Voter Fraud Is Another Trump Lie

"A study of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states between 2000 and 2012 found the level of fraud was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million voters registered over the 12-year period. The analysis found only 10 cases of voter impersonation, the only kind of fraud that could be prevented by voter ID at the polls."

From NBCNews

But if you are going to look, [President] Trump, why not start at home:

Tiffany Trump is one of these voters registered in two states

President Trump's top advisor white supremacist Steve Bannon is another

Cases like Ms Trump's and Steve Bannon's are the rationalization for the massive Interstate Crosscheck the scheme for purging legal voters from the rolls deployed nationwide by Trump supporter Chris Kobach.

Were Bannon and Trump reported to the states by Interstate Crosscheck?

So, an infinitesimal problem. The source of Trump’s anecdotal evidence was a friend of his, a German national, who tried to vote in Florida and was rejected. Trump’s friend complained to him that lots of people were voting who obviously should not have been…according to a foreigner who attempted to commit voter fraud, presumably on behalf of Trump.

Trump does not explain how Bernhard Langer could have seen 3-5 million allegedly illegal voters in this one precinct in Florida.

The Langer anecdote story from CNBC

Here is a fact check from the very middle of the road USAToday

How Senator Rubio And The Republicans In Congress Rigged Your Healthcare Premiums To Go Up

"RISK CORRIDOR": THE REAL REASON OBAMA-CARE PREMIUMS ARE GOING UP IN 2017 -- THAT NO ONE IS TELLING YOU ABOUT

Hot off Wednesday's Thom Hartmann Show:

This is why the insurance companies participating in the Affordable Care Act are raising their premiums next year. As we know, the ACA ended the practice of denying coverage to people with previous conditions (which was causing people who were very ill to go without health care, and others to die). Even though the insurance companies would profit in long-term from overall increased number of enrollees, they screamed because of the short-term losses due to mandatory coverage of people who were already chronically ill. This period of short-term loss due to the addition of high-risk enrollees was dubbed "the risk corridor."

So to sweeten the deal, Obama then added extra subsidies for any losses incurred in the risk corridor. (Poor insurance companies! After all, CEO Helmsley must not be allowed to lose 1 cent of the one billion dollars+ he takes yearly in personal income from United Health Care.) The risk corridor subsidies were of course dependent on Congress passing budget bills that provided the funds for them.

This year, Senator Marco Rubio stripped out funds for the risk corridor subsidies, not as part of a budget bill (which is the honest way to do it), but as a rider to an unrelated bill, which Obama was compelled to sign, for whatever reasons pertinent to the purposes of the actual bill. As a result, the strip-out, and who did it, never got covered in the news. (Which is just how the Republicans wanted it.) And, as a result, the insurance companies will not get the subsidies that provide their short-term profits next year. Instead of "manning up," as the Conservatives like to say, and taking the losses next year in stride (which is what corporations used to do, and found acceptable as part of doing business, when we baby-boomers were kids), and disregarding that these losses will eventually be made up by long-term increased enrollments, the insurance companies are raising their premiums. A lot. Who knows... They may even end up making more money than they would have with the government subsidies.

Meanwhile, the enrollees are screaming bloody murder, as they should, and getting massively ripped off so Helmsley can buy another villa ala vineyard on the South Italy coast. Or whatever he and his CEO cronies do with all that money. And because MSmedia is owned and run by essentially the same people who own and run the insurance companies, and is therefore keeping its collective mouth shut, Republicans get to scream some more that "Obama-care doesn't work!" without revealing the real reason why, and that they're the ones responsible for it. Conveniently during the election.

This is how the Republicans do it. Remember this. Remember the name Marco Rubio and Republicans when your premiums go up. This is why we need single-payer health insurance (Medicare for All). Health care cannot work as long as it's conducted as a for-profit enterprise. And as it is essential to life, it should not be for profit, any more than water, or fire departments should be for profit. I'm not saying we shouldn't all pay for these services, nor that people should not make a decent living from helping to provide them. I'm saying that particular individuals should not be allowed to take ridiculous profits from doing work that is necessary to human beings' basic survival. Certainly people who simply shuffle the money around for these services, or coordinate the processes involved, should not be taking huge profits, adding to everyone's costs. Given that people die without them, that is extortion, and abuse of power. (We actually used to understand these principles in America. These things went without saying.)

Yeah. Obama-care: The only health care solution Republicans would even marginally accept. A system modeled after Republican plans (specifically, as I recall, Mitt Romney's). A system that doesn't work, because the Republicans won't allow it to work... Nice.

Place Blame Where It Belongs

The recent arguments over the GOP's determination to block President Obama's constitutional obligation to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court have tended to return to the old canard that "both parties do this." Both parties are not equally extreme or rigid or prejudiced or hypocritical. One party is causing most of the dysfunction, even if, sadly and unfairly, most Americans have a habit of blaming everyone in elected office.

Which makes it worth re-reading an op-ed from a few years ago by two of the more clear-eyed political observers, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann.

Saying both parties are to blame for the dysfunction we’ve seen in recent years is the result of public laziness. Or perhaps it's exhaustion. Either way it flows from a bad habit in our journalism and the news media who are supposed to moderate and referee our public discourse. I’m referring to the bad habit of false equivalency or false balancing.

“Both sides do it” was Nixon’s defense when a bit of political spying exposed the massive corruption in his presidency. It's also the defense given by five year olds who want to misbehave like the friends their parents don't want them to hang around with.

I’m reminded of something that happened at a friend’s house when I was eight or nine. The older brother was in the rec room pounding the hell out of my friend when their mother came in. She didn’t drag the older brother off and send him to his room; she yelled at both of them and punished both of them for fighting. This is false equivalency: if one party is doing wrong, whether beating or lying or cheating, it is somehow “unfair” to punish or rebuke the one that is offending without also rebuking and punishing the other, the victim. Both were fighting. "It takes two to make a fight." If one party does wrong something in our sense of fairness requires us to say, “Well, both were probably to blame.” This is why we hear people say that the victim of a crime probably asked for it, the beaten wife probably shouldn’t have provoked her husband, the rape victim should have dressed more primly or not gone outside after dark. This kind of lazy rationalization licenses the wrongdoer.

A lot of Americans have expressed disappointment with President Obama because he "doesn’t fight hard enough" for what the Democrats want to achieve, because he doesn’t go full-on political with the Republicans who have embargoed his presidency from day one. But when Obama was elected most Americans breathed a giant sigh of relief because he promised to preside as a moderate, as someone willing to look for common ground, willing to get things done, willing to avoid the bitter partisanship which had disgusted Americans in recent years. Americans applauded his promise to keep away from the nastiness that obsesses the other party. When others got ugly, he did not. When a freshman congressman called him a liar at the State of the Union, he answered civilly and without rancor, because it was a ludicrous and ugly remark. When idiots like Donald Trump questioned his birth certificate he laughed; it was the only sane response to a stupid charge that was provably false and proven to be so.

We’ve heard it seriously suggested by Republicans that Obama has been a divisive president. And there has been no moderate voice to point out what a stupid suggestion this is. The news media has simply reported the Republicans are saying it. They have reported it endlessly without invalidating it or even questioning it. (Just as they have covered Donald Trump’s candidacy without examining his statements or positions for validity or falsehood or bigotry or contradictions.) Calling Obama divisive is a bit like blaming the black family down the street for the burned spot in their front yard. True, that cross would not have been burned there if they had not been black and had not lived in that house. But it is deeply wrong and dishonest to blame the victim for the offenses committed against him. These things are an offense to all of us; perhaps we are all to blame.

All the evidence––the comments, the obstruction, the disrespectful comments by Republican officials, the outright hatred in the comments sections in newspapers and websites––tells us that the Republican base believes Obama was divisive simply because he was elected as a black man. Having a black family living in the White House upsets and somehow “insults” the base of the Republican Party––therefore it was “divisive" of Barack Obama to win the office. And twice as "divisive" to win it twice. That this ludicrous charge isn't greeted with broad disgust shows how corrupted our public conversation has become. Other ugly ideas flow from this unrepudiated and racist sentiment in the Republican base. It now seems the Republicans feel––since the Constitution stated that black Americans were only 3/5 of a human being––that any black American president should have a similarly limited presidency, say three years instead of four. This is difficult to dispute if you believe the Constitution was perfect as written, as if it was a sacred text from God, complete with its slavery provisions, and this is what most Republicans seem to believe. Especially canvassed en masse. One member of a mob will tend to uphold the consensus of the entire body no matter how ugly it is.

This core belief among Republicans that Democrats––and especially Democrats of color––are illegitimate is a deep seated, habitual, and outright form of bigotry. And it is a core part of the Republican brand. It has been so ever since the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and the Republican Party happily invited all the racists to join the GOP. It was written into the party’s campaign strategy in the Southern Strategy that elected Nixon to the White House twice.

A good short piece on the Republicans' Southern Strategy from Bloomberg.

Because Americans prize civility we are barred from calling this racism or bigotry, and we are barred by our news media’s habit of false equivalency from calling the Republican Party racist and bigoted, even when it is, but failure to call out bigotry tends to license it. When we (or our news media) accept a political extremist’s values without opposing or rejecting them we see the political middle skewed toward that extremism.

The center shifts. The standards of validity are rewritten to accommodate what was formerly unacceptable. Just as failure to call out a lie against science and reason shifts public opinion toward the lie and away from the scientific truth. People have a habit of balancing opposing arguments, and if the false argument is not repudiated, whether out of politeness or laziness or cowardice or bad habit, it corrupts the public conversation and the public conception of what is true. Barack Obama has chosen to match political extremism and bigotry and anti-science unreason and outright dishonesty with moderation and reason and tolerance and honesty.

Reason has a disadvantage when it is confronted by unreason. Unreason is louder, it is more fanatical, it is more stubborn, it is narrow minded and will not listen to dispute. President Obama has responded reasonably and tolerantly to the unreason and bigotry of his opponents. Does answering intolerance with tolerance make him a hypocrite? No. He was only tolerant in allowing the bigots the freedom to speak. As Voltaire put it “‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Which puts truth and science and reason and tolerance at a tactical disadvantage. When the Democratic Party repudiated racism the Republicans seized that opening. Knowing that no politician would win by calling the voters bigots, the GOP decided to embrace the bigots and this tactical advantage.

Which means that reasonable people need to engage in the argument instead of relaxing in the comfortable belief that they are right and the comfortable habit of not getting angry about someone else’s offensive beliefs. We cannot relax and feel confident that falsehood will be evident to everyone hearing it. We cannot be confident that everyone will see and repudiate racism or unreason or hypocrisy or unAmerican values without our taking the trouble to point them out. We are obligated to repudiate bigotry and unreason and dysfunction and to place the blame for these things squarely on those causing them. If we do not we are making it likelier that the ugly dishonest things we deplore will become the norm.

Slavery is the Next Neat Idea (and other outrages)

Republican Department of Neat Ideas (via Mike Huckabee): slavery for non-violent offenders

Here's how deals are done on the money minded Right. You use the Party office to run a loansharking business and loot a charity to cover expenses. When there's trouble, declare bankruptcy. Pocket consulting fee. This actually happened in the GOP offices in Nevada.

"We didn't have a spending problem. We had a revenue problem,” said Scott Walker's campaign manager. This is how the failed Walker campaign brushes off their $1 million deficit. The point being this: if you spend people’s money on Scott Walker it’s well spent. If you spend taxpayer dollars on public needs it’s money wasted.

Another example of the Republican “Not My Responsibility” mindset: whenever possible let’s give the wealthy and corporations the option to avoid supporting public needs. NPR reports on a "neat" Oklahoma law that allows companies to leave workers high and dry.

For them, owning the company is what funds their workers’ comp. The only worker they want to compensate is the one at the top. Everything spent on other people is either waste or theft.

For the guys at the top “efficiency” becomes a question of “Who can we do without?” “Who can we get rid of?” The CEO himself is essential, of course, but everyone else is expendable.

When this kind of thinking migrates from the top of corporations into the top of government, what does it begin to remind you of? Which countries have systematically planned how to get rid of groups of people they didn’t want or didn’t like?

Don’t immediately say Germany in the Thirties. That’s easy. The same nasty thinking has been rampant in this country too. One loud voice in favor of selective extermination is now the favorite philosopher of the Republican Party: Ayn Rand.

When the thinking gets this toxic people want to step away from it. So you’d think.

But the migration of the GOP from levelheaded mainstream practical thinking to nutty extremist hate mongering insanity has been so gradual that a lot of people you thought are sane are still party to it. They’re the ones trying to explain away the ugly statements and proposals as isolated gaffes not representative of the broader party. David Brooks, the soft-voiced overly-polite columnist for the NYTimes is one of these, but even he is expressing disgust. Not so much with the hateful policies, though. It’s the dysfunction he finds embarrassing. Forgodssake, if you’re going to be a bigoted extremist party at least be an efficient and competent one! Think German engineering.

Here's an analysis of Brooks' fed up rant.

The problem is, David Brooks has been ushering the GOP down this road for decades. Explaining away the nuttiness, smoothing out the ugly policies, rationalizing the outright unAmericanness of the whole selfishness creed. He’s shocked, SHOCKED, to find the Republican Party––whose dysfunction and extremism he’s been doing PR for all this time––has become a dysfunctional and extremist party. Typically Republican. His response to any problem is threefold: Not my job. Not my responsibility. Not my fault.

Hypocrisy In The News

The Republican Secretary of State in New Mexico was elected on a Stop Voter Fraud platform. She is now under indictment on 65 counts including fraud, embezzlement and money laundering. She is also being charged with identity theft. Hm... It’s a shame Republican voters don’t understand irony or hypocrisy... The LATimes has the full story.

The state of Alabama was very pleased when the Supreme Court said nobody needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act anymore because bigotry and prejudice were over with. So Alabama did two things. They added a requirement that all voters have a photo ID to vote, and they closed offices where these photo IDs could be obtained in majority black counties. Hm… Anybody phoned Chief Justice Roberts for comment? Maybe just phone the Department of Justice... The Root has a full report on this story.

A hurricane just dropped several feet of rain on South Carolina causing the dozenth “thousand year flood” in the past few years. All their Republicans in Congress loudly demanded disaster relief, and they’ll get it too, because it’s what Americans do to help other Americans in trouble. Trouble is, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, New Jersey and the rest of the northeast every one of these South Carolina Republicans voted against federal aid. Hm… Sometimes hypocrisy is so ripe you have to hold your nose... This story is all over the news; here's Salon's article.

College Dystopia

How do you define "dystopia"? OK, it's the opposite of utopia. What if some of the people living in it think it is utopia, perfect as far as they're concerned.

What would American colleges look like in a dystopian model? Like this:

Elite students are jetted around the country by colleges and given luxury living while enrolled…

(The Guardian posted an article about that very thing. All students are equal, but some students are more equal than others, as Orwell would have put it.)

Meanwhile professors work at adjunct level and live on public assistance...

(SLATE posted a story today describing how many working professors and instructors at college level, college graduates in other words, with degrees and abilities, are actually living in poverty.)

A few decades ago such a picture would have made us sick. But we just file it with all of the other stories about the dystopia America has become.

There are many ironies here. The most profound irony is that the party that hates elites has dedicated itself to creating them and insulating them. That would be the Republican Party. Irony evolved into hypocrisy some time ago.

Republican Nuttiness

New Arizona law passed by Republican legislature requires doctors to tell women that abortions can be reversed and to urge them to do so. (Reported in SLATE)

Arizona legislator (Republican) proposes law that would require all Arizonans to go to church. (Reported in the Arizona Republican)

In Oklahoma (in case you missed it) a Republican has proposed a law that would require persons wanting to get married to get permission from a clergyman. (Reported by the religion site PATHEOS)

Wisconsin billionaires appear able to pay governor money and have their taxes disappear. They get unions to disappear too. (in the Milwaukee Journal-Star)

(You save big money for the Menards, in Milwaukee Magazine)

Republicans believe bizarre rumor that Obama tried to nuke Charleston SC. (Reported in Bloomberg, which has obviously decided weird stories about a weird political party have to be reported)

Wealthiness is next to Godliness

Jesus became a serious pure-market capitalist in the 1930s. Before then most Americans believed the Bible nonsense Jesus allegedly said about the wealthy man and the eye of the needle and about how we should feed and clothe the poor in His name. Boy did Jesus fool us! An excellent piece in today's NYTimes explains the history.

For a while not many people believed the truth about Jesus in a three-piece suit and expensive shoes. Eisenhower, who was a Republican, kept FDR’s New Deal in place and went right on taxing top earners more than working stiffs. American prosperity was broad and stable. Working people lived in nice safe neighborhoods with decent schools.

That changed with Reagan. Reagan had allies among the TV prophets who earned millions off of faithful viewers living in mobile home parks. The Reagan revolution, with Jesus’ almighty help, put working people back in difficulties, flattened working incomes, forcing families to have two earners to get by. Taxes on top earners went way down. Government help dried up for most of us but ballooned for special industries preferred by Republicans and Jesus, like weapons manufacturing and predatory lending. Who said you couldn’t worship both God and Mammon? (Hint: it was Jesus. And he was apparently wrong.) Christianity Today has an interesting piece explaining the so-called Prosperity Gospel. (Do you see any mention of Jesus weeping?)

This right wing alliance of wealth and Christianity is downright unholy. Its home is in the Republican Party. They’re the same ones who funded the Citizens United lawsuit making secret million dollar political donations sacred. (They’re also the ones funding the fight against affordable healthcare, because––as Jesus said––sickness and fear of death are best managed as a business model, a source of profits.) The Theocracy Watch website tracks this creepy phenomenon.

An interesting example: Joel Osteen, who lives in a $10.5 million property in Houston, which is a step up from the $3 million property he still owns. Jesus must really really really love him and not like the rest of us much. There's his house, on a map of the star's homes in Houston.

John Hagee is another one of these Elmer Gantrys. Less handsome, but mesmerizing. Intelligent responsible people used to laugh at charlatans like this. The powerful have learned these preachers are a good way to keep a leash on the working masses. American Prospect tells Hagee's story of Jesus-Went-To-Business-School.

There are a lot of busy churchy people out there who’ve carefully revised the Revised Standard Version of the Bible to explain why wealth and money and getting ahead of your neighbor is a true sign of God’s blessing. All of us would rather be Saved and own an expensive car than be Saved and live hand to mouth. People are very good at rationalizing themselves out of being kind to the poor. It’s much more rewarding and pleasant to ignore them. It’s nice to be rich without feeling any obligation to anyone else. The easiest way to do this is to believe the poor are wicked. Even though Jesus said the opposite.

There's no shame in vulgar wealth anymore. It's holy. It's a sign that Jesus loves you. Nobody hides it anymore. Why should they? Their tax rate is so low. Wall Street pros make more in a day than most people earn in a year. Which might explain why the bonuses given out in 2014 — $28.5 billion worth — were twice the combined earnings of all full-time minimum-wage workers in the US.

The GOP and Bowe Bergdahl

It’s shameful when a political party uses war to make its own motives seem nobler. And to disparage and question the loyalty and rubbish the reputations of others who disagree with them. There is something cowardly and genuinely evil in this. In recent years we’ve seen one political party that engages in this kind of underhanded behavior and another that doesn’t. One party that accuses others of cutting and running when they themselves cut and ran. And in doing so created all the negative consequences that came after. (Article about Reagan's Cut and Run in Foreign Policy Magazine)


We have one party that condemns the president for “negotiating with terrorists” when the great hero of their party did the same thing. Worse, in fact: he traded missiles to those terrorists to obtain the release of hostages, and funneled the money left over to extremist gangs of his own in Central America. It was all against the law and contrary to his own policy. (How Reagan traded arms to Iranian terrorists in exchange for hostages)

(When questioned about it Saint Ronald said he didn’t remember what he’d authorized. But, heck, just about every president has negotiated with shadowy and downright evil enemy groups. Our own Minute Men were called terrorists during the American Revolution. Labels get us nowhere. Negotiation sometimes works where war does not.)


Republicans accuse others of cynical trickery when they own the patent on it, delaying the release of American prisoners in order to win an election, not once but twice. Nixon won a close election by scuttling peace talks in Vietnam. Reagan won in 1980 by making sure Americans remained in captivity for several months till he was safely elected and sworn in.

(The New York Times article about how the Reagan Campaign kept Americans in captivity in Iran so he could win the election.)

(The Smithsonian Magazine article about how Nixon derailed peace in Vietnam so he could win election in 1968, and keep the war going for another six years.)

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised how low Republicans have gone to turn the traditional exchange of POWs at the end of a war into a shameful, even an impeachable, act. They were all in favor of it till President Obama got it done.

(SLATE article about how Republicans supported Bergdahl's release until the president got it done.)

They were demanding it until it happened. Then it became an impeachable offense. Did the GOP delete its thoughts and prayers for Bergdahl and his family? How's that done exactly?

(USAToday article detailing how GOP politicians deleted the Tweets they'd posted demanding the White House get Bergdahl released.)

Think you know all about Sgt. Bowie Bergdahl? You should read the Rolling Stone article about him, published in 2012. He was a serious, idealistic, brave, confused soldier who grew disillusioned with the mission and felt dishonored by the shabby disrespectful way his platoon mates treated the Afghan civilian population. In other words, he was a lot like a lot of other GIs in previous wars. Maybe after reading this you ought to pick up Joseph Heller’s WW2 novel Catch22 or Tim OBrien’s Going After Cacciato or The Things They Carried. War is hell. Or read The Red Badge of Courage. Those who haven’t been in war have little idea of it.

(Rolling Stone's excellent and thorough article about Bowe Bergdahl's military career.)

Oliver North, the pardoned felon who violated the law to trade arms to terrorists for hostages and used the extra cash to fund death squads in Central America, should know as much about ransoming hostages as anyone, but he’s been a political hit man a lot longer than he was a soldier.

(Salon article about Ollie North's slippery changeable position on dealing with terrorists.)

He’s saying the crime in the Bergdahl case was in NOT covering it up. I guess Nixon made an impression on someone.

The Cheney/Rove/Cruz/Palin/Limbaugh/Hannity anger machine would rather you not read the Bush White House memos that gave legal cover for this kind of transaction.

(Ironically, the jurist who wrote the Bush memo justifying torture also laid the legal ground for getting Bowe Bergdahl back.)

As if the exchange of prisoners at the end of hostilities ever needed legal justification. It’s simply always been done. Not doing it would put you in the same club with North Korea and whoever it was that imprisoned the Count of Monte Cristo.

John McCain demanded the White House do all it could to obtain Bowe Bergdahl’s release…. until the White House obtained his release. Then McCain condemned it as a shameful, treasonous and foolish act.

But wars always end in controversy and disagreement. John Kerry was crucified by other vets, envious of his heroism and resentful that he later opposed the war in Vietnam. They were fortunate to have wealthy Republicans bankrolling them.

McCain has been accused by less well-funded veterans’ and MIA groups for his scornful treatment of their concerns.

(Some of McCain's fellow Vietnam vets find his record in that war to be despicable and treasonous. But they weren't funded by wealthy backers of his political opponents so they haven't been on the nightly network newscasts.)

Which was surprising since McCain was a POW himself… Some who were in captivity with him have accused him of treason. Perhaps the charges are flimsy, perhaps not. The passage of time has forgiven a lot of former warriors for what they did, and sometimes what they did was done because of what was done to them.

(An alternative weekly in Arizona published this article about McCain's checkered military career. The man lives in a glass house.)

The point is… it’s objectionable to question other soldiers’ loyalty when your own loyalty and behavior under fire has been questioned.

It’s worse when politicians who have never put themselves in harm’s way in the service of their country are seating themselves in judgment of the motives or actions of actual soldiers and captives and their families. It’s shameful.

War makes even the bravest men and women disillusioned.

(The Guardian's article about the GOP's favorite Iraq War hero, Pat Tillman.)

(NPR's story about Tillman, when the Tillman biography came out.)

None of this is new, so why are we outraged? Because of the FoxNews outrage machine. But that machine is aimed at the wrong outrage. War is an outrage in itself. There are certainly good wars undertaken for noble reasons, but war is Hell, as General Sherman said. And there are a lot of shabby motives for it. As General Smedley Butler, America's most decorated veteran, once said.

(General Smedley Butler's famous "War is a Racket" speech.)

You may remember Smedley Butler's name. He was the war hero who certain Wall Street executives tried to hire to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt. He wanted nothing to do with it and told reporters and Congress all about the plot.

(The BBC did a documentary about the Wall Street Coup. For some reason the story got little play in this country. Perhaps because President Bush's grandfather was one of the plotters.)

Hanging Private Ryan

A bit of dialogue from Saving Private Ryan that seemed topical today...

"Private Jackson: Sir... I have an opinion on this matter.

Captain Miller: Well, by all means, share it with the squad.

Private Jackson: Well, from my way of thinking, sir, this entire mission is a serious misallocation of valuable military resources.

Captain Miller: Yeah. Go on.

Private Jackson: Well, it seems to me, sir, that God gave me a special gift, made me a fine instrument of warfare.

Captain Miller: Reiben, pay attention. Now, this is the way to gripe. Continue, Jackson.

Private Jackson: Well, what I mean by that, sir, is... if you was to put me and this here sniper rifle anywhere up to and including one mile of Adolf Hitler with a clear line of sight, sir... pack your bags, fellas, war's over. Amen.

Private Reiben: Oh, that's brilliant, bumpkin. Hey, so, Captain, what about you? I mean, you don't gripe at all?

Captain Miller: I don't gripe to *you*, Reiben. I'm a captain. There's a chain of command. Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer, so on, so on, and so on. I don't gripe to you. I don't gripe in front of you. You should know that as a Ranger.

Private Reiben: I'm sorry, sir, but uh... let's say you weren't a captain, or maybe I was a major. What would you say then?

Captain Miller: Well, in that case... I'd say, "This is an excellent mission, sir, with an extremely valuable objective, sir, worthy of my best efforts, sir. Moreover... I feel heartfelt sorrow for the mother of Private James Ryan and am willing to lay down my life and the lives of my men - especially you, Reiben - to ease her suffering.”

.......

A lot of bickering goes on in war. Soldiers grumble about the mission. Some of them have reason to. Some lose hope. Some die for no clear reason. Some are horribly wounded in mind or body. Some go missing. Some are taken prisoner by the enemy. When the war is declared over those prisoners are brought home and those taken by our side are returned according to international law. Making a political game out of it is not uncommon, but it is in bad taste.

The Real VA Scandal

The Republican half of Congress wants government to fail.

So they do everything they can to make it fail. To make the systems break down, to make Americans angry at their government, the government Republicans hate, the government Republicans now control through filibuster and obstruction.

In February Republicans did everything they could to block a major funding bill to help the VA deal with the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghan wars. And block it they did.

Call it a hostage situation. Republicans want to remove democratic government and replace it with a corporate structure run by their clients for making money.

Republicans are delighted with the VA scandal, because they set it in motion.

They started a war eleven years ago. Wars create veterans. Wars cause many thousands of amputations and other traumatic injuries which need to be treated. But Republicans in Congress didn’t want to pay for that part of the war, the aftermath.

They like veterans for parades but don’t like to pay for their healthcare.

When you defund veterans programs just when they’re needed most you are either cynical, unpatriotic or stupid. Take your pick.

Letter to a Radio Host on the topic of "The Lazy Poor"

Dear [ ],

I heard you on the air talking with Congressman [ ]. I live in his urban district, but I grew up in the suburbs. In fact I was a Republican until I was around thirty. My problem with what I heard you saying doesn't come from a doctrinaire lefty mindset. I got where I am after an embarrassing period when I learned how unsavory and selfish and extreme Republicanism and the comfortable suburban mindset were becoming. It isn't Eisenhower's party anymore.

I heard you referring to lazy people gaming the system to get federal handouts. And I'm pretty sure you weren't referring to ExxonMobil.

I cringe a little when I hear this old chestnut rolled out on local radio. Usually it's confined to the more right wing talk stations, where racism and hatred of the poor is expected.

I can't remember who said it in the Bible, but the quote often goes "The poor will always be with us." If it was Jesus saying this you can bet he wasn't implying that there was no point in bothering to help them out. Jesus (pardon me if you're not a Christian) was pretty clear that our treatment of the poor was the key to everything, that if we failed to help them we were not to expect salvation. But the most aggressively "Christian" among us these days sound the least like Christ in this respect.

Then I hear people like Paul Ryan, who grew up and prospered because he was an early beneficiary of the federal safety net, saying the safety net is becoming a hammock. I can think of no more colossal gall than this. If it is a hammock now it must have been a full service hotel when Paul Ryan was growing up with federal help.

There is a habit among media personalities like yourself to avoid being impolite, to avoid admitting that some of the people in elected office these days are heartless hypocrites. But they are. They are deeply unChristian while pretending to be superChristian. They run endless interference for the huge subsidies given to the enormously profitable corporate farmers and Wall Street banks and oil companies while working just as hard to gut programs intended to help the helpless. To avoid saying this you end up saying the opposite is true. Or you smudge the clear moral difference between the two parties.

Because radio people like yourself are so polite you go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid saying that one party is by and large responsible for this systematic heartlessness. Namely the Republicans. To the extent that Dems are cutting aid to the most vulnerable, they are only doing so to try to get within bargaining distance of their GOP counterparts. And the media's rule of false equivalency is what forces them to do this.

Lazy people on Welfare? Do you realize the hard work it takes to collect Welfare? The Scrooges among us (the same ones who want govt off people's backs) make darn sure that every recipient of government largesse (but only those with a net worth less than a million dollars) gets the stink eye, gets endless scrutiny and probing insulting questions, is made to jump through endless hoops and fill out endless forms, and wait in endless lines. Not only is it unkind but it is expensive and inefficient. Anything to avoid helping the less fortunate...so more is left to help the corporation that needs a freer ride.

Consider that there are some people WHO EMPLOYERS SIMPLY WILL NOT EMPLOY. Persons with limitations, with disabilities (physical and mental) that will not go away. Many of them veterans with the wounds earned in our service. Public works jobs programs might help some, but those are stubbornly opposed by Republicans. If some corporate CEO is going to give a million dollars to a congressman to cut unemployment or other benefits perhaps he should obligate himself to hire the people who are losing aid. It won't happen. These people will not be hired because some people are simply unsuited for work. The reasons are rarely laziness or criminality, but that is the reason radio people trot out to gratify their smug and comfortable listeners--whose own benefits are sacred. Of course, to some being poor is criminal enough.

So, please: stop resorting to the worst kind of class stereotypes. The hardest working people are the poor who have to cobble together several jobs to raise themselves up to the pathetic minimum. The laziest? Perhaps it's people Mitt Romney clubs with, who are rich from being rich. Who make money from the pot they were born with. In Romney's case we have learned how the companies he took over were made profitable at the expense of the people working in them. That is what arbitrage is. Buying a company with its own assets, most often by looting the pension fund of retired workers. Legally of course.

Stereotype? The predatory model of the extremely wealthy is more prevalent than the much remarked "lazy model" of the poor. Just as criminality and psychopathy and sociopathy and greed and corruption and ungenerosity is more typical of the very rich than the very poor. (Jesus was on to something.)

Even if it were rare for a billionaire to be rich by less than ethical means, one billionaire guilty of theft will end up with more than all the petty criminals combined, and he (as seen in the case of Jamie Dimon) will be the one who isn't required to do time. He will be the one who is allowed to deduct his government penalty from his taxes.

If you can get your head around this, perhaps a more enlightened and tolerant and generous point of view will creep into your conversations on air. Not insulting rich or poor, but showing a bit more tolerance toward the unlucky people who are down and a bit less latitude toward the lucky ones who already have all the advantages of money, access, power, influence and the paid up ownership of politicians on their side. Jesus was a stern critic of smugness. We should remind ourselves of that.

Pasquino

How Racist Is This Rabid Hatred Of Obama?

Is it all about race? Being so angry there's a black president that you'd just as soon shut the whole thing down?

Shucks, we're way yonder past racism in this here country, aren't we?

It's gotten worse in the past five years, but the recent mutation of race hatred goes back to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton dog whistle ad in 1988. (The Nation has some interesting recorded conversations in which Atwater lays it all out.)

It goes back to Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy to win the racist white southerners who abandoned the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Amendment. The voters who'd gone for George Wallace twice. (The New York Times archive spells out the Southern Strategy in its wonderful cynical detail.)

But if anyone wants to discuss the unspoken racial content in Republican hatred for this president they are accused of "playing the race card." Because Southerners are much much too polite to ever ever get racial about anything. Never have, never will.

Slate ran a very good piece about this Southern complexion, pure white Southern, in the new Republican Party.

The dog whistle of racist politics has just added another veneer on top of the old Southern gentility, which was a mask to begin with. That mask came off whenever a neatly dressed black student tried to go to a white's only school, but otherwise was as sweet as molasses, as polite and inoffensive as a pure white woman at a cotillion.

Want to know the code words? The secret handshakes and secret signals? The New Statesman listed them in a recent story.

The South and the Republican Party it dominates have learned to change the tone of their message without changing the message. The dog whistle alerts the party faithful the way it alerts hound dogs, by going directly to the lizard part of the brain that responds reflexively to fear and loathing.

A good explanation for the five year long fever of race hatred that's causing this, from Joan Walsh at Salon. (She followed up with a piece describing the angry Republican responses she got.)

To explain why this is happening now, when we finally managed to elect and re-elect our first black president, we almost have to go back to the Civil War, which certain states never recognized they lost, and certainly never recognized they were wrong about.

So it is about race. Still. Stubbornly and ignorantly.

And the Republican Party would just as soon take the whole country down as give in. In their slow, patient way they are trying to take our country back to the old Southern ways. A small aristocracy and white trash and blacks with no rights. Low wages and a small comfortable elite. Bad roads, bad water, bad sanitation, worn out soil, poor education, poor public health. That is the ideal model. What are the standards in the Reddest of the Red Republican districts? They look like the South in the 19th Century. Mostly white, mostly rural, mostly poor. Mostly taking far more in federal aid than they pay in federal taxes. We are being led backward by a backward set of backwater politicians and their extremist (but dependent) voters.

For 148 years since 1865, white southerners have done everything they could to keep African Americans down. Prevented them from voting. Stolen their property. Lynched them. Rounded them up routinely to use as free labor. Prevented them from owning homes, getting educated, getting loans, being tried fairly or being able to press charges against a white person, prevented them from using a drinking fountain designed for white people, prevented them from using the same bathroom facilities. The list is endless and the nasty unChristian southern habit of racial hatred is unending. The aim is to humiliate and degrade the other race so they are lower than you are, which is pretty low considering the ugliness of the mindset.

This ugly and difficult and expensive experiment in social engineering has been paid for by a small set of white folks who'd rather not pay enough for their white social inferiors to live decently so instead of fair pay they promise the lower class whites to make sure the black population is inferior to their own unpleasant inferiority. And they deputize the white lowlifes to enforce this.

So it's no coincidence that they believe (and persist in saying despite evidence that any normal sane intelligent person would understand) that the first black president is A. Kenyan. B. Muslim C. a communist D. a Nazi E. part of a nefarious foreign plot F. the antichrist. Whatever he is, he's got to be illegitimate because of what they've been told all these years. There can't be a black president because they all know that any dumb poor white no account is always and in every way better than a black man. Because everybody has told southern whites that every white person is superior to every black person regardless of achievements or abilities or college degrees. What gave Obama that ticket to Harvard which was rightfully meant for some proper white person?

It's hard to channel this race-hating stupidity without becoming physically sick. And it makes a person mad to think racists and racist-abetters of this sort of stupidity are in control of a whole political party. That they have enough power to shut down our democracy. But I guess that makes it easier to understand how the bigots feel. Something is wrong. Sadly, the ones who are causing the problem are too dumb and hateful to understand what it is.

The Confederate States of America still exist and are now Republican

From Ron Paul's favorite website comes this frank declaration that Lincoln was a murdering Yankee meddler who violated the sacred rights of Southern planters to keep human beings as slaves. An idea that is still prevalent in the states which dominate the Republican Party.

Here's a map of this "New Confederacy". (Thanks to the well-known and rational conservative writer Andrew Sullivan for the map.) These members of Congress are willing to derail the US economy in order to humiliate the black guy who got into the White House by mistake.

The rationale is usually that the federal government is spending too much of their god-given money on people and places that don't deserve it (other liberal states with lots of poor people or foreign countries), but it's interesting to look at decades of tax data and see that the states with the stingiest attitudes towards taxation tend to get more in tax dollars than they pay in. Here's the data, state by state, published by the Tax Foundation.

These Red States get more than they pay because they tend to be poorer and more dysfunctional, meaning they need federal help. Notice also that these legislators (mostly Republican) are also the ones who loudly refuse to vote aid for areas hit by devastating hurricanes, but they immediately demand aid when their districts are hit by tornadoes and floods. (They also tend to claim that these more devastating storms and floods and droughts are not caused by high levels of fossil fuel use as scientists say is happening but are caused by homosexuality in the US.)

There have been a lot of website postings of how Red and Blue States compare in terms of various problems like divorce rates, teen pregnancy, gun deaths, low education rates, low life expectancy, infant death rates, etc.

The red states tend to have more of these problems, which might be directly correlated to their stubborn refusal to deal with those problems. But if they have these problems they should stop preaching reform to the rest of us, or they should at least stop taking our money. Of course their most vulnerable people would be the ones to suffer. And those are the citizens they work hard to prevent from voting. If those people were allowed to vote and their votes were counted honestly, there would be fewer Red States.

The Supreme Court ruling on Citizen's United gave the Republicans the 2010 elections, which allowed them to redraw the congressional districts across the country into safe seats for dangerously insane right wing radicals whose sole aim in life is to make sure the black guy isn't allowed to fulfill his campaign promises. It's worth noting that the Republicans held the House of Representatives in 2012 despite Republican congressmen receiving more than a million fewer votes nationally. The Dems got more votes and fewer seats in the House.

This is a what happens when the Republican strategy of suppressing voting takes hold. They don't like democracy. They don't want to do what the people would like them to do. They have other clients who pay their bills for them. They are the representatives of big money, the representatives of corporations foreign and domestic. Suppressing the vote is a timeworn Republican strategy. Because they dislike democracy. Just listen to Paul Weyrich speaking in the 1980s. He helped get Ronald Reagan elected. He also helped found the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank which is helping take the democracy out of our political system, the think tank which helped the Supreme Court reach the conclusion that corporations are people and money is speech.

The Heritage Foundation is also where the system of private insurance exchanges was invented. The system now called ObamaCare. The system they are willing to derail the US economy to prevent from being put in place, because they hate anything enacted by the current black president.

Or, in the immortal words of Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx):

"I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is
Or who commenced it
I'm against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it
Or condensed it
I'm against it!"

(Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, from the Marx Brothers film Horsefeathers)

Why Do We Criminalize Poverty?

There's been an ugly development in Portland, Oregon. But we live in an age of ugly developments. Our worst instincts are being worked on every day. There's a major network devoted to exploiting our fears and hatreds. So we shouldn't be surprised to read that a masked avenger in Portland, calling himself "Artemis of the Wildland", is urging his neighbors to target the poor and the sick. One of the targets responded in the pages of The Guardian.

People who get aid have to take delivery through a crowd of hateful stares. Why do we do this? We are instructed to, certainly. Goaded into it by right wing media. (Watch "The Five" or "Fox N Friends" on FoxNews and you realize the nastiest bullies and mean girls of your childhood now earn six figure incomes on TV.)

But there must be something in us already. A lot of Americans are dominated by their "lizard brain", the autopilot deep in their heads that reacts to fear and loathing, the part of the primitive brain that caused ancient peoples to stone outsiders and abandon infants if they had red hair.

In difficult times that reptilian way of thinking re-emerges and there are powerful individuals that like to encourage that mindset because primitive, fearful, hateful people are easier to control. They are less likely to help their peers, less likely to organize into unions and more likely to follow corporate authority. They are the ones who wore brown shirts in 1930s Germany. We could call this lizard brain "the fascist brain".

Why don't we think differently in hard times? Some do. Many hardworking and luckless people are kind, generous, helpful, and nonjudgmental. Poor people, in fact, tend to be more selfless and generous than rich people. Which also means they tend not to judge the rich negatively for the enormous wealth shift these past few decades from working people to those who own for a living. Maybe that needs to be taught too...

Instead of stigmatizing poverty, criminalizing and punishing it, we ought to stigmatize unearned wealth. Why do we think badly of people who need food stamps even though they are working hard? Why not stigmatize the Walton family members who own 40% of the nation's wealth? They earn their billions off the labor of minimum wage employees, then they instruct them to apply for government assistance to feed their families. That kind of behavior takes more gall, more ugly nerve than applying for foodstamps after a long day's work in a warehouse.

Maybe we should stigmatize the corporate CEOs who accept large government subsidies and pay no taxes, who then give themselves billion dollar bonuses... Maybe we should stigmatize the Republican congressmen who vote against hurricane relief aid for the east coast but demand flood aid for their districts. Maybe we should stigmatize the Republicans who have voted 42 times to defund the Affordable Care Act (calling it socialist when it isn't), while accepting totally free socialist healthcare from the US government themselves.

Before we stigmatize the working poor or the sick and elderly who are unable to work, maybe we should cast a critical eye at the extremely rich who are subsidized by millions of average working taxpayers. These creeps spend their extra millions (freed up by our public subsidies) telling the rest of us who to hate and who to attack. They deserve that hate more. Want to know where our broad prosperity has gone since 1980? Look at their offshore bank balances. There are people we should be angry at and it isn't the poor.

Republicans' Rationalizations for Rape

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Todd Akin, Republican Senate candidate from Missouri.

Right now Akin sits on the Republican majority's side of the House Science Committee but he has no clue about the science of human reproduction. Nor does his Republican House colleague Steve King.

Republican Congressman Steve King: "I’ve Never Heard Of A Girl Getting Pregnant From Statutory Rape Or Incest"

Todd Akin and Steve King coauthored a bill in Congress last year that would limit a rape victim's access to abortion to women who were victims of "forcible rape". In other words a woman or girl would be expected to carry her rapist's child to term if he didn't break her arm or her nose, or maybe if he said thank-you afterwards.

The other co-sponsor of HR3, this draconian restriction of reproductive rights that redefined rape? Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's running mate.

Today's Republican Party (which is writing these issues into their national platform as we speak) values a fertilized egg (in many cases an egg that has not even been fertilized yet but may if contraceptives are not available) values its rights above those of women and girls who have been assaulted. A single cell, a sperm cell, a infinitely small bundle of cells, created by a criminal assault, trump the rights of a living person. Women and girls have a lower status than their male assailants in the estimation of this modern Republican Party. Rapists' rights to parenthood are sacred to the GOP.

It isn't only Republican men who hold these medieval beliefs. This prominent Republican said rape can be a blessing from God.

"If God has chosen to bless this person [the rape victim] with a life, you don’t kill it." Sharon Barnes, Vice President, Membership Committee, National Association of Republican Women and a leader in Missouri Republican politics. Rape a blessing?

When asked what she would say to a young girl who has been raped by her father, Nevada Republican and Harry Reid's opponent in 2010, Sharron Angle said carrying her rapist's child to term would be like making lemonade when life gives you lemons.

This narrowing and redefining of rape is nothing new to Republican politics. Republicans have a history of rationalizing and excusing and defending rape and rapists, basing these rationalizations on old myths and good-old-boy fairy tales. They've carefully instructed their candidates and spokesmen to use certain terms that put the burden back on the rape victim and narrow her rights and her options, that make the rape victim responsible for the crime.

"When pro-lifers speak of rape pregnancies, we should commonly use the phrase "forcible rape" or "assault rape," for that specifies what we're talking about. Rape can also be statutory. Depending upon your state law, statutory rape can be consensual, but we're not addressing that here .... Assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare." John C. Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee, 1999

Untrue. He should have known better then. We certainly know better now.

"A series of state lawmakers have made similar arguments since at least 1988, when Pennsylvania state Rep. Stephen Freind (R) argued in a debate on abortion that the odds of pregnancy from rape are "one in millions and millions and millions," because "when that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion which has a tendency to kill the sperm."

The Republican Party is spending its billions of dollars advertising myths and false beliefs. Their objective? To revise our medical standards back to the middle ages.

Mitt Romney Praises Israel's Socialized Healthcare System

"When our health care costs are completely out of control. Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? 8 percent. You spend 8 percent of GDP on health care. And you’re a pretty healthy nation.” ~Mitt Romney praising Israel's socialized healthcare system, reported in FORBES

Between $20 and $30 TRILLION are hidden offshore by the Super Rich

"The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy," according to James Henry, former chief economist for the global business consulting firm McKinsey.

This is the financial club Mitt Romney belongs to.

This story broke on the front pages of the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer over the weekend. The articles discuss the burden wealthy tax evaders place on everyone else, not just by evading taxes but by removing their massive cash hoards from the economies where they earned them (and evaded taxes). The amount of hoarded cash is greater than the GDPs of Japan and the US combined. Need a reason for the global recession? This is it.

The summary in the Guardian

The details, in the Guardian

The world of private banks where our economy is being held hostage

Analysis of the problem

The white paper with all the numbers

Mitt Romney is the poster child for this elite group of super rich. They may have homes in this country, but their wealth is safely offshore where what they earn can't be touched to build roads or schools or hospitals. Or, for that matter, to pay the lifetime of healthcare for wounded veterans. They are above obligation to any country, especially the United States. We all try to minimize our tax bill, but for people like Romney it is a major effort of evasion that employs many banks and very complex schemes.

The article about Romney's tax havens in this month's Vanity Fair

The question then is: should Mitt Romney be running instead for the presidency of Bermuda?

Or the Cayman Islands? Or the Bahamas? Or Switzerland? It doesn't really matter what it says on his birth certificate. What matters is what it says on his tax returns. Where is he invested? Whose economy does he care about? Does he fulfill the basic duty of citizenship, the duty we all fulfill? Does he pay the taxes that pave the roads and educate our kids? Or does he evade them?

This matters.

The collusion of the big banks to rig global interest rates matters.

The involvement of major banks in money laundering for international terrorists and drug cartels matters too.

What's disturbing is they are laundering billions for ordinary American billionaires as well, helping them hide what they earn from the tax obligations that are a vital part of citizenship.

Only In America

Political observers are predicting an armed insurrection against Obama's Affordable Care Act. Only in America would you find overweight, diabetic, out of work militants willing to die barricaded in their homes rather than have private healthcare provided to them by law.

Is it the paying for it part they dislike? If they can't pay, other Americans will help them pay.

Is it the concept of the helplessly ill being assisted by the society that irks them to the point of violence? Are Americans that uncaring?

Are they simply nuts?

Or are they dangerously, violently misinformed? Like the Tea Partiers who showed up at protests in 2010 with signs demanding the government get its hands off their Medicare... which is and always has been a government program, run, I might add, at a much greater rate of efficiency than private medical programs. (It was the private companies trying to poach patients from Medicare who spread this disinformation.)

According to a Kaiser Foundation study, Medicare dedicates more than 97% of its dollars to actual medical care, compared to private healthcare companies which bridle at the idea of spending more than half of their revenues on the care of patients.

One of the most alarmingly funny memes that came in the aftermath of the SCOTUS decision to uphold ObamaCare were the many who spoke angrily about moving to Canada to escape the ObamaCare tyranny.

Canada has full universal healthcare run by the government, and it's very popular. In a recent poll the Canadian of the 20th Century voted by all Canadians (and it was no contest apparently) was the politician who was the father of their socialized system. Oh, Canada.

Rush Limbaugh threatened to move to Costa Rica, which also has universal healthcare.

And every Republican who voted and filibustered and threatened to shut down the government to prevent government from providing or requiring healthcare for everyone, every one of them, has government paid healthcare themselves.

They are ginning up a rebellion against a benefit they enjoy. What's good enough for them is apparently too good for everyone else.

Rick Ungar, who writes about healthcare for Forbes, presents a particularly good analysis of the Republican hypocrisy.

Jon Stewart arm wrestles Grover Norquist (and wins)

Here's the Jon Stewart interview. (Dontcha wish actual newspeople interviewed this well?)

I have a pledge for you. And I bet it'd work.

"Any congressional district that elects anyone who signs Grover Norquist's pledge shall have its federal funding adjusted to equal its federal taxes paid."

This would affect mostly Republican districts who get more than they pay in. And it would balance the budget almost immediately.

Take it a step further: all congressional districts that elect a Democrat shall not have to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal funding. This would affect most Democratic districts who tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal dollars.

Ya see, here's the Big Hypocrisy: the districts that get the most from the federal government are Republican districts. And Republican districts nationwide, on average, get more from the federal government than they pay in.

So we'd be doing them a favor. We'd be helping them be honest, helping them be true to their ideals. No more federal gravy train for Republican districts who signed Grover's pledge (which he thought up when he was twelve–––I'm not making this up, it's on tape.) And Democrat taxpayers would stop being ripped off by the lazy, tax evading Republican parts of the country.

Anyway, Jon Stewart does a pretty fair job of outdebating Norquist. He points out that Reagan raised taxes a dozen or so times. He points out Clinton raised taxes and created a budget surplus and a boom, and Bush cut them and destroyed the global economy and bankrupted the country. Norquist doesn't blink or argue because it's all true.

Stewart does miss one big fat opportunity. When Norquist says we should get rid of public pensions and replace them with 401K's because then everyone knows exactly what they are going to get, Jon should have pointed out that 401K's are the accounts that Wall Street cleaned out over the past four years. The money went away. (Well, it didn't go away as much as it went into Goldman Sachs executive bonuses.)

Retirees under the privatized system have to pray really hard that the economy is up when they retire.

The thing Norquist hates about pensions is they are promises that have to be kept even if the market is being wiped out by pirates. Norquist doesn't like promises made to working people. Only promises made to pirates and CEOs, who are sometimes the same thing.