vote for Gerald Ford, who Reagan was challenging for the GOP nomination at the time (and who appointed her loyal apostle and acolyte, Alan Greenspan, to his position as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board).

I’m guessing that a lot of Republican Ayn Rand fans—maybe this will be news to Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Rand Paul—probably don’t realize that their hero had such a dim view of The Gipper…

From The Ayn Rand Letter, Volume IV, Number 2, November-December 1975:

Now I want to give you a brief indication of the kinds of issues that are coming up, on which you might want to know my views.

1. The Presidential election of 1976. I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word—i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose—see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion.

From Rand’s final public speech, “Sanction of the Victims,” delivered November 21, 1981:

In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.

The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.

Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.

If you know any conservative Republican Ayn Rand fans, you should forward this post to them, just to annoy ‘em.

Below, William F. Buckley on Ayn Rand:
 

 
Hacktivisit collective Anonymous uploaded a new video message yesterday to YouTube. Among other demands, Anonymous is calling for the chairman of the Federal Reserve board, Ben Bernanke to resign:

“Democrats have failed us, Republicans have failed us… It is time for us to stand up for ourselves… We must fight back against the organized criminal class.”

The action is being called “Operation Empire State Rebellion” but it has also been referred to as, “CTRL+ALT_BERNANKE.”

Anonymous has called for public protests beginning on June 14th, continuing “until Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke steps down.”

The Anonymous video message:
 

 
As if there even is a middle class to reach, anymore… The top 1% control nearly 40% of the wealth and according to the American Affluence Research Council, just 10% of U.S. households “account for almost half of the consumer spending”—an INCREDIBLE one-third of the total GDP!

Why would Madison Avenue want to bother with “the little people”? They haven’t got any money. If you can’t afford a solid gold Bugatti, you don’t exist to them. This is just another one of the almost imperceptible ways that the capitalist system skewers our reality tunnels, both collectively and individually and just fucks us up as a nation:

From Too Much.com:

The chain-smoking ad agency account execs of Mad Men, the hit cable TV series set in the early 1960s, all want to be rich some day. But these execs, professionally, couldn’t care less about the rich. They spend their nine-to-fives marketing to average Americans, not rich ones.

Mad Men’s real-life ad agency brethren, 50 years ago, behaved the exact same way — for an eminently common-sense reason: In mid-20th century America, the entire U.S. economy revolved around middle class households. The vast bulk of U.S. income sat in middle class pockets.

A small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence. The rich back then, for ad execs, constituted an afterthought, a niche market.

Not anymore. Madison Avenue has now come full circle. The rich no longer rate as a niche. Marketing to the rich — and those about to gain that status — has become the only game that really counts.

“Mass affluence,” as a new white paper from Ad Age, the advertising industry’s top trade journal, has just declared, “is over.”

The Mad Men 1960s America — where average families dominated the consumer market — has totally disappeared, this Ad Age New Wave of Affluence study details. And Madison Avenue has moved on — to where the money sits.

And that money does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession, Ad Age relates, has thrown “a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else.”

Taking inflation into account, Ad Age goes on to explain, the “incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s,” while “the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially.”

The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.

“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence — particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”

Ya got that? Here’s the part where you might vomit in your mouth a little bit:

America as a whole, the new Ad Age study pauses to note, hasn’t quite caught up with the reality of this steep inequality. Americans still “like to believe in an egalitarian ideal of affluence” where “everyone has an equal shot” at “amassing a great fortune through dint of hard work and ingenuity.”

In actual life, the new Ad Age study points out, “the odds of someone’s worth amounting to $1 million dollars” have shrunk to “1 in 22.”

That’s right, so make sure to vote a straight Republican ticket so when you be makin’ that Donald Trump, 50 Cent or Kim Kardashian-level money, the damned IRS don’t come and take it all…

Via Daily Kos

 
Let them eat… nothing!

There is currently a record number of Americans—14%—relying on federal food stamp assistance programs and that number is probably not going to shrink, but grow, in the near term, as more and more desperate Americans exhaust their unemployment benefit extensions. The number of recipients has risen 11% since last year and over 61% since 2007. At present there are an incredible 45 million people (21 million families) who depend on this assistance to put food in their bellies. So that they and their children do not go to bed hungry. (My parents run a food kitchen for the poor out of their church basement in West Virginia, the stories I’ve heard are sad and pitiful.)

If the evil Republicans get their way, these poor families, school-age children, veterans of foreign wars and disabled people can just… starve… Via ABC News:

The Republicans’ 2012 budget plan proposes changing SNAP [“Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”] from an entitlement to a block-grant program that would be tailored for each individual state, much like their proposal for Medicaid. States would no longer receive open-ended subsidies and the aid would be contingent on work or job training. It would also limit funding for the program.

“Limit funding”? In certain states (see New Mexico, Florida, Michigan) they’d just eliminate it entirely.

Why should poor people think they have some kind of a right to eat?

Rand Paul would tell you this himself: Food, like healthcare, is not a right! If some Americans have to starve to death, this is what it takes to preserve our freedom!

It amazes me that Republicans think stirring up these kinds of vicious class resentments somehow helps them politically. I mean, sure, the very, very poorest people tend not to vote, but this stuff is just so nasty that I can’t help wondering what is really going to happen if/when these sorts of cuts go into effect. Do they really expect that these folks will simply STOP EATING AND DIE?

Well, judging from the GOP’s behavior, maybe they do! How else do you explain away this particular aspect of “compassionate conservatism”? Well… now that you mention if, it would certainly help balance the budget if a ton of poor people died. Why just think of the tax cuts for the rich!

Will the Republicans finally be happy when we’re all living in a country that resembles Mad Max far more than it does Leave it to Beaver? Is this what the Republicans want? It sure seems that way to me. If not that, then what? What am I missing???

But the thing is, right, is it actually good for them, too? Think of the shitty karma the Republicans unleash by skull-fucking the poor and indigent?

It’s a very black and white situation: Vote a certain way and millions of people go hungry. Vote a certain way and INSURE an increase in misery for the weakest members of society (just like Jesus would want!).

Would you want that stain on your karma? There is a special place in Hell for someone so cruel and ugly.

It’s not really any kind of grand “thought experiment” to imagine another member of Congress being shot—a Republican this time—not by some lunatic like Jared Lee Loughner, but by a broken man who’s completely lost his shit because he can no longer feed his family. Some sad guy, completely depressed walks into a town hall meeting or a political appearance with a gun and decides to confront the cold-hearted bastard who he blames for fucking his life up and shoots him. It’s not difficult to imagine at all. But again, it won’t be a professional lunatic next time, it’s going to be a destitute, desperate John Q type-situation. It’s gonna happen, it’s just a matter or when.

For the record, I’m not a big fan of violence, but it does have its place, historically, in the class war that’s raged since human society began. Admittedly the image of say, Rep. Paul Ryan, being forced to fellate a Colt .45 in front of news cameras and having to beg for his life by a once-proud middle-class father reduced to moving his family into a car is something I’d really enjoy seeing. (I think whoever did that would go down in history as a folk hero and at least THEY FEED YOU IN JAIL)

The Republicans think that they can cut entitlements for the poor with impunity because the poor don’t vote. But they are not immune from the laws of karma: What if a new front in the class war opens up that doesn’t involve the ballot box?

 
The civil unrest in Spain is taking a distinctly uncivil turn as the police get nasty before the big football match (or at least that is the excuse) and try to forcibly remove the up to 25,000 people who have camped out in Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya. Is it just me or is it only the “business media” in America who seem to be reporting on what’s going on in Spain? As if there is no other box it can be fit into?

Nevertheless, this just in via Business Insider:

Police in Barcelona have attacked protesters that have been camped out since May 15 in the city’s Plaza Catalunya. The protesters originally were trying to apply pressure to the public to not vote in last weekend’s local Spanish elections. Those elections resulted in sharp losses for the country’s Socialist Party government.

Protesters have remained in squares across Spain since the election, demanding government reforms and renewed attention to the country’s unemployment crisis.

The forceful move against the protesters today in Barcelona was staged to clear the square out ahead of FC Barcelona’s Champions League final match against Manchester United tomorrow evening. But to many, it may just appear the beginning of a government crackdown on the country’s protesters.

Videos are now surfacing of the police assault. The video includes violence on unarmed protesters

 
If you haven’t read Tim Dickinson’s terrific article on the genius/lunacy of Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, in the new issue of Rolling Stone, it’s a must-read, tour-de-force bit-o-journalism. Dickinson manages to make sense of the entire wacko-conservative gestalt of Fox News: It’s a top down organization of far-right toadies—no liberals need bothering applying—each vying for attention, approval and career advancement—natch—from the power-mad, brilliant yet crazy-seeming paranoiac who runs that bughouse.

Here are three key “takeaway” paragraphs from the article:

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home – in the aptly named village of Garrison – is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: “We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox’s offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive ‘the package.’ The package is taken in, and I’m taken on to my destination.”Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists. “You know, they’re coming to get me,” he tells friends. “I’m fully prepared. I’ve taken care of it.” (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.) Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. “What the hell!” Ailes shouted. “This guy could be bombing me!” The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. “Roger tore up the whole floor,” recalls a source close to Ailes. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”

**********

Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

**********

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”

Fox News will make a lot more sense after you’ve read this article. You’ll be simultaneously impressed and sickened by the evil genius of Roger Ailes. Love ‘em or loathe him—I’m firmly in the latter category I can assure you—it cannot be denied what a media-manipulating genius he truly is.

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory: The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network (Rolling Stone)
 

 
Not exactly, but he might as well be talking about the so-called “Ryan plan” from beyond the grave…

The more things change, the more they… oh wait, nothing’s changed!

This video is as evergreen as it is brilliant, a “one size fits all” discourse of the futility of capitalism that lends itself to an infinite number of different blogging contexts. Today, it’s the “Ryan plan.”
 

 
Via Crooks and Liars

 
If a picture paints a thousand words,  A.L. and Louise Geddings were lonesome representatives of the laughably low turnout yesterday when SC governor Nikki Haley spoke at a Tea Party rally at the Statehouse in Columbia

Organizers for the event said they were expecting 2000 people to show up, but just 30 attended. They blamed the pathetic turnout on Donald Trump canceling his threatened presidential bid (Trump had been scheduled to appear at the event).

I don’t know, but If 1970 Teabaggers who would have otherwise shown up for a rally, but didn’t bother once Donald Trump bolted from political life, is anything to go by—and I think it is—then. rut roh, the Republicans are going to have a much, much bigger problem on their hands in 2012 than I think they anticipated.

Via Buzzfeed