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Un-American: Pathetic GOP tries to divide American people over Osama kill

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They spelled “cuntry” wrong!

Did you read about Sarah Palin’s utterly shameless tweet today?
 
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TPM quipped:

It’s unclear why she thinks photos of bin Laden’s corpse will scare suicidal terrorists.

Who says she’s capable of thinking at all? Certainly I’ve seen no public evidence that Mrs. Palin is able to engage in critical thinking. But who cares about Sarah Palin anyway? I don’t and I’m bored with writing about her, but her tweet is one of the lamer, dumber examples of a Republican lemon-face trying oh so obviously and desperately to spin the killing of the most wanted terrorist in history against President Obama.

Sarah Palin: The incredible shrinking woman. I will admit that watching her flounder for attention now that the bloom is off and the public is starting to tune her out has been kinda fun to watch…

Irish comedy genius Graham Linehan, speaking certainly with MY full approval, tweeted the following to his 94,000+ Twitter followers:
 
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#Nailed it.

Someone who follows him rejoined “Show us your tits first” and I think this is about where the level of discourse around the Republicans should be, which is to say, pointing at them and laughing.

But where was I? Oh yeah:

Jealous much, Republican’ts?

Of course they are—they can barely stand it—and it’s such a delightful farce to watch these craven shits lashing out like the angry losers they truly are. Even some die-hard Fox News viewers are (probably) starting to suspect what everyone else has known all along: THESE PEOPLE ARE SCURRILOUS FUCKS.

How many times does it take being exposed to the obviously insincere Eric Cantor, for instance, before even a complete idiot would intuit “This fuckin’ guy doesn’t believe a damned word he’s saying. He’s lying through his capped teeth.”

But anyway, back to the whole killing Osama bin Laden thing. The single stupidest, lowest IQ conservative conspiracy theory came from—ya don’t say—batshit crazy racist cat lady Pamela Geller, she of the brain-damaged Atlas Shrugs blog. (Read it if you dare, but as you do, consider the fact that this complete LUNATIC is a frequent commentator on Fox News! As if drivel like THIS IDIOCY has any merit or is in any way worthy of respect or discussion? Seriously Roger Ailes? Seriously??? Pamela Geller believes any damned thing she wants to believe, as long as it fits into her twisted prejudices and irrational foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of Obama, Democrats and Muslims. It would be pointless for me to give her insipid, dimwit conspiracy theories any space here since she’s so mean-spirited, repulsive and beneath contempt. I mean… yuck!).

Steve M., writing at my new favorite political bookmark, No More Mister Nice Blog had this to say about the myriad shameful, embarrassing ways the Republicans are comporting themselves. I think he makes a powerful case here for who America’s real enemies are:

Republicans are responding to this the way they respond to everything: by seeking to divide America and undermine Democrats and liberals. They do this for the same reason the scorpion stings the frog in the fable: it’s their nature. They will continue trying to divide America until we wake up and realize that they hate America—or at least they hate any America in which we don’t turn over all the power to them. They’ll undermine and weaken that pluralistic America until we finally recognize their disloyalty and marginalize the dividers.

We should have expected them to try to deny Barack Obama credit for the fact that bin Laden was located and killed on his watch, and to try to shift the credit to George W. Bush. We should have expected them to use the incident to reopen the debate about torture.

But there’s more. Fox Nation, right-wing bloggers, and others are currently braying about this story from Britain’s Daily Mail:

Obama took SIXTEEN HOURS to make up his mind about Bin Laden mission

Barack Obama kept military commanders hanging by declaring he would ‘sleep on it’ before taking 16 hours to give the go-ahead to raid Bin Laden’s compound….

Really? The mission was successful, and this is the straw they grasp at? A delay of less than a day?

Let me put that in context. It took 1,306 DAYS for George W. Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld for his sheer inability (or willful refusal) to cope with the chaos of Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, and for his stubborn insistence on a level of troop strength inadequate to quell the chaos and restore order—that’s 1,306 DAYS from the first reports of looting in Iraq (April 12, 2003) through the worst of the insurgency and to the day (November 8, 2006) Rumsfeld stepped down.

(Or perhaps, like Maureen Dowd, you’d like to count it down from Tora Bora: “A pigheaded Donald Rumsfeld, overly obsessed with a light footprint, didn’t have the forces needed at Tora Bora to capture Osama after the invasion of Afghanistan.” In that case, it’s 1,787 DAYS from the conclusion of the Battle of Tora Bora, on December 17, 2001, to Rumsfeld’s resignation.)

So who’s the real hesitator?

But that’s not enough divisiveness for Republicans and rightists. Bloggers, led (as Little Green Footballs notes) by the grotesque Pam Geller, are advancing anonymously sourced reports from shady rumor-purveyors that the bin Laden mission happened over Obama’s objections, in a “military coup” of sorts, and took place only because CIA director Leon Panetta gave the OK without waiting for Obama’s approval.

Maybe this scurrilous nonsense is coming from people at the far margins of the right. Or maybe it’s not—maybe it’s being injected into the debate by people close to the centers of mainstream Republican power, because they can’t bear to have a country that’s not divided, with powerful Democrats widely despised and mistrusted. In any event, the nonsense is being regurgitated at such sites as CNN contributor Erick Erickson’s RedState and the well-connected Pajamas Media. It’s part of the mainstream of Republican commentary. It’s a disgrace from a disgraceful party.

Well put, brother. Amen to that.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.04.2011
10:10 pm
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Total Recall: WI Dem easily beats GOP opponent for seat held by Republicans for 16 years
05.04.2011
07:32 pm
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Note to Gov. Scott Walker: You should really,really make an effort not to do this face so often in public, because it’s just too easy for bloggers to find images of you looking stupid, forlorn and like you’ve had your ass whipped.

Wisconsin’s District 94 Assembly seat has been held by Republicans for some sixteen years, but last night it was won by a Democrat running a campaign openly disdainful of Gov. Scott Walker and his clownish, heavy-handed attempts to end collective bargaining rights for public employees in the state. Democrat Steve Doyle, a labor-supporter, smashed his opponent, Republican John Lautz in a 54% to 46% bludgeoning. This was a special election, called to replace Mike Huebsch, a GOP incumbent who was appointed Walker’s secretary of administration, and has was seen by many as a symbolic referendum on the unpopular Gov. Walker himself.

If this is anything to go by—and obviously it is with such a lop-sided margin—the statewide effort by progressive activists to remove eight Republican senators just got a major shot in the arm. Every elected Republican in Wisconsin’s government—not the least Scott Walker himself—has to be pissing themselves in terror of what is to come.

So far, the recall effort has been going great, already easily making the quota of signatures for six GOP senators to face recall by Monday’s deadline. You piss in the wind, it comes back to hit you in the face. That’s the way it works. That’s life. That’s karma. The Wisconsin GOP, I think, is going to get what it deserves, a right thrashing! It’s going to be a hot July in Wisconsin, something tells me…

What’s that line about “Don’t quit your day job?” I give Huebsch, like Walker himself, sometime until mid-2012 before he gets thrown on the scrap heap of history with the rest of the Wisconsin Republican party.

If you live in Wisconsin, you can volunteer for the Walker Recall. He has to be in office for one year before a recall against him can come into play, but that gives activists several months to organize a Bronx cheer for this nitwit. If you are from outside of the state, you can donate some money to the Walker Recall efforts at the same site.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.04.2011
07:32 pm
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Mad Max in America: Our Republican Future?

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This is a guest editorial from Dangerous Minds reader Em, expanding on some pointed commentary he’s made elsewhere on this blog. Em—who’ll keep his last name to himself, thank you very much—works in the financial industry:

We knew we were in trouble when our small private police force left town Tuesday morning. “We’re paid to handle petty crime, not fight a war…we’re outta here!” On the Arizona news and via twitter feeds we knew they were coming: The countless horde of the permanently unemployed, moving northward in a vast caravan consisting of thousands, or some said tens of thousands, raising a cloud of sandy dust that could be spotted for days prior to their arrival. And when they came they’d usually stay a while, knowing that Federal forces were already stretched to the max elsewhere, fighting other well-armed hoards all the way from Sacramento to Pittsburgh. Some of the larger suburbs tried to put up a token resistence, setting up their own laughable Maginot lines that were quickly overrun. This in fact had no practical effect aside from arousing the hoarde to go into a sort of locust mode of raping and pillaging, eventually followed by a mass burning of the town, forcing the survivors to join the hoarde or be left to sit in the burned-out rubble.

Me, I saw this coming. I told them we should pay the protection fee to The Family, which is probably the only Syndicate operating in the part of the country with the guns and trained troops to stop the hordes. But the other townsfolk said that the price they were charging was much too high, higher even that what we used to pay in taxes in the old days. And besides, they said, once you let in The Family, they pretty much take over. Although they do provide some badly needed social services (such as schooling and simple medicine), they end up training the teenagers to join up and become one of them, helping expand their network of gun running and hard drugs. Of course, they sold guns to the hordes in many parts of the country, which worked out well for them because they were the only ones who could stop them. And if a town didn’t pay, then it became a damned good lesson for the other former suburbs in the area. But it’s not like there’s much left of the US government: For all intents and purposes, the Family is the government in this part of the country.

What if most basic services in a society become unavailable to the vast majority of people and are only available to a privileged few? More than that, what if the gap between those that have access to resources and services and those that do not becomes wide enough that no one can cross it? What if everyone realizes that this is the case and, abandoning the old system, align themselves with whatever is available that can provide them and their families to basics such as safety, medical care and basic education? This is, in fact, what we’ve seen in countries from Afghanistan, but could it happen in the United States?

In the May Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Steiglitz writes about “Of the 1% by the 1% for the 1%”. One fact he points out is that the upper 1% of the most wealthy Americans now own 40% of the wealth. If that number appears shocking, it should. It’s an indication that a vast separation has occurred. This vast separation is not merely in terms of who has what stuff right now. It’s not merely a static picture. What it really means, as Steiglitz discusses in the article, is that the vast majority of Americans now no longer have access to the tools necessary for them to create new wealth and thus gain access to basic services. What it also means is that those who control the resources will continue to do so so in order to accumulate more resources, without regard for leaving the bridge to socio-economic mobility open. Instead, what we see through right-wing politics and pseudo-economics is that the tiny fraction of the wealthiest people are utilizing that wealth so as to burn the few remaining bridges and remove basic services from the hands of the so-called ‘have nots’ (which will soon be practically all of the remaining 99%).

In olden times a little lopsided wealth distribution wasn’t necesarily a bad thing: If everyone is getting wealthier, the theory goes, then the upper class will continue to expand as it becomes populated with more people who have crossed the bridge from the middle class. This group may also become wealthier, but in such a context (ie, of a healthy economy that is expanding without incurring additional debt), this is arguably a good thing and it is, perhaps, one of the few valid points emanating from the right in times past.

But that argument no longer holds in the US. Although the housing bubble made it seem as if the standard of living was rising, it was in reality just treading water while the Fed was artificially juicing up the economy through a few very limited channels while putting everyone into debt. While we borrowed and flipped houses and borrowed and flipped again, big business was busy selling the real economy out from under us. Not only did factories move to China, even whole service industries were moving to India and elsewhere as a result of “free trade” agreements. These agreements in effect forced unionized employees to compete with third world wage slaves, who toil 60 hour work weeks in dangerous factories that belch unregulated hydrocarbons into the gray skies. Terrorized at the prospect of joining the legions of the unemployed (who have no health care and crumbling schools), private-sector workers gladly conceded most if not all of their hard-won union rights in exchange for the promise of continued employment, albeit at lesser wages. That promise, of course, was a lie.

As the economy empties out, as the few remaining unions are dismantled and factories shipped overseas, as fewer and fewer services are available to working families for them to stay healthy and educate their children, it is inevitable that people will align themselves with whomever can provide them and their families with opportunities and basic human services as the government fails to do so. This is, in general, the very definition of a failed state, and it is not unreasonable to believe that it could happen here, in the US. Although a small number of people can tolerate poverty, will tens of millions just roll over and die, particularly when they know that the services exist somewhere?

That such a process is already well underway in our neighbor to our south, Mexico, should cause to tread very carefully before we proceed any further down the path that the Republicans so clearly want to take us. It’s no accident that poverty has remained an intractable problem in Mexico: Unempowered and ununionized workers are basically just wage slaves with little or nothing left to pour back into the local economy. Profits go to a mixture of the locally wealthy oligarchs and, of course, to the bottom lines of the big multinationals headquartered north of the border. As time has gone on, the local populace has fully recognized that all of their suffering and hard work will continue to do nothing to raise the standard of living for their families and country as a whole. As they continue to abandon faith in their economic system, they have increasingly cooperated with La Familia and a number of other powerful, drug-moving cartels. Since these cartels are moving capital from North of the border to South and providing basic services to people that have previously had no access, is it impossible to imagine them ‘branching out’, so to speak, north of the border and beginning to offer a similar ‘deal’ to the economically abandoned in the US?

Perhaps even more dangerous is how these cartels currently gain access to weapons: They get them from the US. Like a big corporate merger, then, won’t it make sense in the very near future for these groups, both north and south of the border, to begin to align themselves and thereby gain more power? Do we know that this hasn’t begun to occur already? Look carefully: In towns from Arizona to the Dakotas, we’ll begin to see pro-gun candidates carefully selected by the avante gard of the Cartels. Look also for the sudden an mysterious dissappearence or death of pro-labor candidates, along with large amounts of cash pouring in from unknown sources to counteract marijuana legalization.

In the end, yeah, the US debt is a bad thing. We need to get it down. Anyone with a brain has probably figured this out. But to burn the very bridges to social mobility and wealth creation that were an inherent part of the 20th century emergence of the US as the world’s economic powerhouse is suicide, and the wasteland that the Walkers and Bachmanns want to unleash on us all will be ugly indeed.

About the author: Em was a founding member (with John Cale and others) of the New York punk band Doppler Effect in the early 1980s. After living in China in the late 80s, Em worked in the physics and electrical engineering space until 2002, at which time he moved into the financial world. In July, Em returned to the US after having lived in London since 2006 and is a member of the UMOUR art/event collective. He blogs at The Magic Lantern, his"litterbox of the soul.”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Manufacture of the Tea Party

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.19.2011
02:19 pm
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Congressional Pandemonium: House GOP almost votes for radical budget!
04.15.2011
04:53 pm
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Have you seen the footage of House Republicans scrambling to change their votes on the conservative Republican Study Committee budget, yet? If not, press play and watch 30 seconds of complete idiot GOP pandemonium courtesy of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (MD) who dished this out like a master prankster.

When Hoyer got wind that the Republicans were going to hold a vote on the budget plan, he hatched a scheme to dupe the GOP (who would normally count on Democrats to defeat a bill this extreme) and hang this draconian budget—one even more severe than the one proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (you know, the one with the REAL death panels)—around their necks. The RSC amendment would have banned earmarks, raised the retirement age and prevented any new tax increases!

It almost worked, as you can see from the not so “candid camera” video below.

Hoyer told Brian Breutler at TPM:

“I thought to myself the Republican leadership is probably thinking we’re going to defeat it for them,” Hoyer told me in a phone interview Friday. “I said to myself I’m not interested in seeing that happen. I want the Republicans to show what they believe. And if a majority of them believe that that’s the kind of budget [they want] the American people need to know that.”

The RSC is a very large bloc of conservative Republican House members. They introduced a 10-year plan for America that makes the already far-reaching House budget look fairly moderate. It was supposed to be a symbolic vote—one that allowed conservative members to go on the record in support of slashing $9 trillion in spending knowing full well it would never be adopted as the official position of the House and the Republican Party. Hoyer figured them out.

“I also knew that if we telegraphed that early, they would obviously try to anticipate it, work their caucus early,” he said. “As a result I did not have a whip meeting on this—I did discuss it with the Leader [Nancy Pelosi], I discussed it with the Democratic leadership. I told them it was my plan. And they were all for that.”

If he’d briefed his caucus on the tactic days ahead of the vote, word might have leaked. So he gave them just about five minutes notice.

“Then today, I had a meeting with my senior whip team, assigned them around the floor, and then just before the vote…we sent out an email to the BlackBerrys of our members saying that a). we want you to vote late, b). we want to vote present,” Hoyer explained. “And then on the floor, my whips explained to members why we were doing that.”

That led to the chaos on the House floor late Friday morning. With almost all Democrats voting present, Republicans realized they were about to accidentally pass a plan that was too politically radioactive even to them. So they pressed several of their own members—including Reps. David Dreier (R-CA), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Buck McKeon (R-CA), and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)—to switch their votes from yes to no. Indeed, when they realized what the Dems were up to, Republicans managed to flip just as many votes as they’d need to kill the RSC plan, even if every Democrat voted “present.” Only 15 Democrats declined to switch their votes from “no” to “present.” The plan failed by 16 votes.

“We got a lot of them to change, not every one of them to change,” Hoyer said. Those who didn’t, including several Blue Dogs wouldn’t budge. “There were a variety of reasons. I think some have tough races. Some said they’d never voted present. I was disappointed that they did not follow what I think was a strategy to highlight the position of the Republican Party.”

Now that Republicans are wise to the maneuver, they might think twice before they put symbolic conservative measures on the floor. If they’re not more careful, they’ll fall into the same trap.

“It depends on whether they continue to offer policies that are clearly inconsistent with the American mainstream,” Hoyer reasoned. “If they continue to do that their members are either going to have to decide early that they’re going to have to vote against those policies, or they’re going to be back in that position.”

So good to see the Democrats beating these knuckleheads back at long last. Between this and Obama’s excellent and feisty speech (a speech “worthy of a President, “as E.J. Dionne, Jr. put it in the Washington Post) Obama and the Democrats have really closed my enthusiasm gap this week. I didn’t think that was going to be possible.

Update: The GOP-controlled House has passed the Ryan 2012 budget (which will be DOA in the Senate anyway) with only Republicans voting for it. (Four GOP members voted no and there were zero Democratic votes). These bastards own it now… Read more at Politico.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.15.2011
04:53 pm
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Mock the Dummy takes on Donald Trump

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Mock the Dummy absolutely ream Donald Trump in their latest video and it’s a doozy. Using Trump’s own words fashioned as a blunt instrument they then take to the side of his head, the dummy Trump’s lines below come mostly from an ill-advised letter that the (real life) dummy Trump sent in a grammatically-challenged letter to the New York Times complaining about something Gail Collins had written about him there (see “Donald Trump Gets Weirder,” New York Times, April 1, 2011).

Donald Trump, in the latest poll I’ve seen, is now up a full 9 points higher than the rest of the Republican field.

This asshole? Against Obama? It’s just amazing isn’t it?

Election 2012 is going to play out like a ridiculously awesome reality/comedy show.  A breathtaking Republican freakshow. There is no way that it can be avoided!
 

 
Apparently, the Republicans’ far right agenda during their first 100 days as the Congressional majority party renders NY Rep. Joe Crowley “speechless.” (Although it looks like Rep. Crowley is channeling his inner Bob Dylan, according to his staff, he’s not really trying to ape the famous video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” here, he’s just trying to get across how “speechless” he is).

A politician caught in the act of keepin’ his yap shut? Pretty effective way for him to get his point across, if you ask me.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.14.2011
07:22 pm
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Mitt Romney must be cursed or something
04.12.2011
10:05 pm
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Mitt Romney just can’t get a break. Right after officially announcing his presidential exploratory committee on Monday, Romney got smacked in the face (hard) with one of his greatest accomplishments as Governor of Massachusetts: near universal health insurance coverage for the state’s residents (and the model for “Omabacare”). The smack-down came via the unveiling of an especially damaging viral video prepared by Massachusetts Democrats. In the video (see below), Romney, speaking with Chris Matthews, clearly proud of this absolutely wonderful and noble legislative achievement, comes off like the kind of Democrat many of us (being serious here) wish Obama was…

Obviously this will not do Gov. Romney any favors in the GOP primaries! Get used to seeing this same footage often.

And then, to compound this embarrassing hoisting by his own petard episode, the results of a new national CNN poll show Romney, once the presumed front runner, is now coming in fourth in polling, behind Mike Huckabee (who’s probably not running anyway), Donald Trump (tell me that doesn’t sting) and Sarah Palin, who everybody knows has no chance of getting the nomination in this space-time continuum (and who is probably not running anyway). If this poll is to be believed, now Romney has even less of a chance of winning than someone widely regarded as having none??? Meanwhile Trump’s popularity amongst likely GOP voters doubles in a month!

After coming out of the gate so strong, already Mitt’s already down there wallowing with Newt in “no-hoper” territory??? Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch and double ouch! Romney must feel like he’s been cursed. The first fuckin’ Republican to come along in decades to do something nice for the common man and now he’s unelectable!

Serves him right for being such a hypocrite.
 

 
And as if you need any more evidence of what a massive hypocrite Romney is, this blast from the past will surely erase all doubt about the man and his deeply *cough* held *cough* convictions.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.12.2011
10:05 pm
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Obama will lose in 2012
04.12.2011
05:33 pm
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Did you hear about the petition the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) put up this morning? With rumors rampant in the blogsphere that Obama’s speech tomorrow will endeavor to present the “Catfood Commission” plan as an alternative to the GOP “Ryan plan” for deficit reduction, and thereby allowing the parameters of the debate to be set somewhere “between the right and the far right,” as Paul Krugman wrote, PCCC is asking alarmed Obama supporters (including grass roots volunteers, voters and donors alike) to send a message to the President that unless he starts “acting like a Democrat,” as Rep. Peter DeFazio bluntly put it, they will hold back their support. They’re trying to get 50,000 digital signatures today and it looks like they’ll get that and more. (I signed it).

Of course Democratic strategists know fully well that when all is said and done, these motivated lefty types who would send money to PCCC in the first place are highly unlikely to leave the fold. But can they take their donations for granted? Their enthusiasm? The Republicans, to give them their due as pols, at least know how to throw red meat to the base during an election cycle, even if they are utterly craven about it. The Democrats, by way of contrast, seem to think that taking a piss on the heads of their stalwart supporters is a better strategy.

Take me, for instance. I’ve not voted for even a single Republican in my entire life (and never will). On a local level, I almost always vote for a Green-affiliated candidate or if a socialist candidate if that is possible, unless I really like the Democrat in the race. I’m not interested in a middle of the road, generic Democrat at a local level, I want true progressives. Where I live, at least, in Los Angeles, this is seldom an issue.

Stated differently, my voting is motivated like so: I have absolutely zero loyalty to the Democrats, but I LOATHE Republicans and vote accordingly.

I liked what Ralph Nader had to say in 2000—he was right about almost everything—but there was no way, none, that I wanted a Republican president emerging from a three-way race. My loyalty was to a Republican-free White House and so I voted as defense against that happening.  (How worked up can anyone get about Al Gore? To me he was the candidate who was not George Bush. I felt much the same about that French guy from Massachusetts they ran in 2004).

I think there are a lot of people who, though “nominally” Democrats, vote like I do. Especially in cities, college towns and in blue states.

For the record, I’ve been lucky in recent years to have had a Representative whose votes I agreed with 95% of the time, Diane Watson, who retired from Congress in 2011. I surely can’t say that about Obama! He sucks!

Over at his Of Two Minds blog, our super brainy pal Charles Hugh Smith (no fan of either party himself) thinks that Obama is particularly vulnerable in 2012. In fact, Charles thinks he’s going to lose in 2012.

I’m not saying I agree with that, because I do see Obama winning again, the GOP field is full of midgets and seems likely to remain that way—especially if Donald Trump runs as an independent and splits the GOP vote—but it does make for a compelling read:

President Obama has several key flaws which have doomed his presidency.

1. His leadership style is one of consensus and compromise. This works OK in a caretaker setting in which there are no crises and no demands for bold changes of course. Unfortunately, this era is defined by structural crises, and a leadership based on gaining consensus and compromise is basically a rudderless one in this environment.

2. He does not understand economics or finance, nor is he secure about making decisions on financial topics. As a result he deferred to the “experts,” who just happened to be Wall Street cronies and insiders who easily swayed the President with their hobgoblin stories of financial meltdown and ruin if we didn’t “save the banking sector from losses.”

3. His grasp of history is poor. The same can be said of most presidents, but Obama failed to grasp the historic opportunity to set a new sustainable course for the nation’s banking and financial sectors, and thus for its economy. He opted instead to save and protect the corrupt and embezzlement-based banking sector from losses, and he continues to do so with “extend and pretend” policies.

In a similar fashion, he has allowed the National Security State and the Global Empire to expand without any limitations.

4. He has no visible core beliefs beyond a vague sense that the Federal government and its extension, the American Empire, are forces for good. His policies can be boiled down to: support and expand the Savior State and its many fiefdoms, support and expand the Global Empire and National Security State, and allow the banking system and its Power Elites to set the agenda and control the oversight agencies and institutions.

His signature accomplishment, the “Obama-care reform” of the nation’s sickcare system, simply extends the power of existing cartels and fiefdoms and delivers an ever-larger slice of the national income to their coffers. In its basic parameters, the “reform” could easily have been supported and passed by socially liberal Republican presidents such as Richard Nixon. There is nothing remotely progressive or radical about “pooling” insurance cartels and wet-paper-bag bureaucratic tests of “the most effective treatments.”

These are simply technocratic layers added to a bloated, corrupt, venal and destructive system that already costs twice as much as those of our advanced-economy competitors.

In addition to these flaws, he has made fatal policy errors which doom the economy to implosion by November 2012. All of his administration’s policies can be distilled down to these three points:

1. The banking sector is the most important foundation of the economy. The Central State and its proxy, the Federal Reserve, pumped some $14 trillion (by some measures, $23 trillion) in cash, credit, guarantees and backstops into the banking sector and its cloaked twin, the Shadow banking System.

Meanwhile, little to nothing was done for the cash-strapped consumer or citizenry. Why?

2. The “problem” is lack of credit and “confidence.” If the State and Fed flood the banking system with credit and “restore confidence” by goosing the stock market, then people will start borrowing and spending again, and everything will be “fixed.”

This presumes demand is strong, and all that’s needed is credit for people to satisfy their thirst for more goods and services.

Meanwhile, back in reality, people realized they didn’t need a third car, fourth TV, 17th “cute blouse,” 23rd pair of shoes, etc., and now that their home is worth less than their mortgage (or their remaining equity is minimal), they can’t really afford the luxury travel, boats, etc. they enjoyed when they thought their house would keep rising in value forever and tapping that rising equity was painless.

Demand is slack because everyone who could afford more crap already owns more crap than they need or even want. The percentage of the populace who would like more stuff cannot afford more stuff. Their household incomes and wages are declining, and their expenses for essentials are rising.

The Fed’s largesse to banks (free money in unlimited quantities) doesn’t reach them; all it does is boost assets held by the top 10%.

3. Boosting the assets of this top 10% (or 20% if you include those who have equity of some sort beyond the $2,500 in their IRA) will cause a “wealth effect” that will “trickle down” to the lower 80% as the top 20% buy more Coach handbags, enjoy fine dining at tony upscale restaurants, etc.

Unfortunately, this may help boost Coach’s profit margins, but the vast majority of the “trickle-down” consists of low-paying retail clerks and busboys.

In other words, the “wealth effect” is bogus, a charade deployed to defend the pillaging of the economy via financialization and Fed intervention.

4. Pushing the dollar lower in a “beggar thy neighbor” currency war is the best way to boost the U.S. economy. Apparently no one in the President’s team looked at financial history to identify the nations which grew rich and powerful by debasing their currency.

In a perverse blowback to this misguided policy, corporate profits earned overseas were certainly goosed, but so were import prices, one of the reasons (along with the Fed’s easy-money quantitative easing) for rising costs to consumers.

If you set out to design a policy that impoverished 80% of the citizenry and channeled a larger share of the national income to the top 10%, then this is precisely the set of policies you would pursue.

Nothing important has been fixed; nothing important has even been addressed. The institutions of governance are captured and corraled by the monied Elites to the point that the government has lost control of its own institutions, which now rule as quasi-independent fiefdoms. The citizenry, bought off on the cheap by stale Bread (rapacious student loans, food stamps which offer the veneer of normalcy, extended unemployment benefits so no angry mobs form, etc.) and dazed and distracted by the Media Circus, keep quiet in their complicity, while the Power Elites revel in the freedoms offered by a caretaker Administration.

If President Obama had fought for fundamental structural reforms and lost, he would still have support.

Read more of Obama Will Lose in 2012 (Of Two Minds)

Below, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) tells it like it is on MSNBC last night to Cenk Uygur:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.12.2011
05:33 pm
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What the hell happened in Wisconsin today???
04.07.2011
11:51 pm
Topics:
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Whoops, wrong stolen election!

If you are looking for a way to get your head around what happened today in the hotly-contested Wisconsin election shocker, this clip from Daily Kos explains it in a rather succinct nutshell.

In WI, an automatic recount at state-expense is triggered if an election is within .5%, and we have a fully verifiable paper trail to audit election results. That means in this election with approximately 740k for Kloppenburg and 739k for Prosser, the vote gets recounted at state-expense if the election is within ~7400 votes.

So the last 2 days the WI-GOP has been scrambling trying to figure out how they can still get Prosser into office. What was the result of their brain-storming? Add a few extra votes in a friendly area (Waukesha), and call it a clerical error. But in order to steal the election, they NEED to be able to keep a recount from occurring, because a recount would expose their attempted fraud to the light of day.

So they couldn’t just give Prosser a couple hundred to put him barely in the lead by 40. They had to give him more than 7500 in order to get above the threshold for automatic recount, so that the only way for a recount to happen would be if Kloppenburg ponies up the money for a state-wide recount, which could be expensive. Granted, all of us in WI would be happy to donate to a potential recount effort if it gets to that point, but the resolve of the Kloppenburg camp remains to be seen.

When the Republicans have declared victory starting tomorrow, they will use the full power of their media empire to pressure KloJo to concede instead of paying for a recount. They’ll say she’s a sore loser if she pushes for a recount outside of the .5% margin. They’ll say the gap is so wide that a recount couldn’t possibly swing enough votes her way, so she shouldn’t waste the time of election workers. They’ll say she’s just further trying to divide the people of WI. They will do EVERYTHING they can to make sure NO ONE checks the paper trail. Because the paper trail will be the nail in their coffin.

We must not let them succeed in this attempted fraud.

It is NOT a coincidence that Prosser didn’t get +300 votes or +1000, it had to be +7500 or more in order for the fraud to work. +7400 just wouldn’t have been enough.

RECOUNT WISCONSIN!

Now read this, from OneWisconsinNow. Does Kathy Nickolaus in any way seem kinda shady, do you think? Do ya?

Election Returns: What Went On in Waukesha?
After Hours of Silence, Embattled Clerk Reports Wildly-High Turnout in Prosser’s Top County

Madison—As counties statewide move to certify Tuesday’s shocking upset victory by JoAnne Kloppenburg over heavily-favored David Prosser, unanswered questions remain about returns from Tuesday night in Waukesha County—the top-performing county in the state for Scott Walker’s self-proclaimed “complement” on the Supreme Court.

“Wisconsin deserves elections that are fair, clean and transparent,” said Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Now Executive Director. “There is a history of secrecy and partisanship surrounding the Waukesha County Clerk and there remain unanswered questions.”

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a former staffer for the Assembly Republican Caucus, has been sharply criticized in recent months for her handling of recent elections. Even the archly-conservative Waukesha County Board has sharply condemned Nickolaus after past elections, demanding an immediate audit of her practices following ominous red-flags that emerged regarding her lack of oversight, failure to create backup files and her stubborn insistence to “keep everything secret.” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 8/18/10; 1/17/11]

The County auditors said it was eminently possible—including historical precedent—for Nickolaus or a rogue employee to tamper with data. Why? Nickolaus insists on controlling password access and has unilaterally decided to move sensitive files, like election results, onto her personal computer.

Nickolaus has actually scoffed at complying with impartial audits, thumbing her nose at critics. A move that drew a sharp reaction at the time from the County Board Chair:

“There really is nothing funny about this, Kathy,” said Waukesha County Board Chairman Jim Dwyer when Nickolaus willfully ignored complying with the earlier impartial audit. “Don’t sit there and grin when I’m explaining what this is about.” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 8/18/10; 1/17/11]

On Tuesday, shockingly-large turnout suddenly emerged from Waukesha County, which did not comport with either the results of previous spring elections, or even internal estimates from city officials mid-day. In fact, a Waukesha City Deputy Clerk said at 1:18pm that turnout was very typical, predicting somewhere between 20 to 25 percent. As Tuesday night wore on, reporting in Waukesha County stopped altogether for hours, leaving observers to wonder what was going on. Then suddenly, results suggesting massive turnout started to pour in rapidly with Prosser adding dramatically to his total by a 73-27 percent margin.

One Wisconsin Now estimates put overall turnout near 38 percent, a wild outlier to historical data and the earlier mid-day estimation of Waukesha’s own officials. In April 2009, turnout was 20 percent; April 2008, turnout was 22 percent and in April 2007, turnout was 24

Fishy or not? You decide!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.07.2011
11:51 pm
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Guerrilla artist mocks Maine’s teabagger governor

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Maine Gov. Paul LePage is the Tea party-supported idiot who squeaked into office with just 38% of the vote in a three-way race last year. Hardly the stuff of a mandate—61 %voted against him, of course—but this didn’t stop LePage—who doesn’t really give the impression that he’s a very bright fellow—from barging right in like a bull in a china shop and disrespecting the working people of his state. For no good reason, either. He’s just a dummy.

Instead of worrying about things like, oh, the state’s economy, the battered tax base, the elderly, state roads or ANYTHING THAT MATTERS, dimwitted LaPage took it upon himself, nay made it his business—after what he described as “complaints” about the supposed “anti-business” atmosphere (which later he admitted consisted of one single anonymous letter!!!) —to remove an eleven-panel mural from Maine’s Department of Labor building depicting actual events in American labor history! He also directed conference rooms be renamed so they won’t honor labor leaders, including one named for Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor under FDR who helped established the first minimum wage laws (and the first woman at a cabinet level in US history).

Incredible.
 
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Judy Taylor, the artist of the piece who was selected by the Maine Arts Commission, remarked of the mural’s removal: “There was never any intention to be pro-labor or anti-labor. It was a pure depiction of the facts.”

Aside from proving to his constituents that he’s a blustering buffoon—as if there was ever a reason to doubt it—now Tea party-inspired foolishness might cost Maine taxpayers more than $38,000.”>the Department of Labor who granted most of the money for the mural are going to send LePage a bill for violating the terms of the grant. This Tea party-inspired foolishness might cost Maine taxpayers more than $38,000.

That’s… leadership, baby! Republican leadership. Actually, in all fairness, I can’t blame them: LePage is such a fucking goof-ball that he’s even been rebuked by HIS OWN PARTY for being a dickhead! How many times do you ever hear a Republican break ranks to criticize another Republican??? For a low IQ wingnut like Paul LePage (who told the NAACP that they could “kiss his butt” and that he’d “laugh” at anyone who protested the mural’s removal) they will make an exception! That’s right, as unlikely as this sounds, this twit brings shame on all members of the Maine GOP and they told him so in a very public way to disassociate themselves from this political trainwreck. LaPage is the turd in the punchbowl of Maine policitcs and everyone knows it but him.

Ultimately, this mural business, as annoying as it is, is a small matter because when LePage is defeated in the next election cycle—if he runs, he surely will be challenged by a fellow Republican—his Democratic successor in the governor’s mansion is just going to undo everything damned thing this buffoon ever did, including hanging the mural back up and restoring the names of the conference rooms.

In the meantime, temporary Gov. LePage, was bitch-slapped the other day by a guerrilla artist who projected Judy Taylor’s labor history mural onto the exterior of Maine’s Capitol building. Here’s a statement about the video:

We put this video up to remind our peers that you have a voice, as soon as you choose to use it. If your government takes a symbol away and tries to hide history, you can make the truth resonate a thousand times stronger with your own 2 hands.

This is a lesson the labor unions taught us all, though some have chosen to forget it. We will remind you.

The maker of the art is unimportant. What matters is that you see it, and you have the freedom to speak about it.

Help make this video go viral!
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.07.2011
04:14 pm
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Rich, white and Republican: Are The Young Cons the worst rappers of ALL TIME?

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I realize that this is another one of those, “This smells like shit, smell this” kind of posts, but bear with me, this one is pretty… “good”:

“The Young Cons” are a Dartmouth College “conservative Christian” rap duo comprised of Joshua “Stiltz” Riddle and David “Serious C” Rufful. “The Young Cons” rap about Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan and Jesus and appear at Tea party rallies and on Fox News. Clearly these rich-kid goofballs, have no sense whatsoever of how they must appear to others outside of their white-bread, er, posse. They must have also completely given up on the idea of ever getting laid again…

“Stilz” and “Serious C” make even James O’Keefe look like… less of a Republican dweeb by comparison (That’s hard to do). These guys totally suck!  You might think this is a joke—and it surely is—but it’s not an intentional joke (or at least I don’t think it is?)

Local Los Angeles Christian radio idiot, Frank Pastore said of them:

“They’re Christian. They’re conservative. And, of course, liberals are going crazy over this. Some of their lyrics are really a hoot.”

A “hoot” huh, Frank? I doubt very much “The Young Cons” are driving many liberals (or anybody else) “crazy.” Most liberals would probably just think they’re fucking idiots, point and laugh at them and then say snarky things about them on their Facebook wall. About all they’re worth…
 

Via Wonkette

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.06.2011
09:09 pm
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Republicans’ ‘Path to Prosperity’ plan: Whose prosperity are we talking about???

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In pages of The New York Times, David Brooks actually called the Ryan plan “courageous”! “Courageous”???  You’d have to be a Republican to believe that!

More like an all-out declaration of explicit class war.

How else to interpret the Ryan proposal? I’m all ears.

The public—you know, the people who actually live here in the richest country in the world and who will die here… in abject poverty if something like this gets passed—once they truly understand (even people who nominally consider themselves conservatives) what is being discussed—and what it means for THEIR OWN OLD AGE—are going to bail on the GOP in droves. Even Fox News-watching senior citizens will should be able to see through this. The GOP are really baring their fangs again. CSPAN is getting more and more like Planet of the Apes every single day.

Via Ezra Klein

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.06.2011
03:30 pm
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GOP Family Values: New scandal brewing for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker just can’t get a break. Only in office a few months, already he seems to posses a bottomless pit of sleazy, stupid things that he’s done that are making it, you might say, a little hot for him.

On the eve of his buddy Judge David Prosser getting his ass kicked all over the electoral map, word has leaked out of a new scandal that’s taking shape in Madison: It seems that the ne’r do well. loser drunkard progeny of one of Walker’s biggest donors, Jerry Deshane, was given a plum state job.

From the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel:

Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.

Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.

How did Deschane score his plum assignment with the Walker team?

It’s all in the family.

This is what happens when you vote for Republicans…

Can you imagine being a high school teacher worried about having your benefits cut or losing your job and hearing about some idiot rich kid with TWO DUIs getting a job at the taxpayer tit for over $80k a year and getting a fucking 16% raise in just eight weeks? Rep. Brett Hulsey, a Democrat from Madison said of party boy Deschane: “It doesn’t look like he’s ever had a real job.”

No, but he’s got a real rich daddy... Did he even have to write a resume or fill out a job application? I kinda doubt it, don’t you?

And in related news, a second WI Republican, Sen. Randy Hopper is likely going to face a recall election. You may recall Hopper as the fellow who left his wife for someone half his age who also got a government job well above the standard pay scale. Wisconsin Democrats and labor supporters have previously collected 145% of the necessary signatures needed to recall another Republican senator, Dan Kapanke. I don’t think either of these gentlemen will see out the end of the summer in their current offices. Nor will their buddy Scott Walker be in any position to give them sweetheart jobs when the voters sack them, because those days are over. Walker’s being watched for ANY slip up at this point and although for sure he’s DUMB, he’s not so dumb that he can’t read the writing on the wall. (Can you imagine what it must feel like to be Scott Walker? What a god-damned buffoon!)

This is getting sooooo gooood. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s vote in Wisconsin. Republican schadenfreude? Count me in, I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve…

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
10:40 pm
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Michele Bachmann’s fabulist life

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Not content to simply um… improvise dubious (and easily verified) “facts” about American history, a few weeks ago, MN Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann also made up shit about her own family tree in an effort to appear “more Iowan” to voters in the state where she was born. Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus writes at Op Ed News:

[At] the Rediscover God in America conference in Iowa, Michele Bachmann, like the other potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates who spoke at this conference, lavished praise on their fellow speaker, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. Bachmann also revealed that her involvement in the history revisionism game goes back even further than her association with Barton. As a student at Oral Roberts University, she met John Eidsmoe, and worked as a research assistant on his 1987 book, Christianity and the Constitution. Eidsmoe is another Christian nationalist history revisionist, whose Christianity and the Constitution book predates the first edition of Barton’s book The Myth of Separation by a year. In fact, some of Barton’s lies are adaptations of Eidsmoe’s lies and half-truths, a number of which are debunked in my book. But I had no idea that Bachmann had been involved with Eidsmoe or his book until she talked about it at the Rediscover God in America conference, or that it was Eidsmoe who introduced her to Barton’s material.

But Bachmann’s admiration of history revisionists wasn’t the thing that really caught my attention in her speech at the conference. It was her detailed account of her family history, aimed at emphasizing her Iowa roots to this audience of Iowans. It was when Bachmann said she was a 7th generation Iowan, descended from Norwegians who immigrated to Iowa in the 1850s, that I started paying attention, simply because it would be mathematically impossible for a woman in her mid-fifties to be the 7th generation descended from people who immigrated in the 1850s unless each of their direct ancestors from every generation had had a child when they were still a child themselves. After catching this one obvious lie, I just couldn’t resist doing a little fact checking on the rest of Bachmann’s story. What I found was that Bachmann’s version of her family’s history was as much a work of fiction as anything found in one of David Barton’s books. She wants the people of Iowa to see her as one of them, so she simply changed her family history.

That’s right she just made it all up. Facts? She don’t need no stinking facts! She’s Michele Bachmann, ain’t she?

This woman is stupid and shameless, a winning combination in Republican presidential primaries. The people would cast a vote for this idiot will never even hear about this anyway, so what does she have to lose with a lil’ white lie?

Watch the video of Bachmann’s speech below. Read Rodda’s analysis of Michele Bachmann’s bogus claims for her family tree at OpEd News.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
09:19 pm
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Stupid or evil: Republican Party to commit mass-suicide???
04.04.2011
04:51 pm
Topics:
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Remember all those Republican TV campaign ads last November that warned senior citizens about how the Democrats were hatching plans to cut their Medicare? Some people, sadly, were ignorant enough to believe this claim, as preposterous as it was and that billionaires needed tax breaks, etc, etc, etc. Now we now have a GOP-controlled House. Well, folks, guess what? When you vote for a wolf in sheep’s clothing, don’t be surprised when they eat your carcass and spit the bones out once the election’s over:

This just in from Paul Krugman’s blog at the New York Times. Stunning:

So they’re really going to propose it.

More when we have some details. But two key points:

1. Privatizing and voucherizing Medicare does nothing whatsoever to control costs. We’ve seen that from the sorry history of Medicare Advantage. I’m sure that the Republicans will claim savings — but those savings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.

Oh, and for all those older Americans who voted GOP last year because those nasty Democrats were going to cut Medicare, I have just one word: suckers!

2. E.J. Dionne is right: This will be Obama’s defining moment. Will he stand up for the principle that society takes care of those in need? Or will he cave in? I wish I had confidence in the answer.

Me, too!

House Republicans Propose $4 Trillion in Cuts Over Decade (New York Times)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2011
04:51 pm
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