Ah Texas. I’ve said it before, with the exception of Austin and a few other alcoves of sanity in the state, we may as well hand Texas back over to Mexico; they seem to want it more than we do. Kidding aside though, Texas manages to ram some really incredibly stupid and mind-boggling laws down the throats of its citizens, most of whom are so conservative or libertarian enough that they don’t really care because the rules will never apply to those with privilege – the moment they do, however, you can expect them to rally with their guns in the air outside of the state capital.

In this case, Texas’ new drinking laws give police the discretion to cuff you and lock you up regardless of where or how you’re drinking. This is how it works:

Late on a balmy Saturday night last June, six Fort Worth cops and two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission went looking for trouble. They had just raided two Hispanic bars in an industrial stretch of town and nine detainees now sat in the paddy wagon (pdf), hands bound with plastic ties. The rest of the city’s bars would soon shut down. It seemed like the night was over, except for the paperwork. Then Sergeant Richard Morris had an idea. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go to the Rainbow Lounge.”

A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009 — 40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then “bulldozed” him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. “I’m 6′8″, 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink,” Guttery told a local reporter. “I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that.” Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.

That’s right – arrested for “public intoxication” inside of a bar. Only in Texas.

But here’s the clincher – these guys aren’t going to rootin’ tootin’ cowboy bars with blasting country music and confederate flags on the walls; they’re headed to gay bars and latino night spots, so they can make sure they round up, harass, and arrest the people they dislike the most: minorities and gays. It’s racial profiling at its finest, and the law enables them to do it.

The finest quote on the matter comes from a defense attourney in Dallas:

The public intoxication standard, backed by the Texas-based Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is so broad that you can be arrested on just a police officer’s hunch, without being given a Breathalyzer or field sobriety test. State courts have not only upheld the practice but expanded the definition of public intoxication to cover pretty much any situation, says Robert Guest, a criminal defense attorney in Dallas. “Having no standard allows the police to arrest whoever pisses them off and call it PI,” he says, adding, “If you have a violent, homophobic, or just an asshole of a cop and you give him the arbitrary power to arrest anyone for PI, you can expect violent, homophobic, and asshole-ic behavior.”

Yup – that sounds about right.

The point of these laws, and the intention I’m sure that Texas’ MADD arm had, was to keep drunken people off of the roads and streets where they can cause harm to themselves or others. But good intentions paving the road to hell and all that, the statute doesn’t include the appropriate checks and balances against the inevitable abuse of police power, especially in a state like Texas; deep in the heart of Red America.

There is hope though – as with any group of cockroaches (I love this metaphor, which is why I use it so often) as soon as you shine the light on them, they scatter and try to get away:

After community activists took to the streets and airwaves, Irving’s arrest rate for Hispanics plummeted. (Dallas and Irving are no longer part of the federal program.) In Fort Worth, protests over the Rainbow Lounge raid elicited a quick apology from the police chief and promises to review the PI policy. But the arrests have continued elsewhere, and no one is targeting the public intoxication law itself. Many people don’t care, Novello says, “because they can’t vicariously experience this injustice.” The Houston attorney puts it more bluntly. “As long as police are going out there fucking with the blacks and the Mexicans, until it hits the people with the power, they won’t care.”

And that brings me back to the original point. Until the white, privileged majorities are affected, there likely won’t be any real change here – and if there is real change because of the outcry, it’ll be a step-by-step struggle against that privileged majority who doesn’t see anything wrong with the rules only because they’re not the target of their enforcement.

[ Drinking While Brown (or Gay) in Texas Will Get You Arrested ]
Source: AlterNet

Now this is the President we elected; the President that can stand up in front of a crowd and call out the opposition for what they are: obstructionist, reactionary, and in the pockets of their own special interests and a party gone mad.

The President demanded an up-or-down vote on health care; a phrase that Republicans used to use whenever they felt they couldn’t get a bill to the floor against Democratic opposition. He also trashed the same old GOP lies and talking points that we’ve seen for the past several months levvied against health care reform – all which are clearly designed not to make health care reform more palatable to Republicans and conservatives, but instead to just kill the initiative outright, completely forgetting the fact that the status quo simply isn’t acceptable.

Watching President Obama’s speech this afternoon on the way forward on health care reform, I noticed something I haven’t seen from the always-cool chief executive in a while: real passion.

It was unmistakable — this president wasn’t just making the case for reform, he was practically demanding it. Forget any rumors you may have heard about half-measures or additional compromises. President Obama is going all in.

From the outset, the president reminded his audience why the notion of reform being “rammed through” is silly. Referencing last week’s summit, Obama noted:

“This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. Since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it. So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and businesses.”

The president noted several areas of agreement with Republicans, and presented his plan as a middle ground between the left (which wants single-payer) and the right (which wants to let insurance companies do as they please).

He also spent some time outlining exactly what his proposal is all about, including the notion that reform would give Americans “more control over their health care,” while building on the existing system. Obama presented his package in three parts: (1) ending insurance company abuses; (2) creating a marketplace for uninsured individuals and small business owners; and (3) bringing down costs. All of this would be paid for, and would bring down the deficit.

At that point, the president started knocking down GOP talking points — forcefully.

The article goes on to outline some of the GOP’s common strawman arguments and lies about health care reform – and then the President’s response to each and every one of them. If I could I would forward the article to every person who’s ever said that reform is being “rammed down our throats,” for example.

[ Fired-Up President Demands "Up or Down" Vote on Health Care ]
Source: The Washington Monthly

While it’s absolutely no surprise that the GOP would take the opportunity to be on TV to blubberingly try to talk over the President and denounce health care reform as if the alternative – millions of Americans in the US without access to health care or health insurance and thousands dying every year as a result of that fact – and while it’s no surprise that the GOP is completely out of ideas and instead would rather simply roadblock any congressional action entirely, it was a little surprising (although it shoudln’t be, I suppose) that they chose to get on national television and continue to just lie about the nature of health care reform in America, lie about how much it’ll cost, (and how it’ll actually save us money in the long run, and the amount of money required to fund it is actually a smaller figure than the amount of money we’ll spend in the same time period to keep funding health care the way we have up to this point) and lie about what the bills entail as though they’d never read any of them.

That’s the entertaining thing about the GOP – they lie and they lie, and when they’re finally called out on their lies, they backtrack and claim that they’re just the little guy being pushed around by a Democratic majority, thus rousing the hackles of their fringe Tea Party compatriots and their Ronulan allies (did you hear that their straw poll at the CPAC for the next person they should champion for the White House is Ron Paul? That’s hilarious – and I’ve explained why on at least one occasion.)

So then, we should completely have expected that they’d be out in force again, lying their faces off so badly that if the GOP were actually the pinnochio party, their collective noses would be in the way of the cameras:

The President has been charitable thus far in claiming that there are “philosophical” differences between the parties. From out here, it looks more like a visceral hatred for government on the part of Republicans rather than a real intellectual argument. That’s a divide that can’t be bridged. Because the Republicans continue to just lie, whether it’s about process (see reconciliation) or the CBO reports on the existing plan. Ezra:

Lamar Alexander and Barack Obama just had a contentious exchange on this point, so it’s worth settling the issue: Yes, the CBO found health-care reform would reduce premiums. The issue gets confused because it also found that access to subsidies would encourage people to buy more comprehensive insurance, which would mean that the value of their insurance would be higher after reform than before it. But that’s not the same as insurance becoming more expensive: The fact that I could buy a nicer car after getting a better job suggests that cars are becoming pricier. The bottom line is that if you’re comparing two plans that are exactly the same, costs go down after reform.

And the Republican plan, such as it is, and what happens to premiums under it? Jon Cohn:

So, yes, the Republican health care bill will lower premiums overall. But many people in poor health will see their premiums go up. And many people will get lower premiums only because they’re getting inferior coverage. Meanwhile, more than 50 million people will have no insurance whatsoever.

There. Can we just settle on the fact that the Republicans have absolutely no credibility, on this issue or just about any other, and be done with it? Let’s move forward with or without them.

[ GOP Lies at the Health Care Summit ]
Source: AlterNet (courtesy of The Daily Kos)

I’m with Marc Ash here – I still like President Obama, for a number of reasons, not just the ones he outlines here – personally, I think the President is doing an amazing job, especially against a disjointed Republican party that’s intent on just stopping any positive improvements he can make because they know the whole “saddle him with the problems and then blame him for all of it when he fails to fix it” isn’t going to work. He can fix it, he has the agenda, and he has the people behind him – they have to stop his activity and slow him down at all costs so they can continue to blame him for any negativity in the state of affairs.

President Obama also has to deal with a fractured Democratic party, a good portion of which is too conservative for its own good and unwilling to get in line behind some of America’s most needed priorities, like health care, jobs, and climate change. He’s got a lot of gridlock to deal with, and yet he manages to spend time pushing his agenda – and all without the help of his party, which is so busy defending itself.

Anyone who enrages Republican wing-nuts as effectively as Barack Obama can’t be all bad. In fairness, he does it without trying. In fact, just the opposite, he reaches out to them, which infuriates them all the more.

…

All of which can be argued to be “business as usual” for the American President. I guess what I like about Obama is that I get the sense that he would like to, for lack of a better word, change things. The missing link here is what kind of pressure is Obama facing behind closed doors? Even in the public realm we’re seeing unprecedented resistance to Obama’s attempts at reform, from conservative Republicans and Democrats alike.

I like the things Obama has tried to do: Health care reform, foreclosure mitigation, his comments on the outrageous decision by the Supreme Court’s five corporate lawyers to essentially duct-tape a for-sale sign to America’s electoral system. All of these things are a departure for an American President. He is indeed trying.

What concerns me are the things Obama has agreed to: An extension of the US Campaign in Afghanistan, an acceptance of the Bernanke-Geithner “Wall Street must be saved,” mantra, a don’t-ask don’t-tell policy on torture past and present.

I guess what redeems Obama for me is that he agrees to these things without losing his disdain for them. I wanted change, and in fairness change really hasn’t come yet. The intriguing thing is that Obama may actually want these changes too, and seems to. My impression is that he is meeting resistance in a number of significant forms.

Ash dives into the nature of the presidency and of how Obama may not have completely met up to the sweeping progressiveness that brought him into office (part of which I think is somewhat imagined frankly – I think a lot of progressives and liberals – myself included – made him into a super-liberal that he really never was, and never sold himself to be) but he’s pushing as hard or harder than anyone else could in this situation.

Ash also calls out a group that I’ve mentioned before too – fellow progressives.

The tea party crowd is merciless and relentless in their condemnation of Obama, but there is another group that stands just as ready to indict and convict Barack Obama: Progressives. Progressives are just as unyielding in their judgment of Obama, just as determined to derail, to thwart, to oppose, what they see as unacceptable governance. Progressive social objectives may be better reasoned and better argued, however, at the end of the day we may be seeing a Faustian synergy developing between two groups with diametrically opposed social agendas. Progressives and tea-baggers working on separate but parallel tracks to discredit the same president. Strange bedfellows indeed.

We now have a bona fide intellectual in the Oval Office – such things are rare. This is a man of understanding and insight, but his power to achieve change for good is not greater than the dedication of his supporters. Obama has to rally his supporters through a visible commitment to action, and his supporters must be willing to stand tall beside him.

[ I Still Like Obama ]
Source: Reader Supported News

And by “shocking” we mean “not shocking at all.”

Tana Ganeva, a fantastic writer at AlterNet and an enlightening follow on Twitter, has an interesting tidbit about the so-called “Tea Party” in the wake of their convention and their rabid display of force over the the CPAC event earlier this week. While the media loved all over CPAC and gave top billing to the radical right and its growing cancerous effect within the Republican Party, they were very busy in the halls of their convention proving exactly how unfit they are to lead anyone, much less their own movement, much less the national government as a whole.

Aside from some topics that I’ve mentioned already, specifically the fact that a lot of the Tea Party rage is your standard white male privilege protection, Ganeva points out that – predictably – the people who are so angry about the state of the government are the people benefiting from the old-boy, privileged system the most:

According to a new CNN poll (via TPM), a majority of respondents who had donated to a Tea Party group or participated in a Tea Party event were male, white, and identified as Protestant/Other Christian groups.

…So real, genuine Americans seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

None of this should be especially surprising. Most poor people scraping by in terrible, low-paying jobs — or with no jobs — probably don’t have the time to don three-cornered hats and scream about communism.

But there has been an MSM tendency to trumpet the movement as an eruption of populist rage by those crushed in the financial crisis. “Populism” liberals just don’t grasp, of course, because they’re all elitist and stuff. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reconsider our use of the word “elite” so it at least slightly correlates with things like money and privilege.

Yeah, that’s pretty sad, but again, entirely predictable. The media has been using the word “populist” in so many different ways that it’s difficult to really understand what the word means. When it was about enforcing new rules on Wall Street, the media termed it “populist rage.” Now again, when dealing with an extremely vocal but very certainly a minority group of rich white men trying to change their image to be “one of the people,” they’re using the term again when their agenda is anything but populist.

[ Shocking: Tea Partiers Mostly Rich, White, Christian Guys ]
Source: AlterNet

Take a good long look at that graph up there. The numbers are indisputable too – the kind of turnaround that President Obama has managed to cause in such a short period of time – and with the help of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the Stimulus Plan) is remarkable.

The White House also released a handy video to help people get up to speed with the effects of the plan and how much it’s probably helped them without them even knowing it:

The brilliant thing behind the chart and the video is that it shows that the White House is trying to get back in the saddle about shaping and controlling their message.

Almost just as importantly, this kind of message control is good for calling out Republican congresscritters for bashing the White House on the stimulus plan and then greedily sucking up money for their districts and happily spending it — all while lambasting the President and the government for so-called “wasteful spending;” — all while their home districts are profiting off of the hard work and political will of the President and Congressional Democrats. The truth-telling is becoming so loud that even one very prominent Republican is calling out his own party on their hypocrisy.

[ The Road to Recovery ]

This article was originally posted at the Not So Humble AlterNet blog! Head over there for more political commentary and stories to compliment your reading here!

I caught wind of this article over at TruthDig and was immediately drawn to it – partially because I’ve been seeing yet another spate lately (and this happens from time to time) of people who sincerely believe that having the human decency to respect the wishes of others with regard to the labels and terms you apply to them is “political correctness,” a term that’s essentially spat out by folks who believe they should be allowed to say whatever they want about whomever they choose without having to face the consequences of their actions.

Mind you, these people tend to be largely white, middle-class, Christian males (although they’re not exclusively) who have a horrible case of exposed privilege – their privilege shows in spades, and it’s very clear that as soon as you hear someone dare say something like “you shouldn’t put so much power in words,” or “words have the meaning we give them,” and so on (statements which are philosophically true, but…) that they’re of the crowd who believes their personal speech and ignorance should never be impeded by the impact that those words have on others.

Holding this privileged mindset generally requires the kind of “willful ignorance” that Martin Luther King Jr thought was one of humanity’s most dangerous characteristics – the ability to ignore decades; in some cases centuries; of connotation, history, slander, and slur-use of words in order to “ironically” use them whenever they see fit and then place the responsibility of being offended or concerned at the use of the word on the person or group that’s been victimized by its use.

Essentially the silent follow up to “you shouldn’t put so much power in words” is “I can say whatever I want – the fact that you’re offended or it’s hate speech to you is your problem.” Again, this is a tactic from the privileged in order to continually – without blatantly – subjugate anyone different from them. As there usually isn’t a similar dagger-term for the privileged group, they can sit in a place of privilege and “reclaim” a word (see Sarah Silverman’s horrific – but honorable – attempt to reclaim the word “retard” at the TED conference that’s subsequently been defended by the haughty progressive white male who isn’t progressive because they believe in social justice, but because they believe in their own superiority and ability to resolve the world’s problems in their own image) because they – again from a place of superiority and privilege – feel like they’re doing the minority group a favor by liberating a slur-word from it’s negative connotations.

In the wise words of JSmooth, who does amazing pop-culture, music, and politics videos for IllDoctrine.com, “If you’re not the original target of an insult, you can’t reclaim it.”

That brings us to the Tea Party Convention – which as any of you who read Not So Humble know I loathe to call a “convention,” since it’s more a gaggle of political thuggery and name-calling more than it is an actual convention with sessions, working groups, ideas, and solutions to real-world problems – where good old boy himself Tom Tancredo decided to take pot-shots at the so called “cult of multiculturalism” by suggesting that the only reason the President got elected in his landslide win was because there’s no “test” or “gate” to keep people out of the polls.

That’s right – he’s advocating the return of Jim Crow-style poll tests and taxes. Now of course, he’s missing the point – that highly educated people tend to vote overwhelmingly progressive – but as much as “education” and “ignorance” is his guise, what he really wants to do is keep the poor, disinfranchised, and the minorities from the polls because they tend to vote against him and his interests. And people wonder why the Justice Department still monitors elections closely in southern states (those with histories of this kind of poll-gating) to this day.

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, writing for TruthDig, has some excellent points:

Tancredo is wrong. United States political history reveals our long-standing tradition in this area. In “Before the Mayflower,” Lerone Bennett Jr. recounts how literacy tests were first employed at the federal level as part of the immigration process in 1917. Southern state legislatures adopted literacy tests once African-Americans were granted citizenship rights under the 15th Amendment, as part of the voter registration process. As practiced, the literacy test became notorious for denying suffrage to African-Americans. Adopted by a number of Southern states, the tests were applied in a patently unfair manner and were used, along with the poll tax, to disfranchise many literate Southern blacks while allowing many illiterate Southern whites to vote.

The literacy test—combined with other discriminatory practices that kept African-Americans from attending schools, from particular modes of transportation, from attaining mortgages and from careers in public service—effectively disfranchised the vast majority of people of color in the South from the 1890s until after the middle of the 20th century. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to by federal legislation in the 1960s. This legalized discrimination caused suffering and turmoil for all parties involved, especially during the slavery period and the Jim and Jane Crow segregation era. Tancredo’s call for the return of literacy and civics tests suggests that those (black and brown) who voted for Obama are incapable of making informed political decisions and are influenced primarily by identity politics. Moreover, it denies the fact that the majority of voters who elected Obama were white.

Then there’s the issue of affirmative action. Like many other reactionary politicians, Tancredo has fallen victim to the misperception that affirmative action policies have done away with institutional racism and moved society beyond equal access to opportunity and into an era of “reverse racism” and discrimination. This has resulted in anti-affirmative action legislation such as California’s Proposition 209, Washington’s Initiative 200 and Ward Connerly’s various racial privacy initiatives.

During the presidential campaign, Obama responded to this issue in his “A More Perfect Union” speech when he stated: “… we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.” This misperception that Obama is an unqualified leader who benefited unreasonably from such legislation allows many to assert that a heightened focus on diversity is tantamount to a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Also wrong. Statistics on affirmative action show that white women, such as Tea Party Convention keynote speaker Sarah Palin, have been its greatest beneficiaries, while unemployment rates for African-Americans and Latinos, 15.7 percent and 13.1 percent respectively, rival those experienced by these groups during the Great Depression.

As usual, the conservative right and the psuedo-center libertarians are more than ready to shoot themselves in the foot and bury everyone else because of a misguided interpretation of a few pieces of fiction by Ayn Rand about some kind of inherent social equality that exists when you oh-so-conveniently ignore the fact that it simple doesn’t.

I’ll let Marcia sum it up, since she brings it back around to the issue of privilege, which is near and dear to my heart:

Beneath this fiery rhetoric, Tancredo is calling for tea partiers to retain the twin social privileges of being in the company of people like themselves while avoiding spending time with people they’ve been trained to mistrust. These social privileges are, of course, only corollaries to the tea party’s more blatant call to retain economic interests that, according to UCLA law professor Cheryl I. Harris, the law has established and protected through its construction of white identity. In her article “Whiteness as Property,” Harris explains that the legal construction of whiteness defined and affirmed who is white, what benefits and privileges whites enjoy and what entitlements to property arise from their status. Harris’ work reminds us that we must pay attention to claims like Tancredo’s because they show how whiteness can be used strategically as identity, status and property depending on situation and goal. Here’s a quick translation of Tancredo’s message: Privilege needs protecting.

They’re very interested in protecting their privilege, in keeping the veil right over their eyes. How interested are we in removing it?

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.