Santorum to Mainline Protestants: You Are Satan’s Spawn

By Ed Kilgore

Kyle Mantyla of People for the American Way’s indispensable Right Wing Watch has come up with an audiotape of a Rick Santorum address to the students of the conservative Catholic Ave Maria University in Florida, delivered in 2008. It’s an altogether remarkable speech depicting Rick as a leader in a “spiritual war” against Satan for control of America. Much of its involves the usual right-wing stuff about the conquest of academia (outside bastions like Ave Maria) by the forces of moral relativism, but then there is this Santorum assessment of mainline Protestantism:

[O]nce the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.

How Citibank Dumped Lousy Mortgages on the Government

by Cora Currier
ProPublica, Feb. 16, 2012, 5:34 p.m.

Citigroup agreed yesterday to pay $158 million to settle a lawsuit over bad loans that the bank passed on to the Federal Housing Administration to insure. The whistle-blower who originally brought the case, Sherry Hunt, an employee of Citi's mortgage department, said the company actively undermined the process that was supposed to check for fraud in order to push through reckless loans and get higher profits.

The suit itself makes for good reading. We've pulled out the juiciest bits, and explain just what Citi appears to have been doing.

The 'second Great Depression' saviour myth

We're told that Fed officials and the Obama administration saved us from another 1930s-style slump. Nonsense

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 February 2012 16.15 EST

As President Obama's re-election campaign heats up, there are several new accounts of his track record finding their way into print. One item for which he is – undeservedly – given credit is saving the country from a second Great Depression. The political elites believe in the salvation from the second Great Depression myth with the same fervency as little kids believe in Santa Claus. And it has just as much grounding in reality.

While the Obama administration, working alongside Ben Bernanke at the Fed, deserves credit for preventing a financial meltdown, a second great depression was never in the cards. The first Great Depression was brought about not only from misguided policies at the onset of the financial crisis, but also from an inadequate policy response.

Paul Krugman: Moochers Against Welfare

First, Atlas shrugged. Then he scratched his head in puzzlement. 

Modern Republicans are very, very conservative; you might even (if you were Mitt Romney) say, severely conservative. Political scientists who use Congressional votes to measure such things find that the current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as their estimates go. 

And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs. Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.

The inside story on climate scientists under siege

Michael Mann reveals his account of attacks by entrenched interests seeking to undermine his 'hockey stick' graph

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 February 2012 07.28 EST

It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann's account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harrass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid.

But now comes the unauthorised release of documents showing how a libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.

Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control -- And Why We'll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on February 15, 2012, Printed on February 18, 2012


What's happening in Congress this week, as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) bars any woen from testifying at his so-called "religious freedom" hearings, is so familiar and expected that it hardly counts as news. The only thing surprising about it is the year: didn't we all honestly think that by 2012, contraception would be a non-issue, and Congress wouldn't make the mistake of leaving women out of conversations like this one?

Yes, we did. And the fact that we were wrong about that points to a deeper trend at work, one that needs a bit of long-term historical context put around it so we can really understand what's going on. Let me explain.

When people look back on the 20th century from the vantage point of 500 years on, they will remember the 1900s for three big things.

The Nation’s Ari Melber: Facebook owns you

By Eric W. Dolan
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 21:21 EST

Ari Melber of The Nation explained Wednesday on MSNBC why the public offering of Facebook was estimated to be one of the biggest of all time.

“Why exactly is Facebook worth so much money? It’s current revenues of a few billion dollars don’t support this evaluation,” he said. “But Facebook owns something that can make a lot more money down the road. It owns us.”

The Fight for a Fair and Free Internet

Rebecca J. Rosen

Feb 14 2012, 8:34 AM ET
 
When Rebecca MacKinnon was working for CNN in Beijing from 1992 to 2001, she and her fellow expats expected that the coming age of global networking would strongly undermine the Communist Party's grip on the reigns. But a decade later, she writes, "I grew to believe that we were naive." The Internet is not the stepping stone to democracy she had hoped.

In part, that's because citizens aren't the only ones building the net. Corporations and governments are shaping its space and its power, and oftentimes in ways that work against democratic goals. In her new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, MacKinnon issues a call to arms for the people of the Internet. "The Internet can be a powerful tool in the hands of citizens seeking to hold governments and corporations to account -- but only if we keep the Internet itself open and free."

Occupy's amazing Volcker Rule letter

By Felix Salmon

February 14, 2012

banking

One of the saddest aspects of the financialization of the US economy is the way in which America’s best and brightest found themselves working on Wall Street, rather than in jobs which improved the state of the world. Proof of this comes from the absolutely astonishing 325-page comment letter on the Volcker Rule which has been put together by Occupy the SEC; it’s pretty clear, from reading the letter, that the people who wrote it are whip-smart and extremely talented.

Occupy the SEC is the wonky finreg arm of Occupy Wall Street, and its main authors are worth naming and celebrating: Akshat Tewary, Alexis Goldstein, Corley Miller, George Bailey, Caitlin Kline, Elizabeth Friedrich, and Eric Taylor. If you can’t read the whole thing, at least read the introductory comments, on pages 3-6, both for their substance and for the panache of their delivery.

APNewsBreak: Suspect in Kan. Capitol case released

By JOHN HANNA - Associated Press

Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012 | 02:43 PM 

TOPEKA, Kan. A man whose pickup was found to contain homemade bombs near the Kansas Statehouse has been released from custody but still could face criminal charges, a Capitol Police spokesman said Thursday.

The Kansas Highway Patrol, which operates the Capitol Police, planned to discuss possible criminal charges by early next week with Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor, police spokesman Patrick Saleh said.

Taylor told The Associated Press that his office is meeting Friday morning with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to discuss the case.

Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science

Libertarian thinktank keeps prominent sceptics on its payroll and relies on millions in funding from carbon industry, papers suggest

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 February 2012 22.30 EST

The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.

DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an "insider" at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.

The scheme includes spending $100,000 for spreading the message in K-12 schools that "the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain - two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science", the documents said.

SEE ALSO:  Leaked Heartland Institute documents pull back curtain on climate scepticism

Maddow: PolitiFact, you are a disaster

By Eric W. Dolan
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 23:40 EST

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Tuesday once again blasted the fact-checking website PolitiFact.

n January, she accused PolitiFact of undermining the word “fact.”

This week, the fact-checking website drew Maddow’s ire after rating Sen. Marc Rubio’s comment that the majority of Americans are conservative as “mostly true.”

Reining in the Bond Markets - Public Policy in a Context of Ideological Capture

by Vikingkingq

Introduction:
In my last piece, I discussed the irrational nature of how the bond markets have reacted to the financial crisis and the recession that followed, simultaneously demanding austerity and then reacting to the recessionary crises their demands have created by demanding government intervention to provide growth (as long as it doesn't result in inflation, higher taxes, or more borrowing).

As the Greek Parliament passes the kind of austerity that makes Andrew Mellon look like a bleeding-heart and Athens burns, we see European politicians demand further austerity at the same time that everyone realizes it's not going to work. So how do we construct a new conventional wisdom amidst the tyranny of the old, and then how do we transform understanding into action?


 

INTERNAL DOCUMENTS: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax

By Brad Johnson on Feb 14, 2012 at 3:10 pm

The first in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. Heartland has issued a press release claiming that some of these documents were sent to an outsider under false pretenses and that one document in the set is a fake.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial”:

How State Taxes Put a Bigger Pinch on the Poor

By Bruce Watson Posted 6:00AM 02/13/12

Over the last few months, as Republican presidential candidates have unveiled a stream of plans to cut taxes, they've consistently focused their rhetoric on a very narrow spectrum of our tax burden -- income tax as a percentage of income -- to suggest that the poorest Americans get a free ride at the expense of the wealthiest.

But, as a recent study points out, income tax is only part of the equation, and when all the other taxes we pay are factored in -- especially our punishing state taxes -- it's clear that the poor often pay a far greater percentage of their income in taxes than the rich.

The Right's Inside-Out Constitution

February 13, 2012

 

Exclusive: It has become an article of faith on the American Right that the Founders opposed a strong central government and that federal activism — from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to President Obama’s health-care reform — violates the nation’s first principles. But that’s not the real history, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

In recent decades, the American Right has sought to rewrite the founding narrative of the United States through selective “scholarship,” by snatching a few quotes out of context and then relying on a vast propaganda machine (and much ignorance about U.S. history) to turn the Constitution inside out.

According to the Right’s revisionist narrative, the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia for the purpose of tightly restricting the powers of the national government and broadly empowering the states – when the actual intent of the Constitutional Convention was nearly the opposite.

The Long History of the War Against Contraception

Tuesday, 02/14/2012 - 10:39 am by Ellen Chesler 

For those surprised about the recent fervor over Obama’s contraception coverage decision, a look at its deep roots.

Republicans for Planned Parenthood last week issued a call for nominations for the 2012 Barry Goldwater award, an annual prize awarded to a Republican legislator who has acted to protect women’s health and rights. Past recipients include Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, who this week endorsed President Obama’s solution for insuring full coverage of the cost of contraception without exceptions, even for employees of religiously affiliated institutions. And that may tell us all we need to know about why President Obama has the upper hand in a debate over insurance that congressional Tea Partiers have now widened to include anyone who seeks an exemption.

It’s a long time ago, but it is worth remembering that conservative avatar Goldwater was in his day an outspoken supporter of women’s reproductive freedom — a freethinker who voted his conscience over the protests of Catholic bishops and all others who tried to claim these matters as questions of conscientious liberty and not sensible social policy. With Goldwater on his side, Obama sees a clear opening for skeptics wary of the extremism that has captured Republican hopefuls in thrall to the fundamentalist base that controls the GOP presidential primary today. Holding firm on family planning — even if it means taking on the Catholic hierarchy and other naysayers by offering a technical fix that would have insurers cover costs instead of the churches themselves — is a calculated political strategy by the Obama campaign, not a blunder as it has been characterized by many high powered pundits, including progressives like Mark Shields of PBS and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.

President Obama's Budget is Disappointing

Good but limited measures on tax reform are sacrificed, once again, to Obama's eagerness to compromise on budget cuts

by Mark Weisbrot

 

President Obama's proposed budget has a few interesting proposals for reforms over the next decade. Among the best are the proposals to rescind the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes of more than $250,000, and to tax dividends for stockholders among this group as ordinary income. These and a few other proposals would sum up to a small but significant step in the opposite direction to where this country has been going for the past three decades: that is, a vast upward redistribution of income to the rich and the super-rich.

The Right-Wing Id Unzipped

Tuesday 14 February 2012

by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis 

 

Retired Republican House and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren spoke with Truthout in Washington, DC, this fall. Lofgren's first commentary for Truthout, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult," went viral, drawing over a million unique views.

Although Mitt Romney used the word "conservative" 19 times in a short speech at the February 10, 2012, Conservative Political Action Conference, the audience he used this word to appeal to was not conservative by any traditional definition. It was right wing. Despite the common American practice of using "conservative" and "right wing" interchangeably, right wing is not a synonym for conservative and not even a true variant of conservatism - although the right wing will opportunistically borrow conservative themes as required.

Right-wingers have occasioned much recent comment. Their behavior in the Republican debates has caused even jaded observers to react like an Oxford don stumbling upon a tribe of headhunting cannibals. In those debates where the moderators did not enforce decorum, these right-wingers, the Republican base, behaved with a single lack of dignity. For a group that displays its supposed pro-life credentials like a neon sign, the biggest applause lines resulted from their hearing about executions or the prospect of someone dying without health insurance.

 

Pentagon misreports or ignores long-term weapons costs

Auditors find repeated errors in projected expenditures for repairs, maintenance and operations

By R. Jeffrey Smith, 9 hours, 22 minutes ago; Updated: 9 hours, 23 minutes ago

The Obama administration’s 2013 defense spending plan, detailed as part of its overall new federal budget, includes $178.8 billion to buy new weapons, ranging from jet fighters and artillery to naval cruisers and satellite systems. But the real costs of these programs to the federal budget are unlikely to be disclosed in its budget documents or dozens of detailed weapons program reports due on Capitol Hill in March, according to a recent federal audit report.

The true costs of some of the biggest pieces of the U.S. arsenal are mostly hidden, the audit concluded, because the Defense Department’s public documents typically list only how much has been spent or will be spent to acquire its fighters, ships, and vehicles.

The Ideologue Who's Holding Homeowers - And the Economy - Hostage

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

February 13, 2012 - 7:37pm ET 

Close your eyes and imagine:

The year is 2027. President Peace N. Love lost his re-election bid three years ago, after the disaster created by his military and intelligence cuts turned millions of Americans into refugees. His successor has appointed General Cathy Common-Sense (USMC, Ret.) to be Secretary of Defense. But Congress is controlled by President Love's party and has refused to confirm her. President Love's appointee, Sunshine Harmony Rainbow III, is still in charge of the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Rainbow has halted all attempts to defend the homeland. "We're saving billions of dollars for the taxpayer instead," Secretary Rainbow tells Congress, adding: "Maybe can spend the money on learning how to love one another." But soon it's discovered that Secretary Rainbow has misled Congress and the "plan" is really costing billions.

Paul Krugman: Severe Conservative Syndrome

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured. 

The New Anti-Science Assault on US Schools

In a disturbing trend, anti-evolution campaigners are combining with climate change deniers to undermine public education

by Katherine Stewart

 

You might have thought it was all over after the 2005 decision by the US district court of Middle Pennsylvania (pdf), which ruled in the case of the Dover Area schools that teaching intelligent design is unconstitutional. You might have guessed that they wouldn't come back after the 1987 US supreme court decision in Edwards v Aguillard, which deemed the teaching of creationism in Louisiana schools unconstitutional. Or maybe you figured that the opponents of evolution had their Waterloo in the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial in Tennessee.

They are back. There are six bills aimed at undermining the teaching of evolution before state legislatures this year: two each in New Hampshire and Missouri, one each in Indiana and Oklahoma. And it's only February.

Public Utility, Private Profit

Privatization of water is as benign as Lucifer

Thursday 9 February 2012

by: Richard Raznikov, The Rag Blog | News Analysis 

 

San Rafael, California -- There hasn’t been much rain this season where I live. Personally, I don’t mind much. I like sunny days, summer weather, dry fairways at San Geronimo. The deer are not very happy, having to spend more time on my street than they’d prefer but they’ve had to come down from the hills a bit looking for food.

Where I live the reservoirs are still mostly full from the last winter’s rain and we will not experience any delays or service interruptions. I pay for water every month, the local water district sends a bill, costs maybe 30 bucks if everybody showers a lot and there are loads of clothes.

A 75th Anniversary for the American Dream, a 25-Year Anniversary for Me

by Michael Moore

 

On this day 25 years ago, in 1987, I became a filmmaker. It was around ten in the morning and the first-ever roll of Kodak 16mm film for my first-ever movie was loaded into my friend's camera to shoot the very first scene of 'Roger & Me.' I had no idea on that morning in Flint, Michigan what my life would be like after that, or what would happen to Flint, or to General Motors. It all felt fairly ominous, though -- after all, GM, which was posting record profits at the time, was closing its first Flint factory (the first of what would become many) and unemployment in Flint had officially been listed as high as 29%. Surely things couldn't get much worse.

That morning, 25 years ago today, a group of autoworkers had come together on the lawn of the soon-to-be-closed Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac assembly plant to raise their voices against the closing -- and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, which had begun at that very factory. That strike, in 1936-37, was actually an occupation. Hundreds of workers took over the factories in Flint and refused to leave for 44 days until GM capitulated and recognized their union. The strike inspired thousands of other workers across the country to stage their own occupations and, before you knew it, in the years to follow, factory workers were paid a living wage, with benefits, vacations, and a safe working place.

Mean-Spirited, Bad Economics

By Simon Johnson

The principle behind unemployment insurance is simple. Since the 1930s, employers – and in some states employees — have paid insurance premiums (in the form of payroll taxes, levied on wages) to the government. If people are laid off through no fault of their own, they can claim this insurance – just like you file a claim on your homeowner’s or renter’s policy if your home burns down.

Fire insurance is mostly sold by the private sector; unemployment insurance is “sold” by the government – because the private sector never performed this role adequately. The original legislative intent, reaffirmed over the years, is clear: Help people to help themselves in the face of shocks beyond their control.