Glenn Beck in a headdress

The reason Glenn Beck wore a Native American-style headdress this morning

By Erica RitzThose who watched Glenn Beck’s radio program on TheBlaze TV this morning may have caught Beck wearing a Native American-style headdress early in the broadcast.

“This is actually from the first … resurrection of the Tea Party,” Beck explained. “When the founders went, they dressed to disguise themselves as Native Americans and they dumped the tea away. Around the last century, everybody said, ‘Our country is a little out of control and we should get back to our founding roots.’ This is a headdress from that Tea Party movement that happened in the late 1800s.”

Beck joked: “For anybody who says, oh, geez, they’re dressed as Founding Fathers. It could be worse. We could have all gathered and dressed like this.”

Growing more serious, Beck added: “But it also shows you, this was a very elaborate and national movement. This was a big movement and it’s completely gone. Have you heard of that movement? Did you even know it was going on?”Glenn Beck Dons Headdress: 'I Think it Works on Me'

By Simon Moya-SmithOnce the video circulated on the web, prominent Native Americans berated Beck’s insensitive behavior.

“The reason that Glenn Beck wore a headdress illustrates the lack of respect that he has not just towards indigenous people, but towards basic human decency,” Johnnie Jae, Jiwere-Nutachi and Chahta and managing partner of Native Max Magazine, told ICTMN. “He has consistently taken controversial stances in the past such as claiming that we should be proud to have a slur towards indigenous people used as a team name,” she said.

Tara Zhaabowekwe Houska, Ojibwe and a tribal rights attorney, criticized Beck’s “jocular behavior” and added “headdresses are earned.”

“I wonder if Mr. Beck would be comfortable casually putting on a Medal of Honor while laughingly stating he ‘feels more important’?” she said.

Facebook comments

Comments from Natives and others on Beck's display:I have no words....

Attention whore? "Hey, everyone else is getting publicity out of doing this, I should, too!"

Turkey feathers like the turkey he is....

Just when you think Glenn Beck couldn't be more sickening...

The icing on the cake is the smug look on his face. He knows exactly what he is doing. Courting controversy so people will pay attention to him. Gross.

We're just props for people like him. Trotted out to make a point and then put away afterwards.

The wind has lost the bellows in his bag of hot air so he bottom feeds like a heckler media-personality -- #noaudience.

He's not complex. He's an opportunist milking whatever issue or angle necessary to boost himself into the central light in order to stay relevant in order to feed his ego.

Douchebaggery!

Ignorant soul!!

I will never run out of reasons to hate Glenn Beck.Comment:  Needeless to say, Plains Indians and their headdresses had nothing to do with the Boston Tea Party. The colonists didn't know these Indians existed when they staged their protest.

For more on the subject, see Teabaggers = Indians?! and Teabaggers Misuse Indian Imagery.

Tea Party = Confederate Party

Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party

Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think.

By Doug Muder[T]he enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

That was the victory plan of Reconstruction. Black equality under the law was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. But in the Confederate mind, no democratic process could legitimate such a change in the social order. It simply could not be allowed to stand, and it did not stand.

In the 20th century, the Confederate pattern of resistance was repeated against the Civil Rights movement. And though we like to claim that Martin Luther King won, in many ways he did not. School desegregation, for example, was never viewed as legitimate, and was resisted at every level. And it has been overcome. By most measures, schools are as segregated as ever, and the opportunities in white schools still far exceed the opportunities in non-white schools.

Today, ObamaCare cannot be accepted. No matter that it was passed by Congress, signed by the President, found constitutional by the Supreme Court, and ratified by the people when they re-elected President Obama. It cannot be allowed to stand, and so the tactics for destroying it get ever more extreme. The point of violence has not yet been reached, but the resistance is still young.

Violence is a key component of the present-day strategy against abortion rights, as Judge Myron Thompson’s recent ruling makes clear. Legal, political, social, economic, and violent methods of resistance mesh seamlessly. The Alabama legislature cannot ban abortion clinics directly, so it creates reasonable-sounding regulations the clinics cannot satisfy, like the requirement that abortionists have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Why can’t they fulfill that requirement? Because hospitals impose the reasonable-sounding rule that their doctors live and practice nearby, while many Alabama abortionists live out of state. The clinics can’t replace them with local doctors, because protesters will harass the those doctors’ non-abortion patients and drive the doctors out of any business but abortion. A doctor who chooses that path will face threats to his/her home and family. And doctors who ignore such threats have been murdered.

Legislators, of course, express horror at the murder of doctors, just as the pillars of 1960s Mississippi society expressed horror at the Mississippi Burning murders, and the planter aristocrats shook their heads sadly at the brutality of the KKK and the White Leagues. But the strategy is all of a piece and always has been. Change cannot stand, no matter what documents it is based on or who votes for them. If violence is necessary, so be it.‘Hatriots’ in Action: Conservatives Push for Armed Rebellion if Obama is Not Impeached

By Josh KilburnIt’s easy to prove that the political right-wing hates the United States; every action that they’ve taken has been the antithesis of what they’ve claimed. They may swear by democracy, and claim loyalty to the Constitution with one breath, while with the other, despise the very foundation of this country, the Constitution, and the multiculturalism that makes this country so strong.

Remember that in 2012, a Virginia Republican Committee newsletter openly called for armed rebellion if President Obama was re-elected. This is not how you support democracy. Over the last week, the Republicans have been pushing hard to impeach or sue Obama for doing his job when the Republicans in congress refused to do theirs—this is not how you support democracy.

Tom Tancredo, former Republican Congressman, warned that if “Republicans are too afraid to challenge presumptuous dictatorial behavior, then the war is already lost and we should stock up our ammunition shelves and join a militia.”

Last month, one such right-winger, Mike Vanderbogh, stood before a crowd of fellow terrorist militia members and declared “This administration, this regime, seems to operate ever more increasingly as a lawless gang than not on the rule of law but rather on the rule of men—which is to say the law of the jungle, enforced by the iron fist of government power,” and that “We will vote with our guns.” It’s gotten so bad that there is almost no way to tell the difference between the right wingers and the jihadists in the Middle East.Comment:  or more on conservative racism, see Right-Wing Terrorism Worse Than Jihadism and Conservatives Want a Race War.

Teabaggers are 25% more racist

Are Tea Partiers racist? Answer: yes!

Are Tea Partiers Racist?

By Arian Campo-FloresA new survey by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality offers fresh insight into the racial attitudes of Tea Party sympathizers. "The data suggests that people who are Tea Party supporters have a higher probability"—25 percent, to be exact—"of being racially resentful than those who are not Tea Party supporters," says Christopher Parker, who directed the study. "The Tea Party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race."

Surveyers asked respondents in California and a half dozen battleground states (like Michigan and Ohio) a series of questions that political scientists typically use to measure racial hostility. On each one, Tea Party backers expressed more resentment than the rest of the population, even when controlling for partisanship and ideology. When read the statement that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," 73 percent of the movement's supporters agreed, while only 33 percent of people who disapproved of the Tea Party agreed. Asked if blacks should work their way up "without special favors," as the Irish, Italians, and other groups did, 88 percent of supporters agreed, compared to 56 percent of opponents. The study revealed that Tea Party enthusiasts were also more likely to have negative opinions of Latinos and immigrants.

These results are bolstered by a recent New York Times/CBS News surveyfinding that white Tea Party supporters were more likely to believe that "the Obama administration favors blacks over whites" and that "too much has been made of the problems facing black people." The survey also showed that Tea Party sympathizers are whiter, older, wealthier, and more well-educated than the average American. They're "just as likely to be employed, and more likely to describe their economic situation as very or fairly good," according to a summary of the poll.

If Tea Party supporters are doing relatively fine, what are they so riled up about? These studies suggest that, at least in part, it's race. The country that the Tea Partiers grew up in is irrevocably changing. Last month, new demographic data showed that minority births are on the verge of outpacing white births. By 2050, Hispanics are expected to account for more than a quarter of the American population. The Tea Partiers "feel a loss … like their status has been diminished," says David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which examines issues of race. "If you listen to [their] language, it's always about 'taking our country back.' But it's really not taking the country back as is. It's taking the country back"—as in time.

Bositis finds the movement's arguments about reckless federal spending unpersuasive. Why, he asks, weren't they up in arms when President George W. Bush launched two costly wars and created a new unfunded mandate with his Medicare prescription-drug plan? Why didn't they take to the streets when he converted a surplus into a massive deficit? "I don't like to be in a position where I'm characterizing people as being racially biased," says Bositis. "But when the shoe fits, what do you do?" Given modern societal norms, "they know they can't use any overtly racist language," he contends. "So they use coded language"—questioning the patriotism of the president or complaining about "socialist" schemes to redistribute wealth.Comment:  For more on teabagger racism, see Obama = "Trifecta of Othernesss" and Republicans Want to Restore Confederacy.

Educating DMarks about conservative Santa

Reader DMarks didn't like the Santa cartoon I posted in Conservative vs. Liberal Santa.



He wrote:The sack Santa carries is a pack of lies.No, your response is a pack of lies, DMarks. Or a pack of stupidity, if you prefer. Let's break it down.

Tax breaks for the 1%The Bush tax plan, the typical conservative one promoted and preserved, was not a tax cut for the 1%. Most of the people affected by lower taxes were middle class, and they saved most of the money too."Tax breaks for the 1%" doesn't refer to the Bush tax cuts. Which weren't wholly for the rich, but were skewed toward the rich compared to previous tax cuts. This is a point you've never been able to grasp.

It doesn't even refer to the Republicans' abject refusal to raise taxes on millionaires. This refusal is the best proof that you and your fellow conservatives are lying hypocrites when you say you want to reduce the deficit. It's all we need to prove that conservatives do indeed care only about helping the rich.

No, it refers to things like this, dummy:

Top 1% get big bang from tax breaksThere are more than 200 tax breaks in the U.S. tax code, and the top 10 for individuals are by far the most expensive. How expensive? They will cost federal coffers $12 trillion over the next decade.Big Tax Breaks Equal Big Cash for the Top 1%The top 10 tax breaks–which total more than $750 billion this year–heavily benefit the top 1 percent of earners.The Top 10 Tax Breaks--And How They Help The Wealthy The Most

Nice try to change the subject from the Republicans' present defense of their wealthy donors to the Bush tax cuts of a decade ago, but no sale. Read what the cartoon says, idiot, rather than making up an almost unrelated argument.

Big money politics"Big Money Politics"... Obama is the one that ran and won the most expensive campaign ever."Big money politics" refers to spending throughout the political system, not just in one presidential race. Are you seriously going to raise this subject but mention only a single exceptional race? Incredible.

Here, educate yourself on another topic, dummy:

2012 Election Spending Will Reach $6 Billion, Center for Responsive Politics PredictsOverall it appears Republicans will end up collecting $1.1 billion, or 55 percent of the money raised by congressional candidates in 2012. In 2010 overall, Republicans outraised their Democratic counterparts by 15%.Big Money Breakdown: Why 2012 Is the Most Expensive Election EverIn the broader election, an estimated $577 million, or 69 percent, of outside super-PAC and nonprofit spending supported conservative causes, and $237 million went to liberal candidates and causes, CRP reports.Election Spending 2012: Post-Election Analysis of Federal Election Commission DataBusiness Money to Super PACs

While it is likely that much of the business money coming into the elections was funneled through dark money sources such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent at least $36 million on races nationwide according to the Center for Responsive Politics, business corporations remain the second largest source of Super PAC money, accounting for $71.8 million, or 11% of all Super PAC funds.

Some of the largest and most active Super PACs receive a significant portion of their funding from businesses: pro-Romney Restore Our Future received 20% of its funds from for-profit corporations.If you seriously think liberals are spending more than conservatives overall--if you seriously think they're driving "big money politics"--you're a flippin' idiot.

Corporate subsidies"Corporate subsidies"... something the Dems tend to favor and conservatives tend to oppose (TARP, bailouts, auto industry, green scam, etc). Bank bailouts? Obama is and was gung-ho on these. The Tea Party strongly opposes them.I thought your previous points were dumb as a box of rocks, but this one is even stupider, if that's possible. Let's see how stupid:

Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008.More Americans think Obama, Not Bush, Enacted Bank Bailouts, Poll ShowsNearly half of Americans incorrectly think President Obama started the the bank bailout program, otherwise known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a new poll shows.

Just 34 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center correctly said that TARP was enacted by the Bush administration. Almost half--47 percent--think Mr. Obama started the bank bailout, according to the survey, conducted July 1-5. There was no partisan divide on the issue.Automotive industry crisis of 2008–10In September 2008, the Big Three asked for $50 billion to pay for health care expenses and avoid bankruptcy and ensuing layoffs, and Congress worked out a $25 billion loan.[84] By December, President Bush had agreed to an emergency bailout of $17.4 billion to be distributed by the next administration in January and February.The Tea Party opposed these bailouts? When? Not while Bush was in office.

The Tea Party didn't exist until Obama took office. There were no large-scale protests against Bush's bailouts ("There was no partisan divide on the issue"). These protests didn't happen until Tea Party racists decided to demonize the black president as a Kenyan Muslim socialist.

No protests against white president; protests against black president. I'm still waiting for you or any conservative to explain this. Go ahead, dumbass...explain why Tea Party fanatics didn't demonstrate against Bush but did against Obama for continuing Bush's programs.

Green scam?

As for Solyndra (aka your "green scam"), let's take a look:

Fact check: Romney misses mark on Solyndra claimTHE FACTS: Romney is right that taxpayers are on the hook for the $528 million loan to Solyndra and other losses from the loan guarantee program. But the Obama administration said such losses were expected when Congress created the high-risk program, which is intended to boost cutting-edge projects that would have trouble obtaining private financing.

An independent review indicates that the government could lose nearly $3 billion on green energy loans—just under one-third of the $10 billion Congress set aside.So we have Bush's corporate bailout programs for the banking and auto industries. Like most brain-dead conservatives, you stupidly and wrongly attributed them to Obama. But I won't count them since they had bipartisan support.

We have Obama's reinvestment act, which may lead to $3 billion in losses.

And we have this:

Corporate Welfare Grows to $154 Billion even in Midst of Major Government Cuts

Corporate Welfare in the Federal BudgetBudget experts and policymakers may differ on exactly which programs represent unjustified corporate welfare, but this study provides a menu of about $100 billion in programs to terminate.Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare ProgramsAbout $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.So that's $100 billion or more every year in other corporate welfare--most of it championed by conservatives.

$100 billion or more every year vs. a one-time loss of $3 billion. Which number is bigger, you flippin' idiot? Which problem area should be the biggest concern among Republicans who claim to be fiscally responsible?

To be fair, many Democrats also support these corporate subsidies. But I'd say it's relatively rare for Democrats to seek a corporate subsidy that Republicans oppose. In most cases, Republicans are leading the charge to protect their wealthy donors, again.

In short....better luck next time, loser. You haven't made a single valid argument about economics since you began reading Newspaper Rock. And your asinine comments on this cartoon haven't come close to breaking that record.

For more on the subject, see "Defund Obamacare" = "Nigger, Nigger" and Where Obama Went Wrong.

P.S. No, we aren't debating the conservative worship of the wealthy in my blog. Post a response in your own blog if you want. But I'm not wasting any more time educating you on the basics of government spending.

Obama = "trifecta of Otherness"

Inside the Conservative Brain: Why Tea Partiers Are Desperately Afraid

To understand how Tea Partiers view the world, you have to know how they see themselves.

By Lynn Stuart ParramoreThe Tea Party is a fascinating case study for how these questions and ideas play out. Its members are bonded in anxiety and terror—a very powerful glue—over what America is becoming: something other than the “real America” they wish to belong to. Their America is white, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon (it’s no accident that the Right’s leading think tank is called the Heritage Foundation).

powell notes that while Tea Party members will tolerate a bit of diversity—the occasional Catholic or Jew—they primarily wish to protect the distinctiveness of their chosen group in the past, present and future. For them, someone like Obama represents the ultimate threat to maintaining this distinctiveness, the thing that makes them feel special. With his black/Muslim/immigrant associations he becomes the “trifecta of Otherness”—an unholy trinity that must be resisted at all costs. The Tea Partier perceives the President as the incarnation of a malevolent force that will take from them and give to Others. He is both the incarnation and the welcoming committee for the Stranger who doesn’t belong in America.

As an illustration, powell looks at how Tea Partiers feel about Social Security, which is coming under vigorous attack just as default has been avoided. When asked individually, powell finds that the Tea Partier likes the program a lot. But she only likes it for her own group—for people who have, in her view, “worked for it.” She doesn’t want the Others to have it because she doesn’t want to be connected to “Them.” “They” don’t work the way she does. “They” don’t care about America as she does. “They” don’t belong in America. This divide between the small group and the larger community can be leveraged by politicians who wish to sway them.

Because the government wants to extend Social Security to the Other, the government itself becomes the Big Other—an alien entity. If only “They" could be excluded from this otherwise excellent deal—as blacks and many women were excluded from Roosevelt’s original New Deal—then Social Security would have stronger support from the right.Race is central to the fear and angst of the US right

By Gary YoungeSecond is the perceived beneficiaries of government spending. Republicans are more likely to regard intervention as being to support minorities rather than to support the poor. This goes not only for food stamps and welfare but also for Obamacare–which was the issue that initially sparked the shutdown.

“Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters,” writes Greenberg. Their despair is largely rooted in the assumption that by championing programs that disproportionately help minorities, Obama is effectively buying votes and securing a growing tranche of the electorate who will for evermore be dependent on government. One participant, echoing the views of many, said: “Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don’t. It’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn’t say happiness. You get to be alive and you get to be free. The rest of it’s just a pursuit … you’re not guaranteed happiness. You have to work for it.”

Finally, there is Obama–the black son of an African immigrant and white mother–who stands as an emblem for all this unease, personifying, in their minds, not only their political impotence today but their demographic irrelevance tomorrow. The word they’re most likely to use to describe him is “liar”. But their hostility goes beyond his policies and pronouncements to a deeply rooted suspicion of his authenticity.

“[There] is a sense of him being foreign, non-Christian, Muslim–and they wonder what really are his motives for the changes he is advancing.” As he moves into his second term, there is now an elision in the Republican mind between what they think he is (an immigrant, a fraudster, a non-American) and what they think he does (assist immigrants and fraudsters in contravention of American ideals).No, America is not a Christian nation

Why is the Right so obsessed with pushing revisionist history?

By Amanda MarcotteSo why do conservative Christians care so much? Why is it so important to them to establish that rights come from God that they will make up imaginary liberals to argue the point with, rather than just move on?

Two reasons: One, this argument makes it easier for the right to actually restrict the number of rights they will accept that people have, all while pretending to be pro-rights. Two, it gives them an excuse to ignore the First Amendment and the well-established fact that the U.S. is, like France, a secular democracy and not a Christian theocracy.

What’s nice about the “rights come from God” theory is that it makes it easier to deny that new rights can be established. Since the 18th century, a lot of rights have been granted that didn’t exist back then: The right not to be enslaved, the right of all adults to vote, the right to have some time off from your job. Conservatives resisted each of these rights and continue on that path today, resisting more recently established rights, such as the right to be free from discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. By saying that God informed the Founding Fathers what rights there were, conservatives can claim that any rights that have been developed since then are illegitimate. Sure, it’s a lie, but it’s an awfully convenient one.Comment:  For more on conservative racism, see Republicans Want to Restore Confederacy, Shutdown = White Minority Asserting Power, and "Defund Obamacare" = "Nigger, Nigger."

Republicans want to restore Confederacy

Columnist Dennis Hamill tells us what the government shutdown, aka the Obamacare battle, is all about:

Frightened white people in Congress who won't accept a black President are what's causing the deadlock

Even on Columbus Day extremist Republicans are stopping progress

By Dennis Hamill[T]his isn’t about money, debt or deficit. It’s about race.

Five centuries after Columbus and his nervous white crew arrived, there is still a small crew of frightened white people in Congress who refuse to accept an America with a black man in charge.

These extremists have not yet been able to accept, even after two decisive national elections, that a black man occupies the White House.

For some of them, their single goal as members of Congress is to make this first African-American President fail.A Southerner confirms the conservatives' irrational fear and loathing of minorities:

The irrational fear of President Obama

By Jonathan CapehartCapehart: The president and the Obama administration say the whole reason he did this is to get the 50 million Americans without health insurance to have health insurance.

Jackson: They figured out a way to get money out of the American people’s pockets. It won’t benefit—it’ll benefit a very small amount of people, and it’ll be the ones that are too lazy or unwilling to work, along with the millions and millions of illegal aliens in this country.

Capehart: You do know that the Affordable Care Act is not … undocumented workers are not eligible for Obamacare. That’s specific in the law.

Jackson: They can go into any Social security agency, welfare office, social services and they’re giving them stuff. They are handing it out to them left and right.

Capehart: What exactly are they handing out?

Jackson: Benefits! Look at them. They get food stamps. They get welfare, dependent children…. They help them with their housing, and they’re not even supposed to be in our country. They are here illegally, but, yet, they know how to work our system to get what they want. They want our health care. They want our food. They want our money, yet they don’t pay taxes. And they’ll look right at you and they’ll tell you, “No habla the English,” and laugh. But you understand what they’re saying. That really makes me angry.As does this sign:

Arkansas Restaurant Sign Claims Obamacare Is 'America's Punishment For Slavery Years'



That pretty much says it all. Passing Obamacare = helping black and brown people = punishing white people. In short, those who oppose Obamacare are motivated by racism.

Racist Tea Party

Let's look more closely at the Republican Tea Party's racism. I added the red emphasis to highlight the key points.

Ex-GOP insider unloads: Blame “neo-Confederate insurrectionists” for shutdown!

"I would take Boehner drunk over Cruz sober," former 28-year GOP staffer-turned-author Mike Lofgren tells Salon

By Josh EidelsonThese people are basically neo-Confederate insurrectionists. They are in substantive rebellion against the orderly government of the country. And one of the things I noticed—and it’s something that’s very common in human beings—we all try to mollify or appease the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. You know, “Don’t make a scene.” Well, I noticed in the last few years of my service on the Hill that a number of Democrats seemed to be afraid of Republicans. And Obama pretty much wasted his first term trying to mollify them. I think he’s finally stumbled upon a strategy that’s better: simply not give them what they demand. Because this is a deliberate strategy to hold the government hostage.Pollsters: GOP will become even more extreme (if that’s possible)

New research suggests the factions currently leading the war on Obamacare will grow even more intransigent

By Steven RosenfeldRace is very much at play in right-wing politics and identity, the pollsters found.

“While few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities,” they said. They believe that “their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities.”And:Evangelicals were clearly the most aggrieved and discouraged GOP faction.

“They believe their towns, communities and schools are suffering from ‘culture rot’ that has invaded from the outside,” the 30-page analysis said. “The central focus here is homosexuality, but also the decline of homogenous small towns. They like the Tea Party because they stand up to the Democrats.”

Evangelicals are a third of the GOP base, the report said. More than three-quarters are married. More than 90 percent are white and older. Eighty percent vote only Republican. And like the other factions, they can’t stand President Obama, labeling him as a “liar” who panders to middle-class worries.“I think that his picture of the people in this room would be that we’re all a bunch of racist, gun-clinging, flyover state, cowboy hat-wearing yokels—because we didn’t go to Harvard, and we’re not from New York, and we’re pretty white, we’re pretty middle-class,” said one man in Roanoke, Virginia. “We’re going to be in a very politically incorrect minority very soon,” added another, objecting to how the mainstream culture supports gays, schools allow same-sex teenagers to hold hands, and the political left beats up on them for anti-gay beliefs.

The notion that their corner of American life—described by a Virginian as “a little bubble”—is under attack extends to feeling “invaded” by immigrants, and taking offense that they have to tell their phones to talk to them in English, not Spanish. “Don’t come here and make me speak your language,” another man said.Tea Party radicalism is misunderstood: Meet the “Newest Right”

Our sense of the force currently paralyzing the government is full of misconceptions--including what to call it

By Michael LindWhen the post-Civil War system broke down during the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the South’s local notable class and its Northern and Western allies unexpectedly won a temporary three-decade reprieve, thanks to the “Reagan Democrats.” From the 1970s to the 2000s, white working-class voters alienated from the Democratic Party by civil rights and cultural liberalism made possible Republican presidential dominance from Reagan to George W. Bush and Republican dominance of Congress from 1994 to 2008. Because their politicians dominated the federal government much of the time, the conservative notables were less threatened by federal power, and some of them, like the second Bush, could even imagine a “governing conservatism” which, I have argued, sought to “Southernize” the entire U.S.

But then, by the 2000s, demography destroyed the temporary Nixon-to-Bush conservative majority (although conceivably it could enjoy an illusory Indian summer if Republicans pick up the Senate and retain the House in 2016). Absent ever-growing shares of the white vote, in the long run the Republican Party cannot win without attracting more black and Latino support.

That may well happen, in the long run. But right now most conservative white local notables in the South and elsewhere in the country don’t want black and Latino support. They would rather disenfranchise blacks and Latinos than compete for their votes. And they would rather dismantle the federal government than surrender their local power and privilege.

The political strategy of the Newest Right, then, is simply a new strategy for the very old, chiefly-Southern Jefferson-Jackson right. It is a perfectly rational strategy, given its goal: maximizing the political power and wealth of white local notables who find themselves living in states, and eventually a nation, with present or potential nonwhite majorities.

Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane

Why aren't Republicans more frightened of a shutdown and a default? Part of the reason is magical thinking

By Amanda MarcotteThe press often talks about the Tea Party like they’re secularist movement that is interested mainly in promoting “fiscal conservatism”, a vague notion that never actually seems to make good on the promise to save taxpayer money. The reality is much different: The Tea Party is actually driven primarily by fundamentalist Christians whose penchant for magical thinking and belief that they’re being guided by divine forces makes it tough for them to see the real world as it is.

It’s not just that the rogue’s gallery of congress people who are pushing the hardest for hostage-taking as a negotiation tactic also happens to be a bench full of Bible thumpers. Pew Research shows that people who align with the Tea Party are more likely to not only agree with the views of religious conservatives, but are likely to cite religious belief as their prime motivation for their political views. White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to approve of the Tea Party. Looking over the data, it becomes evident that the “Tea Party” is just a new name for the same old white fundamentalists who would rather burn this country to the ground than share it with everyone else, and this latest power play from the Republicans is, in essence, a move from that demographic to assert their “right” to control the country, even if their politicians aren’t in power.

It’s no surprise, under the circumstances, that a movement controlled by fundamentalist Christians would be oblivious to the very real dangers that their actions present. Fundamentalist religion is extremely good at convincing its followers to be more afraid of imaginary threats than real ones, and to engage in downright magical thinking about the possibility that their own choices could work out very badly. When you believe that forcing the government into default in an attempt to derail Obamacare is the Lord’s work, it’s very difficult for you to see that it could have very real, negative effects.

It’s hard for the Christian fundamentalists who run the Republican Party now to worry about the serious economic danger they’re putting the world in, because they are swept up in worrying that President Obama is an agent of the devil and that the world is on the verge of mayhem and apocalypse if they don’t “stop” him somehow, presumably be derailing the Affordable Care Act. Christian conservatives such as Ellis Washington are running around telling each other that the ACA will lead to “the systematic genocide of the weak, minorities, enfeebled, the elderly and political enemies of the God-state.” Twenty percent of Republicans believe Obama is the Antichrist. Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner argued that Obama is using his signature health care legislation to promote “the destruction of the family, Christian culture,” and demanded that Christians “need to engage in peaceful civil disobedience against President Obama’s signature health care law.”"Neo-Confederate insurrectionists" isn't just rhetoric, as the flag-waving teabagger below demonstrated. The Republican Tea Party literally champions a Southern white Christian power structure where minorities are second-class citizens.



How Republicans became racists

How Racism Caused The Shutdown

By Zack BeauchampBy the Johnson-Goldwater election, it had become clear that overt racism and segregationism was politically doomed. Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw to that. As this scary recognition dawned on Southern whites, they began searching for a new vehicle through which to shield themselves and their communities from the consequences of integration. The young conservative movement’s ringing endorsement of a minimalist federal government did the trick—it provided an on-face racially neutral language by which Southerners could argue against federal action aimed at integrating lily-white schools and neighborhoods.

Kevin Kruse, a Princeton historian whose work focuses on the South and the conservative movement, finds deep roots in segregationist thought for this turn. “In their own minds, segregationists were instead fighting for rights of their own,” Kruse suggests. These “rights” included “the ‘right’ to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the ‘right’ to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps, most important, the ‘right’ to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government.”Modern GOP is still the party of Dixie

How the South poisons American conservatism and sabotages our politics

By Kim MessickFor black Americans slavery was a holocaust and a nightmare. For white Southerners it meant (among other things) living intimately with millions of human beings who were permanent outsiders—persons whose natural incapacities, as the white South saw them, meant they could never be trustworthy members of the community. For white supremacists, citizenship had one very definite condition of entry: white skin, and the potential for moral personality that came with it. The racial divide defined the difference between civilized society and the enthralled barbarism that lay beyond and beneath it.

It would be hard to overstate the influence of this experience on the mind of the South. For one thing, it meant that the white South was, in effect, a garrison state. White Southerners lived in close proximity to a large population they routinely abused, terrorized and defiled. Fear of black violence and revolt is a constant theme of white society before and after the Civil War. The South’s noisily martial version of patriotism has its roots here, as does the region’s love affair with guns. And there are obvious connections between these facts and its stubborn embrace of patriarchy and misogyny. (Does the name “Todd Akin” ring any bells?)

Of greater relevance to our present concerns, however, are the implications for the South’s political psychology. Here the region’s history as a slave society left a very particular imprint, one that lingered long after slavery and Jim Crow collapsed. I mean the habit of imagining society as a two-tiered structure, with the “normative” community on top and a degenerate class of outsiders below. The former consists of those who satisfy the prerequisites of citizenship, and can therefore be trusted to fulfill the social contract voluntarily; the latter of those whose inherent debilities ensure that coercion is the only reliable guarantee of cooperation.This is a fraught subject, so I want to make my meaning clear. I am not arguing that all Southerners—or all conservatives—are racists or paranoids; I’m not even arguing that all Southerners are conservatives. (I myself would personally disprove that assertion.) Slavery, thankfully, disappeared long ago, and Jim Crow is now almost two generations behind us. Racism lingers on in the South as in America generally, but for the most part must now keep its head down and its voice low; it’s the vice that dare not speak its name. (This is not to deny, of course, that it retains considerable social valence.) What I am arguing is that a certain habit of thought, powerfully shaped by the experience of slavery, survived the passage of that curse and continues to influence some Southern conservatives to this day. It no longer takes the form of a blatant assertion that only the white race is worthy of social trust; its definition of the normative community has shifted. (Though it remains associated with racialist, or at least race-conscious, themes.) It is now more likely to define that community in ideological terms—to see it as consisting of those who endorse a particular view of government and its rightful relations with traditional mores and economic power. It has, however, retained certain aspects of its earlier, darker origins. It is still obsessed with purity—ideological if not racial—and still invests those it regards as impure with a harsh, acute animus. And it continues to equate difference with illegitimacy. Those on the outside—the liberals, the Democrats, the “socialists”—cannot be trusted partners in political life; they want only to undermine our institutions and must therefore be expelled from them.Tea party wants to take America back--to the 18th century

Their ultimate destination appears to be the 1780s and our dysfunctional government under the Articles of Confederation.

By Joseph J. EllisClearly, most of the tea party radicals in the House of Representatives come from gerrymandered districts, which function as cocoons that resist penetration by alien ideas, like Keynesian economics, Darwinian evolution, global warming and yes, the potential popularity of Obamacare. They live in a parallel universe in which a rejection of any robust expression of government power is an unquestioned and unexamined article of faith.

Where does this irrational but obviously deep-felt impulse come from? Talk radio and Fox News obviously feed the beast. But the seminal convictions of the tea partiers defy any modern conceptions of government power. How far back in history do they want to take us?

My initial impression was that they wanted to repeal the 20th century. Radical Republicans of the tea party persuasion object to all federal programs that have an impact on our daily lives, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the Federal Reserve Board. Even though tea partiers, like all the rest of us, are beneficiaries of these federal programs, especially Medicare and Social Security, ideology trumps self-interest in their worldview, though one wonders how they would respond if they had their way and their Social Security checks stopped coming.

Now, I believe these radicals want to go even further back in time. Though it wouldn't be fair to pin a defense of slavery on them, they agree with the states' rights agenda of the Confederacy and resist the right of the federal government to make domestic policy, which is their visceral reason for loathing Obamacare.

But their ultimate destination, I believe, is the 1780s and our dysfunctional government under the Articles of Confederation. The states were sovereign in that post-revolutionary arrangement, and the federal government was virtually powerless. That is political paradise for the tea partiers, who might take comfort in the fact that their 18th century counterparts also refused to fund the national debt. Their core convictions are pre-Great Society, pre-New Deal, pre-Keynes, pre-Freud, pre-Darwin and pre-Constitution.

For more on conservative racism, see Shutdown = White Minority Asserting Power and "Defund Obamacare" = "Nigger, Nigger."

Anti-government extremism = white supremacy

Anti-Government Extremism Has Roots in Prewar South

By Robert Parry[S]omething extreme has surfaced in modern American politics: an ideological hatred of government. From the Tea Party to libertarianism, there is a “principled” rejection—at least rhetorically—of almost everything that government does (outside of national security), and those views are no longer simply “fringe.” By and large, they have been embraced by the national Republican Party.

There has also been an effort to anchor these angry anti-government positions in the traditions of U.S. history. The Tea Party consciously adopted imagery and symbols from the Revolutionary War era to create an illusion that this contempt of government fits with the First Principles.

However, this right-wing revision of U.S. history is wildly askew if not upside-down. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution—and even many of their “anti-federalist” critics—were not hostile to an American government. They understood the difference between an English monarchy that denied them representation in Parliament and their own Republic.

Indeed, the key Framers—James Madison, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton—might be called pragmatic nationalists, eager to use the new Constitution, which centralized power at the national level, to build the young country and protect its fragile independence.

While these Framers later split over precise applications of the Constitution—Madison opposed Hamilton’s national bank, for instance—they accepted the need for a strong and effective federal government, unlike the weak, states’-rights-oriented Articles of Confederation.

More generally, the Founders recognized the need for order if their experiment in self-governance was to work. Even some of the more radical Founders, the likes of Sam Adams, supported the suppression of domestic disorders, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. The logic of Adams and his cohorts was that an uprising against a distant monarch was one thing, but taking up arms against your own republican government was something else.

But the Tea Partiers are not entirely wrong when they insist that their hatred of “guv-mint” has its roots in the Founding era. There was an American tradition that involved resisting a strong and effective national government. It was, however, not anchored in the principles of “liberty,” but rather in the practice of slavery.

The battle against the Constitution and later against an energetic federal government—the sort of nation-building especially envisioned by Washington and Hamilton—emanated from the fears of many Southern plantation owners that eventually the national political system would move to outlaw slavery and thus negate their massive investment in human bondage.

Their thinking was that the stronger the federal government became the more likely it would act to impose a national judgment against the South’s brutal institution of slavery. So, while the Southern argument was often couched in the rhetoric of “liberty,” i.e. the rights of states to set their own rules, the underlying point was the maintenance of slavery.Comment:  For more on the Tea Party, see Racism in the Republican Primaries and Teabaggers Seek White Christian Rule.

Thoughts on Casino Jack documentary

I recently watched Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a documentary on the Jack Abramoff scandal. I followed the story when it unfolded in the early-to-mid 2000s, of course. But this documentary put everything in context and helped cement the information in my mind.

Abramoff's Indian lobbying scandal was perhaps the worst of his crimes. You may recall these highlights:Abramoff and his partner Scanlon are alleged to have engaged in a series of corrupt practices in connection to their lobbying work for various Indian gaming tribes. The fees paid to Abramoff and Scanlon for this work are believed to exceed $85 million.

In particular, Abramoff and Scanlon were alleged to have conspired with Washington power broker Grover Norquist and Christian activist Ralph Reed to coordinate lobbying against his own clients and prospective clients with the objective of forcing them to engage Abramoff and Scanlon to lobby against their own covert operations. Reed was paid to campaign against gambling interests that competed with Abramoff clients.And:In emails now made public by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, which is investigating his activities, Abramoff repeatedly referred to Native Americans as "monkeys," "troglodites," and "morons."

Abramoff once asked his co-conspirator Scanlon to meet a client, saying in an email, "I have to meet with the monkeys from the Choctaw tribal council. You need to close the deal... with the client..." In another email message he wrote, "we need to get some money from those monkeys!!"More interesting to me was the history leading up to this scandal. Here are some thoughts I posted as I watched Casino Jack:

Roots of Tea Party hate

The doc makes it clear that the Republican Tea Party = hate and intolerance = lies and hypocrisy was launched by Reagan, Rove, Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff in the 1980s.

he Young Republicans watched Patton and substituted "liberals" for "Nazis" in Patton's speech urging death to the evildoers.

Norquist modeled himself on Lenin in terms of using lies and propaganda to foment a revolution.

"Hostage shame" helped spur the Young Republicans in the '80s. Shame at letting 9/11 happen helped spur the Republicans in the 2000s.

So it's all about proving their manhood without, you know, actually going to war. Hence today's war on women, opposition to gay marriage, and love of guns. Real men are strong and tough, not weak and compassionate.

Obviously the Young Republicans weren't in office or setting policy then. But they were creating the ideology of worshiping Reagan as a demi-god, drowning government in a bathtub, and vilifying liberals as traitors. Which led directly to the Tea Party and today's partisan gridlock.

The Young Republicans compared themselves to James Bond and Indiana Jones. They thought of themselves as heroic "freedom fighters," the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers. "The cult of the freedom fighter," says Thomas Frank.

Hence their similarities to the Taliban, the "freedom fighters" whom Reagan was talking about. As well as to Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin.

Which explains why they loved so many thuggish dictators. And why they love America's present security state. To them, iron-fisted rule = freedom (from liberal values).

Killers = "freedom fighters"

Jonas Savimbi's UNITA was financed by apartheid South Africa. It "was famous for kidnapping thousands of children, turning vast farmlands into minefields, and murdering political opponents."

The Young Republicans considered Savimbi one of them because he was a man who stood up to Communism. The way Patton would've done: by crushing and killing the bad guys.

Maybe the Young Republicans learned their dogma from the robot in Lost in Space. Crush, kill, destroy!

Reagan sent Savimbi a letter and a George Washington bowl as a token of support. Thus launching Reagan's career of backing right-wing oppressors and murderers.

Americans in general and conservatives in particular like to invent an enemy to prove themselves against. Sort of a national manhood test. Previous enemies have included Indians, immigrants, unions, Nazis, and Commies. The present enemy is "terrorists" (Muslims), with China coming on strong.

Written and produced by Jack Abramoff, the movie Red Scorpion was a fictionalized version of the Angola conflict with a white super-soldier (Dolph Lundgren) helping a noble black freedom fighter overthrow the dirty Commies.

First taste of power

The Republican revolution reached fruition in 1994, when Newt Gingrich led the party takeover of both houses of Congress. It began with demonizing women, "secularist humanists," and others who weren't white male Christians at the 1992 convention--the beginning of the so-called "culture wars."

After demonizing Clinton for invented scandals (Whitewater), gay rights, and healthcare reform, they made their big play: their first, but not last, attempt to shut down the government. Does this sound familiar?

Gingrich had close ties to Norquist and Reed. So the Lenin/Patton/Savimbi wannabes were nearing the reins of power.

"Under Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition became a political powerhouse." Reed campaigned with Pat Robertson against unmarried sex, gambling, and abortion. (Two of three issues aimed at keeping women in the kitchen and bedroom.)

This is when Norquist became an anti-tax crusader and made his "drown government in a bathtub" comment. He founded the K Street project to pressure lobbyists to fire Democrats and hire Republicans.

Norquist promoted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as the "hammer" to get Republican legislation through Congress. Their goal was to eliminate rules and regulations on corporations. Abramoff turned to lobbying and promised access to DeLay, whom he took on trips around the world.

Marianas = capitalist dream

Tom DeLay began implementing the former Young Republicans' corrupt schemes. Perhaps the most interesting one was in the Marianas Islands. Some thoughts on that:

DeLay explicitly touted the Marianas as a free-enterprise zone. It's a perfect example of what happens when you don't regulate capitalism.

Jack Abramoff CNMI scandalIn testimony before the Senate, it was described that 91% of the private-sector workforce were immigrants, and were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage. Stories also emerged of workers forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without plumbing. A Department of the Interior report found that "Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry." The Senate passed the Murkowski worker reform bill unanimously. The bill was then blocked by Tom DeLay in the house.Abramoff ties cloud Schaffer's '99 fact-finding tripAt heart of the issue is the islands' massive textile industry, which is exempted from the U.S. minimum wage as well as most American immigration laws. The Northern Marianas economy is built on thousands of workers from China, the Philippines and Bangladesh, some of whom pay labor recruiters as much as $7,000 to land a job on U.S. soil.

A class-action lawsuit filed the year Schaffer toured the islands alleged that many of those workers lived in slum conditions, housed seven to a room in barracks surrounded by barbed wire designed to keep the workers in. Workers in some factories labored 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the suit alleged—without pay if they fell behind set quotas.

A U.S. Interior Department investigation found that pregnant workers were forced to get illegal abortions or lose their jobs. Some were recruited for factories but forced into the sex trade instead.

The islands' factories were cited by the U.S. Department of Labor more than 1,000 times for safety violations in the late 1990s.

"There were some examples of problems that we found, and we raised those with the equivalent of the attorney general," Schaffer said of his visit. But in many others, "the workers were smiling; they were happy."

Said Matthew Miller, spokesman for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee: "The fact that (Schaffer) sided against the human rights of those workers, not just then, but still today, shows he was more interested in doing the bidding of the people who set up the trip than in actually investigating abuses."

At the time, those alleged abuses and a push by the Clinton administration led to a flurry of congressional action. Several bills passed the Senate that would have brought the islands' factories under stricter American laws, but the legislation failed in the House.

Hired by factory owners and the government of the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Abramoff and his firm were paid more than $11 million over nine years to fend off those efforts, according to reports.Conservative Congressmen on "fact-finding" pleasure junkets didn't notice anything wrong. Until someone met with a worker who offered to sell a kidney so he could pay off his debt and go home. Wow.

This is what Tom DeLay wanted to turn America into, too. It's what the Republican Party still wants.

You're a freakin' idiot if you don't understand this. Read a history book about sweatshops and child labor. Or look at the evidence in front of your face. Unregulated capitalism => indentured servitude if not slave labor.

Mini-review

Casino Jack uses entertaining techniques to keep the story interesting. For example, it didn't rely on static screen images of text with the key passages highlighted. Instead, actors Stanley Tucci and Paul Rudd dramatized e-mail exchanges while a shadowy figure typed the messages and the letters appeared on the screen.

When the conspirators met during a racquetball game, Casino Jack showed two people playing to illustrate the words. When someone talked about showering money on politicians, a rain of dollar bills fell from the sky. Little things like this were effective in bringing the story alive.

I'd say the first two-thirds of the documentary--from Abramoff's beginnings through the Indian gaming scandal--were intriguing. But as Abramoff became involved in several more scandals, the story became more convoluted and harder to follow. I guess the SunCruz Casinos scandal was integral to Abramoff's arrest, trial, and conviction, but I would've spent less time on these scandals. The meat of the story is how Abramoff became a super-lobbyist, not what happened after he did.

Anyway, Casino Jack and the United States of Money is an eye-opening look at how corrupt our politics have become. If you think our government still follows the Founding Fathers' noble ideals, you need to watch this documentary. Rob's rating: 8.0 of 10.

For more on the movie, see Summing Up the Abramoff Scandal and Preview of Casino Jack. For more on related subjects, see The Facts About Indian Gaming and The Best Indian Movies.

Below:  Jack Abramoff.

Angry Patriots and Pinheads

Elections 2012: The Election Played as a Video Game

By Mark TrahantThe birther movement–the far-fetched idea that President Barack Obama is not a natural born American–has moved to a new platform, the video game, Angry Patriots and Pinheads. According to the company’s website, the game uses “a Revolutionary War cannon to launch patriotic characters or the “Angry Patriots” at socialist politicians, actors, musicians, other mainstream pinheads as well as a variety of ‘jack asses’ stationed throughout the board.”

One such character is Elizabeth Warren. The promotional video shows Warren wearing feathers. She is asked by a Kenyan-flag-waving Obama, “Liz, So are you Cherokee?” The tag line says she proclaimed her 1/32 Cherokee Heritage (a story debunked here by Indian Country Today Media Network).Comment:  Just be clear, the "angry patriots" aren't the same people as the "pinheads," as you'd expect. These angry patriots are fighting the people they consider pinheads.

Apparently the game uses stereotypes to make its racist points. Warren is a pretend Indian and Obama is a Kenyan. No doubt women are shrill, gays are effeminate, and Muslims are terrorists.

If the game-makers think they're being clever or funny, they're mistaken. Dressing up as Indians started before the Boston Tea Party 239 years ago. I believe cartoonists have been sticking white men in leathers and feathers ever since. To reiterate a centuries-old "joke" is pathetic, not original or insightful.

For more on Elizabeth Warren, see Elizabeth Warren Ducks Native Delegates and Warren:  Conservatives Back Cherokee Protesters.

Racism in the Republican primaries

Republican Racism is an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle

Republican candidates are overtly signaling that whiteness and American identity are intertwined.

By Chauncey DeVegaOn his MSNBC show Hardball, Chris Matthews called out Newt Gingrich and other Republicans for what he described as their "dog whistle" appeals to white racism during the South Carolina debate on Monday night.

He was correct in identifying the work that racism does for the Tea Party GOP and its candidates in their efforts to win over white conservative voters. However, Chris Matthews was too generous and kind. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and other Republican candidates are not engaging in subtle dog whistles to their faithful, where racism and white racial anxiety hides in the background, masked and hidden by other language.

Definitions matter: dog whistle politics are based on a signal or cue to the in-group, and one so subtle that those not in the know will overlook it as no more than quixotic background noise, a blip, a comment without context or meaning.

For example, during the 2004 election, President Bush's mention of the infamous Dredd Scott Supreme Court decision had nothing to do with African Americans and slavery. Rather, it was a wink to a rabidly anti-choice conservative Right-wing audience that Roe vs. Wade would be overturned by his administration.

In 2008, McCain-Palin featured a negative campaign ad which borrowed from the movie The Ten Commandments and suggested that Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ. If one was not part of the Left Behind Jesus Camp Christian Nationalist Dominionist crowd, the visuals and narrative of the commercial were odd, bizarre, utterly strange, and devoid of context. The ugliness of these symbols and metaphors were so covert, that they made sense for those outside of the targeted audience only after Time magazine thoroughly deconstructed the campaign ad and its malicious intent.

In 2012, Republican candidates are using overt signals, what are for all intents and purposes blaring air raid sirens and signal flares that race, whiteness, and American identity are deeply intertwined. The appeals to white racism by the Tea Party GOP during the primaries are not background rhythms or subdued choruses. They are the driving guitars of Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla," the chorus of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," the opening moments of the Notorious B.I.G's "Kick in the Door," or the flipped samples of Justice's "Stress." You feel it. You know it. To deny the obvious is to close one's ears to a driving drum line and cadence that travels up through your shoes...and to your bones.

How else can a fair observer excuse away Republican arguments that blacks are lazy parasites, whose children should live in work houses and pick up mops and brooms to learn a work ethic, that "illegal" immigrants should be killed by electric fences, or Muslim Americans should be subject to racial profiling, marked like the "Juden" of Nazi Germany?

In all, the Tea Party GOP's campaign for the presidency rests upon marshaling white anger and rage at The Usurper, a perpetual Other, and one not fit for the presidency by virtue of his birth and skin color--he who we know as President Barack Obama. If Birtherism is not based on this calculation, on what else does it rest?

Race matters to the Tea Party GOP. It matters overtly. And it matters to the white populists of the Republican Party without apology or subtlety.Racism 'happens': Inexplicable events haunt GOP primary

Although several Republican presidential candidates have made racist remarks, none will admit or condemn the statements.

By Paul Rosenberg"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N****r, n****r, n****r.' By 1968 you can't say 'n****r' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites." - Lee Atwater, former Chair of the Republican Party

San Pedro, California - It's the darnedest thing. Republicans have zero tolerance for anything racist. They'll tell you so at the drop of a hat. It's liberals and Democrats who are the real racists. Just ask Herman Cain, he'll set you straight. After all, if a pizza CEO isn't an expert on racism, then who is?

And yet, in recent weeks, all manner of seemingly racist things keeping popping up all around the GOP presidential primary campaign, which can only be explained in terms of mysterious and malevolent forces, out of movies such as The Exorcist, or Men in Black, or more recent low-rent fare, like the SyFy channel's Ghost Hunters "reality show".

First there was the matter of Ron Paul's racist, homophobic and otherwise bigoted newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s. Of course he never read them. ("I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it ten years after it was written," he told Gloria Borger on CNN the week before Christmas.)And:[T]hen along comes Rick Santorum, and he says: "I do not want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." Except, he later says, he didn't say "black" at all, even though it’s right there on the videotape. In between, he admits he did, but then the more he thinks about it, the surer he becomes that he didn't. Somehow, as with Ron Paul, it just happened. Mysteriously. Nobody knows how.And:[T]hen there's Newt. ... In this particular instance, Newt was riffing on one of his favorite not-at-all-racist themes, how Barack Obama--whose actions could only be understood as coming from a Kenyan anti-colonialist mindset--is the greatest "food-stamp" president of all time. Mere mortal men might catch a whiff of racism in a statement like that, but Newt would shoot back, saying that it was bizarre to think any such thing.

"I'm prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps," Gingrich told a crowd in Plymouth, New Hampshire. This was racist two-fer on Gingrich's part, as NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous indicated, saying: "It is a shame that the former speaker feels that these types of inaccurate, divisive statements are in any way helpful to our country. The majority of people using food stamps are not African-American, and most people using food stamps have a job."

But Newt made two other racist implications as well, first by repeating his association of President Obama with food stamps--as if it wasn't Bush's super-recession that created the record-high levels of food stamp usage - and second by implying that the NAACP was somehow afraid or unwilling to hear from Newt the world-historian truth-teller, when he had actually been invited to speak to them several times in the past--and always refused to do so.Iowa and Beyond: "Common Sense" Racism and the Tea Party GOPThere are several elements at work here.

First, poverty in America is racialized. The image in the public imagination is of black welfare queens, or illegal aliens birthing "anchor babies" who live off of the government tit, profiting from food stamps and the generosity of the American people. The white poor rarely, if ever, enter the picture. Second, black people are in a parasitic relationship with white Americans (Santorum's "someone" else). In sum, black people are "lazy," and a dependent class, unable to take care of their families except for the generosity and benevolence of white people.

The most powerful part of Santorum's appeal to his white audience in Iowa is the implication that black people are receiving some type of "reparations." For Santorum and the Tea Party GOP, blacks are plagued by "bad culture" and are existentially prone to poverty. Therefore, in a country where labor, capitalism, and citizenship are inexorably connected, blacks are outside of the political community.

In the age of Fox News and the Right-wing echo chamber, one cannot forget how the conservative imagination is constituted as a dream world: it is a mature fulfillment of some of the most sophisticated propaganda in the post World War 2 period.

In this imagination, it does not matter that whites are the majority of America's poor.

It does not matter that most people on public assistance and welfare in Iowa are white.

It does not matter that there is a deep history which explains how conservatives have spun a fiction about black and brown poverty while ignoring structural economic inequality, and how many of the policies endorsed by the Tea Party GOP in the name of economic austerity and punishing people of color (who are coded as "the poor" or "unproductive citizens"), also disproportionately harm the white working and middle classes.

This local type of common sense helps to explain the feelings of defense, denial, and injury that many white conservatives exhibit when challenged about the racism of the Tea Party GOP and the Right-wing establishment. While the leadership and media elites from which they take their cues skillfully play the race baiting game, rank and file Fox News conservatives simply feel aggrieved at the suggestion that anyone would take their common sense understandings of the world to be racist, bigoted, or based on false understandings about the nature of racism and white privilege in the Age of Obama.

In the same way that a fish does not know that it is wet, the politics of nativism, an authoritarian-like embrace of the politics of us and them, and a fear of the Other, are so central to contemporary white populist conservatism, that they are taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of the world.More on Republican racism:

How Race Shaped American Party Politics

CODE BLAH: Racism in Republican Politics

And for those who think "libertarians" like Ron Paul are somehow different:

Of Broken Clocks, Presidential Candidates, and the Confusion of Certain White Liberals

For more on conservative racism, see Whites Think They're Discriminated Against and Teabaggers Seek White Christian Rule.

Obama's goal: US as Indian reservation?!

Former Sen. Burns speaks to tea party groupFormer U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns says President Barack Obama wants the “whole country to become like an Indian reservation.”

Burns spoke Thursday in Billings to tea party supporters at a small rally organized by Americans for Prosperity. AFP is an advocacy group founded with support from billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which lobbies for lower taxes and less government.

The Billings Gazette reports Burns also compared the Occupy Wall Street protesters to spoiled children throwing a “hissy fit.” A group of more than 40 responded approvingly to his remarks.Comment:  "Like an Indian reservation"...you mean a place of great cultural diversity and beauty?

Perhaps he meant the Mashantucket Pequot or Mohegan reservation, or another reservation of that type. You know, where a rising tide of prosperity has lifted every tribal member.

Less charitably, perhaps he meant a place where brown-skinned people predominate. You know, ghettos, 'hoods, barrios, reservations, and mosques. Where "those people" are trying to take over the country from "real Americans" like Burns.

The Tea Party audience cheered these remarks the same way they cheered executions and booed a gay soldier. Thus proving once again that teabaggers are racists.

For more on conservative racism, see Perry's "Response" Broke Cannibal Curse?! and Rubio:  Entitlements "Weakened" Us.

Perry's "Response" broke cannibal curse?!

Jacobs:  'The Response' Broke The Curse Of Native American Cannibals

By Brian TashmanAs we’ve been reporting, self-proclaimed prophet Cindy Jacobs has dedicated her show God Knows to discussing how lands are cursed by sins like abortion, adultery and homosexuality, calling on Christians to literally take control over the weather and reverse the curse. In the fourth part of the series, Jacobs claims that lands are cursed with violence because they were previously inhabited by Native Americans who “did blood sacrifice” and “were cannibals and they ate people.”

Fortunately, Jacobs maintains, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s The Response prayer rally in Houston broke the curse and “the land is starting to rejoice, you see, because of that prayer.”

This concept of curses left by Native Americans has a large foothold in the New Apostolic Reformation, and today Bruce Wilson reported that NAR figures Chuck Pierce, John Benefiel, Tom Schlueter and Jay Swallow recently participated in an event in Teas that involved “smashing of Native American art objects” in order to “divorce and tear down the principalities of Baal, Asherah and Leviathan.” Like Benefiel and Swallow, Jacobs was an official endorser of The Response.

Here's the complete quote:You study the area and you find out what happened? What did the indigenous people worship? If they did blood sacrifice, like we found some areas that were very, very violent because the former culture was a murderous, violent area, like in Texas here and all of the coast around Houston and Galveston and some of that area, the Native American people were cannibals and they ate people. And so you can see a manifestation of that in the churches where people turned against people and kind of cannibalized other people’s ministries. So there’s been a lot of prayer over that in Houston, Texas, they’ve done a lot of intercession over that and broke the curses on the land. We just had a prayer meeting in Houston a little a week ago, the governor of Texas, really as an individual instigated this, and 35,000 people showed up to pray and it was only a prayer meeting called within three months, three month period of time. So what happened? The land is starting to rejoice, you see, because of that prayer.Comment:  Wow. We knew these people--conservative Christian Tea Party Republicans--were bigots and racists. Their views range from mild--blacks don't quite fit in--to extreme--Latinos/Jews/Muslims/Indians/gays are trying to take over and impose their monstrous one-world agenda on us.

Even so, it's amazing to see their prejudice so nakedly displayed. Because the Aztecs and a few others practiced human sacrifice, thousands of cultures spread over tens of thousands of years are evil. According to these racists, Indians are devil-worshiping demons from hell. When we broke our treaties with them, rounded them up like cattle, and massacred them, they only got what they deserved. When you're faced with rabid dogs and mass-murdering Indians, all you can do is exterminate them.

Why Perry is no. 1

Jacobs isn't just some fringe figure. She endorsed Rick Perry's event and he accepted her endorsement. He proudly attended the event knowing people like Jacobs and Bryan Fischer were behind it. And Rick Perry is the leading Republican candidate for president in the polls.

Perry isn't the most popular Republican candidate these days despite his racist supporters. He's the most popular Republican candidate these days because of his racist supporters. When he attacks Social Security, illegal immigration, or global warming--when he talks about everyone he's executed under "Texas justice"--his supporters know what he means. He's protecting "us" from "them"--the brown-skinned un-American "traitors" who would destroy our way of life.

In other words, he's telling white Christian conservatives that he understands their racist fears. He'll man the barricades against the minorities, liberals, secularists, and "elitists" who would force "his" people to give up their privileged positions. He'll make sure that "equal protection under the law" doesn't apply to anyone except the "right" people. You know, Sarah Palin's "real" Americans.

And where are the Limbaughs and Becks on this issue? Has anyone in the right-wing media denounced Cindy Jacobs for her racist screed against Indians? No, of course not. Pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck share Jacobs's views. They've each made racist assertions many times before.

This is standard dogma in the Republican Tea Party: that blacks, Latinos, and other minorities are inferior. That they're poor and uninsured only because they're lazy, good-for-nothing bus. Jacobs has simply said what others think: that dark-skinned minorities have equally dark souls.

For more on the subject, see:

Whites think they're discriminated against
Teabaggers seek white Christian rule
Rick Perry promotes Christian bigotry
Conservatives use "language of savagery"
Stossel:  Indians are biggest moochers
Whites feel like a minority
Fischer:  Indians were thieves

Below:  How conservative Christians see Indians. How they see all minorities, really.

Republican Jesus™

Republican Jesus™

By Justin "Filthy Liberal Scum" RosarioWho the hell is Republican Jesus™?

Republican Jesus™ is very different than the Jesus you and I are familiar with. First off, he is White. Not just white, but White. Republican Jesus™ has a special place in his heart for America. Specifically, White America. Do you doubt this? Ask yourself why anyone who believes in a colorblind Jesus would even conceive of praying for the death of Obama? No, only those who follow Republican Jesus™ would even think that such a prayer could, or should, be answered. If you are currently thinking that racism has nothing to do with the unprecedented hatred of Obama, go away, I’m talking to the grownups.

Republican Jesus™, by the way, is a big supporter of the Confederacy. Why he let them lose the War of Northern Aggression is a mystery. But all “real” Americans know that the South will rise again and Republican Jesus™ will lead the way back to glory. Or something like that. How the Northern and Mid-western Red states fit into this Southern revival is also a mystery.

Republican Jesus™ loves guns. Loves them! Never mind all that silly talk of beating swords into plowshares! Every good member of the church of Republican Jesus™ should have, at minimum, enough armament to hold off an invasion by those commie Nazi liberal hordes that are coming any day now. Or the ATF, whichever shows up first. Or maybe just enough to wipe out a schoolroom filled with kids when their excellent parenting skills manifest themselves in the next Columbine tragedy.

Remember, conservatives, to complain about anti-bullying programs being government overreach afterwards!

Republican Jesus™ loves the rich. Ignore that whole “camel through the eye of a needle” garbage. Republican Jesus™ wants you to be prosperous! It’s called “prosperity theology” and it percolates throughout the conservative religious fervor. God rewards the faithful with material wealth. Very spiritual stuff. If your idea of spiritual is a McMansion.

But Republican Jesus™ is not just about love. Republican Jesus™ also hates and, boy, does he hate!

Republican Jesus™ hates the poor. This is the flip side of “prosperity theology.” If God rewards the faithful with riches, than the poor are obviously NOT of the faith and deserve what they get. This is, in part, why conservatives hate the social safety nets of welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. Those (and by “those” I mean those) people don’t worship Republican Jesus™ and are unworthy of being helped. Besides if you feed them, they’ll just breed!Comment:  If Jesus returned to Earth today, right-wingers would crucify him for his heresies.

For more on the subject, see:

Rubio:  Entitlements "weakened" us
Whites think they're discriminated against
David Duke speaks to teabaggers
Teabaggers seek white Christian rule
Rick Perry promotes Christian bigotry

Rubio: Entitlements "weakened" us

Rubio’s Reagan Speech:  Entitlements “Weakened” Us

By Thomas LaneWith a tone that suggested he spoke more in sorrow than in anger, Rubio said that though the creation of a welfare state "was well-intentioned, it was doomed to fail from the start."

"These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities."

Of course, one might argue that the reason welfare programs were created--with great popular demand--was precisely because in all too many cases "communities," "families," and "churches" weren't doing an adequate job. That hasn't prevented paeans of praise from flooding in from the right. The influential blog site RedState was fairly typical, headlining their take, "Marco Rubio speaking at the Reagan Library. OH HECK YEAH."Comment:  Who are these people who aren't taking care of each other? Who aren't tending to the sick or helping their neighbors? Who aren't saving for the future and their retirement?

Well, obviously they're the people living off "entitlement" programs, according to Rubio. You know, the people "mooching" off health and welfare programs. The lazy, good-for-nothing welfare queens and cheats who won't get off their duffs and get a job because government pays them to be unemployed.

Brown-skinned animals

If Rubio doesn't say who "those people" are, other conservatives have let the secret slip. They're America's brown-skinned poor: blacks, Latinos, Indians, and others. You know, the people conservatives compare to animals.

Nebraska AG Jon Bruning Compares Welfare Recipients To Scavenging Raccoons

By Benjy SarlinNebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, a frontrunner to win the GOP nomination against Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), compared poor people to scavenging racoons in a speech this week.

In a video captured by the liberal group, American Bridge 21st Century, Bruning makes the comparison as part of an elaborate metaphor originally focused on environmental regulations. He describes a requirement that workers at a construction project gather up endangered beetles by luring them into a bucket with a dead rat in order to release them elsewhere. But the plan is thwarted when hungry raccoons then eat them straight out of the rat-infested bucket. Which, according to Bruning, is a perfect image to illustrate how welfare recipients receive their benefits.

"The raccoons figured out the beetles are in the bucket," Bruning said. "And its like grapes in a jar. The raccoons--they're not stupid, they're gonna do the easy way if we make it easy for them. Just like welfare recipients all across America. If we don't send them to work, they're gonna take the easy route."

In Republican America, welfare recipients are no better than animalsWhile Bruning’s comments comparing welfare recipients to animals are absolutely disgusting, he’s not the only Republican who apparently thinks welfare recipients are no better than animals.

Take the case of South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, who during a speech in January 2011 said his grandmother told him “as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed.” Doubling down on his comparison of welfare recipients to animals, Bauer continued, saying that receiving assistance from the government is “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. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Welcome to Republican America, where welfare recipients are no better than animals scavenging for food, instead of being real people who just need a hand up.Critics rip Rubio

Back to Rubio's comments. Here's what people had to say about them:Wonder if his parents received any government help when they arrived from Cuba as exiles? Wonder if they're collecting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid?

Even better: Ask Mr. Rubio why programs like Social Security and Medicare weaken us a society, but subsidies to his backers (e.g., Big Sugar) don't.

So, now that he and his family have safetly taken avantage of the "entitlements" that America has to offer and have given him a safe journey thru school, a good start on a career he now has the obligation to deny that to you or your brother or sister or friend or mother....He got his, so the hell with you.

The precise reason why wage standards, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were established was because people did not have the means. Keeping a sick, elderly relative at home meant waiting for that person to die (more or less since the average life expectancy before 1930 was under 60 yrs. of age for both sexes). How do you take care of someone with cancer or other serious ailments at home? In a church??? Our communities responded by electing representatives who went to Washington and acted in the interests of the public, not the monied interests gobbling up all the wealth and making people work/live in substandard conditions. They were fed up with the fact that before 1965 approx. half of the nation's seniors had no health insurance, 1 in 4 avoided treatment because of cost concerns, and 1 out of every 3 was living in poverty.

"The right is not attacking safety net programs. We are saying they cannot continue as they are currently structured." That's just a lie, Rubio is clearly saying that the guarantees we make to old people are evil in principle.

Read Rubio's speech (even just the extended quote in this story). "These programs actually weakened us as a people." Etc. And read your guy Perry's book--he was telling us to read it as recently as a few days ago, until his campaign told us it was no longer operative. Questioning these programs' constitutionality, which he clearly does in the book (and elsewhere), doesn't exactly make him sound like a guy who wants to propose a sustaining fix for them. If you sincerely want what you describe, you're in the wrong party.

RighTeas want their entitlements (because, they're honestly entitled to them, of course). What they want is to prevent those who, in their Far White minds, are not honestly entitled to entitlements to be entitled to them as well. They simply don't want government to waste money that should go to them on all the undeserving, non-entitled people who are darker-skinned than themselves.

Please, please, GOP, take your cue from Rubio and make sure you, a) continually talk about how bad entitlements are and demonize the lazy brown people who take advantage of them, and b) continually coddle the mega-rich and corporations by refusing to tax them reasonably and refusing to regulate them in any way. Please continue those extremist policies, and in due time even the dumbest hick in this country will have seen through your self-serving lies. And that is no small feat.For examples of Rubio's "blame the victim" mentality, see:

Beck ridicules Lumbee woman
Aboriginals to be "weaned from government teat"
Commissioner:  Indians should get off the rez
Roger:  Let Indians commit suicide
Fox special on Indian "freeloaders"
Mines minister blames the victim

For more on the subject in general, see Why Americans Hate Welfare.