Good old white privilege – it rears its head in so many ways. This time, at the so-called Tea Party Convention (hardly a convention, more like a Klan rally or a gathering of thugs with political ideologies – and I say that clearly; the Tea Party can pretend they’re a real party or a real option as much as they like, but they are nothing more than a group of political thugs masquerading as a group with an agenda – their “agenda” is really “burn it all down.” They are not a political party, they have no platform, they have no plans for America.) Tom Tancredo, mister “proud to be a racist,” makes the claim that the only reason Barack Obama was elected was because, “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country,” as he put it.

Funny, that’s a lot like what progressives said when George W. Bush got elected the second time, but the difference here is that it’s not just dismissable rage, this is actually white supremacist, racist rage bubbling furiously. The Teabaggers honestly believe that Black people, Latinos, and everyone else who doesn’t believe and think the way that they do is somehow idiotic and should be stripped of the right to vote so they’re able to take the reins of power.

…and they call Democrats socialist? They try to tie President Obama with Nazis? Oh to look into the abyss and see yourself staring back in the darkness, eh Teabaggers?

Seriously – these folks are claiming that America needs poll taxes and poll tests like the kind that were used in the pre-Civil Rights years to keep Black Americans – who had the right to vote – away from the polls, intimidate them so they wouldn’t vote, or somehow find a way to disqualify their vote so Republicans managed to hold their majorities in the South.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

How fitting, therefore, that Sarah Palin keynote the movement’s first organized confab. Neglected in all the fevered conversation around the movement’s meteoric rise, and Palin’s selection, is any useful reflection on what the cause and this figurehead stand for: white racial resentment. Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through.

Deciphering the racial codes on the movement’s ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in semiotics. One popular sign shows the president’s face and a caption: “Undocumented worker.” Another combines Obama’s image with this caption: “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”

Oh yes – if you had any doubt that these folks are racist, and that these folks are the cancer that desperately needs to be excised from the Republican Party, read on:

Denouncing government assistance and free school lunches at a town hall meeting in late January, South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, a Tea Party supporter, said: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

At a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis called cap-and-trade legislation “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.” In Tea Party-speak, “heartland” often means “white” — what Palin calls “the real America” — while “coastal state” means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as “gateway states” for Latino immigrants.

“Immigrants are 21 percent of the uninsured, but only 7 percent of the population. This means white folks on Medicare or headed there will see benefits curtailed, while new arrivals from the Third World, whence almost all immigrants come, get taxpayer-subsidized health insurance,” gripes Patrick Buchanan on his blog. “Any wonder why all those Tea Party and town-hall protests seem to be made up of angry white folks?”

How about a dose of truth to round us out, eh?

The bar-stool version of the Tea Party canard goes like this: Why should we, self-sufficient small-town whites, pay taxes to support all those welfare queens, food stamp cheats and Medicaid layabouts in the big cities and coastal states? The media’s version, parroted by Palin and other Fox talking heads, commiserates with Americans in the heartland, christened “the average taxpayer,” for unjustly having to subsidize ethnic enclaves that mooch off the national treasury.

Well, not so fast. A disproportionately high share of our federal government’s tax income comes from racially diverse, immigrant-rich, urbanized states, including California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts; not from extremely homogeneous, conservative, anti-tax strongholds like Idaho, Montana, Utah, the Dakotas and Wyoming.

All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and ’60s.

There we go. As if anyone with half a mind really needed any additional proof that the Teabaggers are not just maliciously misinformed, they’re actually taking great lengths to perpetuate and maintain their stupidity in the face of overwhelming evidence. They are, quite simply, proof of how far hatred can take you.

[ White Racial Resentment Bubbles Under the Surface of the Tea Party Movement ]
Source: AlterNet

Here we are, right back where we started from oh so many years ago – Republicans stand in the pulpit complaining that every dollar that Democrats want to spend is somehow wasted, that somehow Republicans would never spend money when in office (even though recent history – and deficits – prove otherwise) and that somehow putting Americans back to work, providing access to health care for everyone, and cleaning up our air and water are all wasted when compared to the incessant need for bombs and guns – which to be clear, is all the Republicans really spent money on when in office, aside from their own interests, friends, and failed programs.

Paul Krugman, in an op-ed for the New York Times, quite accurately takes on the problem of deficit fear-mongering, which has always been one of the Republican party’s staple tactics. Lately the right-wing has been drumming up the media with “doom and gloom” scenarios of massive deficits and budget gaps, which they conveniently blame on the President’s domestic priorities and not at all on the massive escalation of overseas conflicts caused by the previous Republican administration and its majority in Congress.

Even so, Krugman points out that this fear-mongering is ultimately pointless and is designed to make more of a political point than it does an economic point:

These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.

Yet they aren’t facts. Many economists take a much calmer view of budget deficits than anything you’ll see on TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at historically low interest rates. The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren’t — and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe.

…

Let’s talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.

The point is that running big deficits in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s is actually the right thing to do. If anything, deficits should be bigger than they are because the government should be doing more than it is to create jobs.

True, there is a longer-term budget problem. Even a full economic recovery wouldn’t balance the budget, and it probably wouldn’t even reduce the deficit to a permanently sustainable level. So once the economic crisis is past, the U.S. government will have to increase its revenue and control its costs. And in the long run there’s no way to make the budget math work unless something is done about health care costs.

But there’s no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade. Consider, for example, what the latest budget proposal from the Obama administration says about interest payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they’ll have risen to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. How scary is that? It’s about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush.

Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.

Heaven forbid the conservatives running around like chickens with their heads cut off acknowledge that we’re in the same position as -or better than- we were under one of their own. Instead they’d rather storm the airwaves with stories of excessive government spending, even though that government spending is what’s keeping the economic engine of the country running right now.

[ Fiscal Scare Tactics ]
Source: The New York Times

Much love for The Far Left Side, a political comic that’s worth reading if you’re of the progressive political persuasion, and much thanks to Papamoka Straight Talk, one of my favorite political blogs with attitude and biting commentary.

It’s sad, but true – expect that the costs of waging political war incurred by corporate America to make sure their friends get elected (and make no mistake, those friends are not friends of the American people, they’re friends of the American CEO) will be passed directly on to the American consumer. When Exxon and Shell need to raise money to fight political candidates who advocate a clean environment and breathable air and drinkable water, they’ll pass that cost right along to you and I to make sure that their dirty air and filthy water friends get into office – their interests will be not only in poisoning the planet to make a buck, but in making sure they make that buck back out of your and my wallets.

I’m definitely one of the people who watched the Q-and-A at the House Republican retreat with the President and yearned for that Obama to be the one who governs from the White House. We caught a glimpse of him again during the State of the Union, and we saw him out in full force when he was striking down talking-point-driven Republicans who asked questions that were devoid of substance and designed only to provoke a response – he handled them with class, poise, and dignity, and laid the smackdown when he had to. I was more than impressed.

Shortly thereafter, Republicans were in a tizzy, trying to come up with more talking points to back up the ones that the President had just shot down on national television like so much skeet at an NRA convention, trying to hilariously claim themselves victorious for even asking the questions in the first place. When cornered, they admitted they shouldn’t have let the Q-and-A be broadcast, because the President said he would be candid, direct, and pointed, and he was: shining the light on the cockroaches of the Republican party and their political degeneracy and watching them scurry away from the light was one of the best things I’ve ever seen….and a long time coming.

RUSSERT: Tom Cole — former head of the NRCC, congressman from Oklahoma — said, “He scored many points. He did really well.” Barack Obama, for an hour and a half, was able to refute every single Republican talking point used against him on the major issues of the day. In essence, it was almost like a debate where he was front and center for the majority of it. … One Republican said to me, off the record, behind closed doors: “It was a mistake that we allowed the cameras to roll like that. We should not have done that.”

Additionally from ThinkProgress:

Accepting the invitation to speak at the House GOP retreat may turn out to be the smartest decision the White House has made in months,” writes the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder. “Debating a law professor is kind of foolish — the Republican House Caucus has managed to turn Obama’s weakness — his penchant for nuance — into a strength. Plenty of Republicans asked good and probing questions, but Mike Pence, among others, found their arguments simply demolished by the president.”

Owned.

[ Republicans Dismayed by Obama’s Strong Performance, Say it was a ‘Mistake’ to Let Cameras Roll. ]
Source: ThinkProgress

I’ve mentioned before that Glenn Beck is a dangerous man (I’ve been talking about him since he got his CNN post, the one that he thankfully no longer has), and not for the reasons that you might think – not because he’s factually incorrect and manages to spew forth the kind of fecal works of fiction that are dangerous to anyone who might happen to be paying attention (seriously, the IQ of people must go down when listening to his ranting, hyperbolistic, hysterial monologues, like the crazy guy in the street who starts shouting and everyone just looks at quietly hoping he’ll just go away) but because he’s funded and heeled by a political organization that’s posing as a media outlet and news organization.

Most recent on the ridiculous list? Glenn Beck’s pompous, self-important “documentary:”

When Glenn Beck aired an hour-long documentary titled “Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die” last Friday, it marked a major turning point in the annals of television.

The film, narrated by Beck himself, purported to reveal “really disturbing and shocking stuff,” specifically the “dirty little secret” that progressive political beliefs led inexorably to “some of the most horrifying outcomes in history.” With help from interview subjects like Jonah Goldberg, author of the book Liberal Fascism, Beck linked the progressive political movement to such nightmares as China’s Cultural Revolution and Hitler’s gas chambers. Beck alternated images of the emaciated, tortured bodies of the victims he blamed on progressivism with archival footage of Goebbels, Stalin and Mao.

Behold, America, the future of conservative media.

There was a time when such stunningly irresponsible and historically dubious assertions were the province of isolated individuals holding homemade signs at rallies — but no longer. “The Revolutionary Holocaust” was watched by nearly four million Americans. And it was broadcast by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, News Corporation, which made no effort to disassociate itself from the program’s content.

You hear that? Normally that last bit is where the media company says something like “the opinions expressed here are solely those of XXXXX person and not representative of YYYYY company or its partners,” etc, etc. News Corp decided “you know what? that’s not necessary – they’re pretty much our opinions too.”

This is where the FCC needs to step in. There are regulations for this type of media abuse, and they need to be levvied against News Corp. For a group of people who like to whinge and whine so much about Nazi-ism and rewrite history so their own ills and sins are washed away and anyone they disagree with is somehow painted as “the bad guy,” they have no idea how quickly they walk down the same path as those they’re claiming to protect the American people against.

“Even if you think I’m wildly irresponsible,” Beck said a few weeks ago, “you have to know that News Corp. is not stupid. It’s a company worth billions of dollars. Do you really think this corporation would risk everything on an irresponsible crazy guy?”

Oh yes. Yes they would. Without hesitation, and that’s why they pay you so much, Beck.

[ Glenn Beck Assails Obama and Progressives with Holocaust Imagery ]
Source: AlterNet

Why is it that when the Republicans want to take someone on, they can never manage to do it cleanly and in front of the American people over the issues they care about, and instead resort to things like breaking in to someone’s office or dressing up like a pimp to try and deceive someone gullible enough to believe they’re honest? I mean really.

No, seriously – the guy who dressed up like a pimp and went around from ACORN office to ACORN office in an attempt to get someone gullible or silly enough to take them seriously enough to offer them tax advice that naturally would be illegal because of their illegal profession, and then subsequently somehow managed to light a firestorm over it (for some reason this is like a late night infomercial salesman managing to find someone stupid enough to fall for their prank and then everyone gets up in arms about the person who fell for it and not the prank) got himself busted trying to play secret agent and breaking into Loiusiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s office.

James O’Keefe, the snot-nosed thug in question (who likely wouldn’t last an hour in jail if it weren’t for his well heeled and well-connected friends/parents who likely bailed him out immediately) and a couple of his buddies trying to pose as telephone repairmen – without proper ID or clearance of course – apparently tried to break into the office and tap Senator Landrieu’s phone. For what? Who knows, but, as the media is missing, that’s not the important question. The important question here is why the conservative right is acting like this, and why they’re fostering this kind of scorched earth “ends justify the means” politicking by breaking the law – instead of simply coming to the table?

You can do inflammatory documentaries without circus acts and scare tactics and pseudo-secret agent antics. The trick is to use this little thing called evidence and investigation: two things O’Keefe has clearly never heard of.

[ ACORN Smear Journalist Arrested for Alleged Attempt to Bug Sen. Mary Landrieu’s Office ]
Source: AlterNet

[ Fake ACORN Pimp Arrested in Attempt to Bug Senate Office ]
Source: NewsWeek

The most hilarious thing about the “alternatives” that the Republicans have tried to put on the table to health care reform is that they’re all exactly what they complain the President always does: talk but provide no direction. The Republicans claim their option will “eliminate frivilous lawsuits against hospitals and doctors,” which essentially amounts to torte reform – the kind that has been proven time and time again to benefit insurance companies by making patients less able to file claims for ineffective or inappropriate or harmful care and treatment.

The majority of Americans has never supported torte reform, and they won’t even if they change the language – it essentially puts more power in the hands of insurance companies and less in the hands of patients and doctors who are actually responsible, and it just goes to further the fear that Americans have – and are dying from – of going to the doctor for medical treatment, even when something is clearly wrong.

I’m getting too deeply into a discussion of torte reform, but this is true all around whenever the Republicans try to dabble in health care. Their last attempt was so horrific they tried to play it off like it was just a first and rough draft and no one should have seen it, even though they were the ones who released it.

But this one is just as bad. The goal here, as usual, is “self empowerment,” which is really code for “you’re on your own, no one cares about your health care, we just want to not spend money on you so we can cut costs arbitrarily to spend money on things like bombs and missles.”

Hidden in the cobwebby depths of the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions lies the conservative answer to health care. It’s a plan that would cost about $940 billion less than the House Democrats’ bill, and cut deficit spending by tens of billions over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office – all while keeping large employers and insurance moguls happy as clams on subsidized Prozac.

The downside? It would leave more than 52 million nonelderly Americans uninsured. That’s an improvement of roughly zero percent.

The legislation, ambitiously dubbed “The Empowering Patients First Act,” was introduced by Rep. Tom Price, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, in July. It has lately been resurrected as the paragon of reform done right by right-wing columnists, as well as conservative bastions such as the Heritage Foundation and the Christian Coalition.

The Empowering Patients bill would grant tax credits to people purchasing insurance – not much use to unemployed and low-income Americans. It would allow health insurance companies to sell policies across state lines, knocking off state oversight of insurers.

The legislation would not require that employers offer coverage, nor would it impose regulations preventing insurance companies from cherry picking healthy clients.

It would require that no federal funds be used to pay for abortions unless “the pregnancy endangers a women’s life or was the result of forcible rape.”

And, to help fund the minimal expense of the bill, it would instate “medical liability reforms” that would force down the cost of compensation for malpractice lawsuits and make it harder for patients to sue for injuries incurred during treatment.

Feeling empowered yet?

Awesome – so a bill that…does nothing but slash costs and benefits and leaves millions of Americans to fend for themselves, whether they’re sick, needy, elderly, or none of those things.

That’s the conservative way: I’ve got mine, you can go to hell.

[ The Republican Health "Alternative": Empowering Ourselves to Death ]
Source: TruthOut

Alternet is clearly one of my most valued news sources, one that ripe with intelligent commentary, talented writers, and breaking stories and perspective from news agencies and sources around the Web.

That’s one reason I’m thrilled to be a part of the AlterNet community, and am hosting Not So Humble @ AlterNet, a special edition of Not So Humble that updates every monday along with the main blog here – just over at AlterNet to supplement their exceptional political coverage.

If you love Not So Humble and love the political commentary and stories that I link here, head over to Not So Humble @ Alternet – a kind of Not So Humble extra edition, and let me know what you think there!

[ Not So Humble @ AlterNet ]
Source: AlterNet

Joshua Holland, writing for AlterNet, strikes gold again with another dissection of how the right-wing has gone from devouring itself to devouring everyone around it. Back in early 2008 and 2009 we were collectively appalled at the way the right-wing was destroying itself, and the battle that was raging within – the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives and the wingnuts on the fringe, and how they were all competing for control over the direction of the party. Well guess who won: the wing-nuts on the fringe – mostly by allying themselves with the social conservatives. Fiscal conservatives, who allow themselves to be blinded by any mention of “smaller government,” follow right along in the scorched-earth policies of the far-right, and help get them elected.

But that battle is over – it’s clear that the wingnuts and the teabaggers are in control of the GOP, and they won’t stop until they’re back on top and ready to shove another mouthful of neocon-style political soup right down our throats along with the water they’ll board us with. Now it’s time to turn our attention to the Democrats who are letting this happen, and get them back in line, and that’s what Holland does.

I always say that generalized griping about “the Democrats” is a waste of time. It seems to me that there are around 10 Democratic senators and maybe 50 members of the House who are far to the right of “moderate” by any stretch of the imagination. They are conservatives, and they’ve obstructed their own party’s moderately progressive proposals — the very same proposals they ran and won on — at every turn, right from the beginning.

Let me be clear before continuing: there’s buckets of blame to go around, and it would be oversimplifying to suggest that it’s all on the conservadems. But I think they deserve the most responsibility for the Democrats’ inability to pass the key pieces of “change” they promised.

Holland is doing the right thing here – it’s one thing to whine and complain about “Democrats” and claim they’re “just like the other folks,” and so on – that’s too easy, and doesn’t address the real obstacles to change. Holland calls them out by name:

The Nelson Twins, Evan Bayh, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Kent Conrad, Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb and Blanche Lincoln in the Senate, and all but 4 or 5 of the Blue Dogs in the House have been horror shows, and the entire party has had to appease them by watering down its proposals at every turn, demoralizing the Democratic base in the process and leading of course to Scott Brown and the possible — perhaps probable — end of the road for health-care reform.

Max Baucus dragged out the process for months in his committee while entertaining all kinds of Republican amendments and flirting with pathetic futility with Olympia Snowe’s vote. Reps like Joe Baca and Jim Marshall held pressers to spew forth Fox News-worthy talking points against “socialized medicine.” Joe Lieberman not only went on Fox news to oppose anything even vaguely progressive, he also repeatedly, almost comically pulled the ball out from under Harry Reid’s foot every time Reid thought he was going to finally kick that field-goal.

And they are wholly responsible for the Dems’ almost unbelievable inability to overn with huge majorities in both chambers of Congress — they are why real Democrats (actual moderates included) remain in the minority. Do the math — 59 minus 10 equals 49, a Senate minority.

Their opposition would be wise to start raising money now – there’s no way these folks will get re-elected. The real hope for America rests with populist, progressive candidates who can intelligently sell their message to the American people, without waffling over whether they’re conservative enough to keep their jobs or progressive enough to keep their titles.

[ Conservatives Made the GOP Toxic and Now They're Killing the Democratic Party ]
Source: AlterNet

Most news agencies are abuzz over this news already, but it bears repeating – while some on the right is busy claiming that this is a “victory for free speech,” by which they mean a victory for their deep-pocketed special interests, a large swath of the left and the right are already considering new legislation to keep this Supreme Court ruling from becoming effective in time for the 2010 election cycle.

The gist of the ruling, which goes drastically against previous court precedent, essentially states that corporations can spend money from their own coffers to support or detract any political candidate or cause they choose. The point is that it effectively drives forward the notion of “corporate personhood,” where corporations have the same rights as individuals without the responsibilities.

Joshua Holland has a few words to say about corporate personhood, and how important it is that we put a nail in its coffin once and for all – every couple of years the idea pops up to terorrize our political system, and just when you think you have it in check, the companies who would benefit most from being able to spend their own millions on a crusade to sway the American vote bring it back up again. I’m not a fan of the term “judicial activism,” because it’s all too often used against any court that rules in favor of someone that one part or another doesn’t like, but it may be justified in this case:

In addition to the idea in [Buckley v Valeo] that “money equals speech,” we’ve been saddled with the Orwellian concept of “corporate personhood.”

“Corporate personhood” gives corporations — entirely artificial entities created by the state — the same individual rights that the framers fought and died to secure for flesh-and-blood citizens (or at least for white male property holders, but you get the idea). The doctrine started in England reasonably enough; it was only by considering corporations “persons” that they could be taken to court and sued. But during the 19th century, the Robber Barons and a few corrupt jurists deep in their pockets took the concept to a whole new level. After the Civil War, while many of those same interests were fighting to keep African-Americans from being enfranchised, the doctrine took on new weight — the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment was extended to corporations, and Thomas Jefferson slowly rolled over in his grave. The trend of granting more and more rights to corporations continues today.

As long as these ideas are embedded in our legal system, talk of cleaning up government — of campaign finance and lobby reform — are just that: talk. On these fundamental issues of democratic participation, incremental reform is a road leading nowhere.

Which is why we need bold, populist ideas for real structural reform. I say let’s rip a page from Karl Rove’s Scorched-Earth Politics for Dummies and offer a progressive constitutional amendment that would end this madness once and for all.

That could be as simple as a one-line amendment that rolls back Buckley by explicitly stating that regulating the amount of money donated to campaigns or setting limits on what candidates spend on advertising isn’t the same as putting limits on political speech.

But I think something even bolder is in order. I think it’s time for a Defense of Human Citizenship Amendment — language that would strip the “personhood” from corporations and give reformers a fighting chance to establish a true democracy in the United States.

I’m on board, Holland.

[ Really Simple: We Need to Get Rid of the Perverse Notion of Corporate Personhood ]
Source: AlterNet

But Holland isn’t the only person who’s appalled at the ruling. Here’s some stronger language:

Indeed, in a momentous 5 to 4 decision the New York Times called a “doctrinal earthquake,” the U.S. Supreme Court handed down an unprecedented ruling today that gives new significance to the phrase “corporate personhood.” In it, the Roberts court overturned the federal ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns, ruling that forbidding corporations from spending money to support or undermine political candidates amounts to censorship. Corporations, the court ruled, should enjoy the same First Amendment rights as individuals.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the Supreme Court rejects “the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not ‘natural persons.’”

In other words, as Stephen Colbert put it last year, “Corporations are people too.”

On a conference call with reporters following the decision, critics could not overemphasize the enormity of the ruling, whose implications will be visible as early as the upcoming midterm elections. Bob Edgar, head of the watchdog group Common Cause, called it “the Superbowl of really bad decisions.” Nick Nyhart of Public Campaign called it an “immoral decision” that will make an already untenable mix of money and politics even worse.

“This is the most radical and destructive campaign finance decision in the history of the Supreme Court,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. “With a stroke of the pen, five justices wiped out a century of American history devoted to preventing corporate corruption of our democracy.”

Writing about the ruling, Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy described it as “a revolution in the law,” one that has been in the works for years thanks to conservative activism.

“Today’s decision is a huge gift to corporations from a Supreme Court that has been radicalized by right-wing ideology, whose political agenda was made obvious in the Bush v. Gore case and whose very political decision today only makes things worse.”

I really don’t think it’s possible to grasp the enormity of the situation. But then, if nothing changes, I think we’ll really start to see it as soon as the election cycle heats up. If you don’t make an active effort to tune out political advertisement, you’ll be saddled with it – and you may even be surprised to find out that the company you work for or patronize is throwing several times your salary behind a political candidate you’d never support.

[ Supreme Court's 'Radical and Destructive' Decision Hands Over Democracy to the Corporations ]
Source: AlterNet