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Category Archives: Republicans
Do these Harvard Law students look suspicious to you?
Source: MoveOn.org
Chris Hayes: Richard Dawkins / Great Discussion of Religious Beliefs in the Public Square
What Are Conservatives [i.e., Reactionaries] Trying to Conserve?
About a month ago, Jonathan Chait published an important article in New York Magazine arguing that demographic changes in the United States will before too long spell doom to the political influence and hegemony of conservatives [i.e., reactionaries], and that conservatives [i.e., reactionaries], well aware of these changes, regard the 2012 elections as their last, best chance to reverse the course America is on. “Conservative America,” Chait writes, “will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests.” The Republican [i.e., Reactionaries] Party, Chait explains, had over decades found itself increasingly confined to white voters, “especially those lacking a college degree and especially rural whites.” Meanwhile, Democrats have increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, secular whites and racial minorities. . . .
The GOP’s God
Women’s rights, climate change, the current cry for war against Iran, and the economy, they’re all hung up in the same place:the GOP ideology and their false sword and shield of Christianity. I don’t see how “love thy neighbor,” the only commandment Jesus Christ ever gave, could be honestly interpreted to mean kick thy mother in the ovaries, stab mine earth with oil drills, and bloody my holy name with the sin of war. It seems to me that doing these things in His name is the ultimate in wickedness.
As a result of this warping of religion, solutions to the issues that plague us all and the common sense legislation that could easily lead to better lives for many of us, is being ignored. I don’t understand why we are so dead set on cutting off our nose to spite our face. I read the blogs, the news, the statistics, the studies. I lay awake at night puzzling away at the patterns, and the inconsistencies. I keep coming back to a single shoe string holding this mess together, the GOP’s God.
Quote: Bill Maher
If you’re a working-class American who still votes Republican . . . you’re stupid.
Paul Krugman: Paranoia Strikes Deeper
Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot. . . .
. . . [T]he president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports. . . .
As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod. . . .
When They Say Government They Mean You
I’d like to talk about government. The conservative [i.e., reactionary]/corporate propaganda machine has turned “government” into a bad word. Conservatives [i.e., reactionaries] portray our government as some kind of enemy of the public. We have all heard the scare stories about the harm done by meddlesome regulations from intrusive big government programs run by government bureaucrats.
Let’s step back from reacting to the word as we hear it today and think about what the word really means.
How Religion’s Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages
. . . [W]hile the secular arguments for dictatorship have been greatly weakened, the religious arguments for it have scarcely changed at all. Religion is very much a holdover from the dark ages of the past, and the world’s holy books still enshrine the ancient demands for us to bow down and obey the (conveniently unseen and absent) gods, and more importantly, the human beings who claim the right to act as their representatives. It’s no surprise, then, that the most fervent advocates of religion in the modern world are also the most deeply inculcated with this mindset of command and obedience. . . .
In sharp contrast to the religious and conservative worldview of obedience and submission, the worldview of freethinkers and progressives at its best is one that exalts freedom and liberty — freedom to make our own choices, freedom of the mind to travel and explore wherever it will. These are our commandments: Think for yourself and don’t blindly bow down to the claims of another. Exercise your own best judgment. Ask questions and investigate whether what you’ve been taught is true.
Walking While Black: The Killing of Trayvon Martin
On the rainy night of Sunday, Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store in Sanford, Fla. On his way home, with his Skittles and iced tea, the African-American teenager was shot and killed. The gunman, George Zimmerman, didn’t run. He claimed that he killed the young man in self-defense. The Sanford Police agreed and let him go. . . .
So, while the police and State Attorney Norm Wolfinger have defended their inaction, a democratic demand for justice has ricocheted around the country, prompting a U.S. Justice Department investigation and leading Wolfinger to promise to convene a grand jury.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called for the removal of Sanford Police Chief Lee. NAACP President Ben Jealous, recounting a mass meeting in a Sanford-area church Tuesday night, quoted a local resident who stood up and said, “‘If you kill a dog in this town, you’d be in jail the next day.’ Trayvon Martin was killed four weeks ago, and his killer is still walking the streets.”
With his gun.
Always Question Authority 