Month: October 2013

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Arizona Republic's resident GOPropagandist for the conservative media entertainment complex, Doug MacEachern, is a sad and pathetic creature. He lives in the conspiracy theory hate-filled world of talk radio and FAUX News. Like Sméagol in The Lord of The Rings, it has turned him into Gollum.

I recently took The Arizona Republic to task for its lack of investigative journalism into the dark money web of "Kochtopus" organizations operating out of the Phoenix area right under its nose. The media is supposed to be the 'watchdog of democracy,' not the media arm of the GOP.

Doug MacEachern appears to be the Koch-blocker editor responsible for preventing such investigative reporting, with GOPropaganda love letters to the "Kochtopus" like this recent opinion. For liberals, Kochs and tea party are evil personified:

The settlement reached Thursday in California over anonymous campaign contributions was one of those good-news, bad-news things.

The good news? Two nameless, faceless Arizona-based non-profits that
funneled $16 million into California ballot-measure campaigns got their
knuckles whacked, and hard.

The bad news is that the California public officials who negotiated
the settlement, which included a $1 million fine, just couldn’t resist
topping off their big victory with a cheap-shot partisan dig:

The two Arizona groups, they said, “operated as part of the ‘Koch
Brothers Network’ of dark money political non-profit corporations.”

“Koch Brothers” — a reference to a couple of rich guys who dare
contribute to conservative causes — is a well-worn, all-purpose liberal
epithet for perceived conservative villainy. Everything about the word
“Koch” sets liberal hair afire.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Arizona Republic reported this week, APS, solar companies clash over credits to customers:

APS recently acknowledged to The Arizona Republic that it
provided money to a Washington, D.C.-based conservative organization
called 60 Plus, which focuses on seniors’ issues such as taxes, Social
Security and Medicare.

It also gave money to another non-profit called Prosper, which was launched this year by Republican Kirk Adams, a former Arizona House speaker.

The non-profits have supported APS’ position in websites, online videos and television advertisements.

John Hatfield, APS vice president of communications, said the utility
is contributing money to the non-profits, and potentially other groups,
through political consultant Sean Noble and his firm, DC London.

“We needed to respond to these ridiculous assertions that we do not
support solar,” Hatfield said, adding that APS does not agree with all
political positions at 60 Plus and Prosper.

Early this year, APS initiated a series of meetings with solar companies and other interested parties to address net metering.

In March, California rooftop-installation companies SolarCity Corp.
and Sunrun Inc., with other partners, formed TUSK, or “Tell Utilities
Solar won’t be Killed.”

The group opposed changes to net metering even before APS formally
submitted its proposed changes to the Corporation Commission, which
approves rates and related policies for most of the state’s utilities.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

""Hopefully we'll go into eight to 10 races and beat the snot out of them." — former Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-OH

An interesting assertion in the Arizona Daily Star today, Business, GOP establishment: Tea party is over.

Hmmm, I don't think the GOP establishment fully appreciates just how out of control the Frankenstein monster it mistakenly created is.

Are they willing to begin disassembling the Mighty Wurlitzer of the conservative media entertainment complex right-wing noise machine that daily feeds the GOP crazy base?

Are they willing to defund the complex network of interconnected far-right political action committees, so-called think tanks, and 501(c) organizations? Are they willing to stop funding fringe Tea Party candidates, and to only give their money to sane candidates, including Democrats?

And how exactly do they propose to rein in far-right billionaire hedge fund managers and corporate CEOs like Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, Club For Growth, etc.? What kind of leverage can they exert over this rogue gallery of bad boys?

With that said, here is an earlier report by Beth Reinhard at the National Journal on the same subject. Inside the Messy but Moneyed Republican Plan to Neutralize the Tea Party:

It took a tea-party insurrection that disabled the federal government
and wrecked the Republican brand, but after months of handwringing,
establishment Republicans are preparing to attack ultraconservative
ideologues across red America.

From
Alabama to Alaska, the center-right, business-oriented wing of the
Republican Party is gearing up for a series of skirmishes that it hopes
can prevent the 2014 midterm election from turning into another missed
opportunity. This will not be a coordinated operation. It will be messy,
ugly, and prone to backfiring. And if the comeback succeeds, it will be
in fits and starts, most likely culminating in the selection of a
presidential nominee in 2016.

"Hopefully
we'll go into eight to 10 races and beat the snot out of them," said
former Rep. Steve LaTourette of Ohio, whose new political group,
Defending Main Street, aims to raise $8 million to fend off tea-party
challenges against more mainstream Republican incumbents. "We're going
to be very aggressive and we're going to get in their faces."

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Thomas Franks in his seminal work, What's the Matter with Kansas?, explored reasons why people vote against their own economic self-interest and choose to live in an economic system of inequality and poverty. It's not just Kansas.

Jim Tankersley at the Washington Post  today introduces us to Tom Hackett and his life in the meat business in Rome, Georgia. This Southern conservative blames everything on him — that man in the White House — rather than the decades of conservative economics that he voted for religiously, which is the source of the economic troubles in which we find ourselves today — something Tankersley does not mention nor challenge Mr. Hackett with in his one-sided narrative piece.

When politics weds religious dogma and produces an article of faith, the adherents of this "faith" are conceptually unable to question what they believe — even when confronted with the cold, hard facts of reality — because it means questioning their "faith." Until we can end this "cult" of wedding politics with religion, this disabling cognitive dissonance which is causing substantial economic harm to this country and destroying people's lives will continue. Tea party lawmakers’ districts suffer economically:

If you want to understand the congressional Republicans who have
forced confrontations with Obama on the “fiscal cliff,” the government
shutdown and the debt ceiling — and whether those lawmakers might feel
encouraged to force more confrontations in the future — you need to
understand the economic struggles of the Republicans’ home districts.

People
in those districts are poorer and more likely to be unemployed than in
the nation at large. They have focused their anger about their economic
circumstances on Obama, and they want someone, anyone, to make him
improve things for them. This is why Hackett praises his congressman, Tom Graves,
for voting against the plan to end the budget impasse with Obama that
produced the shutdown. “I think he’s great,” he said of Graves.
“Somebody’s got to stand up to him.”

Posted by Bob Lord

Are minds much greater than mine looking to answer my oft-repeated question: How much wealth and how much income can we cram into the top 1% before the bottom 90% explodes? 

Quite possibly, yes. My sampling methods are admittedly unscientific, but opinion writers seem more willing to contemplate rebellion openly these days. I follow Chris Hedges, who has dedicated his two most recent columns to the subject. In Our Invisible Revolution, Hedges explains why his preference, a nonviolent movement that removes the current power structure, may not succeed and may give way to a more violent uprising:

By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”