Republicans – Page 2

This man is running for Congress

The man standing second from the right in the above photo — Republican Rich Iott — is a candidate for Ohio’s Ninth district Congressional seat. And yes, the Tea Party favorite is dressed in a Nazi SS uniform as part of a re-enactment group (read this blog post from The Atlantic).

I’d laugh if there wasn’t a chance that a man who played at being a Nazi soldier could end up in the U.S. House of Representatives. Just too freakishly weird.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Singing the same old song

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=295625-1
The Republicans’ new plan for the nation — as described in their “Pledge to America” is not exactly a bold statement pledging a new direction. The plan, tax cuts and vague promises to cut government spending can be summed up succinctly: More of the same.

We’ve been down this road before. The notion that we can cut our way to prosperity is absurd. It hasn’t worked in the past and it will not work moving forward. Consider recent history: The last three decades have been characterized by wild fluctuations in our economy, an upward shift in income, a growing underclass, failing infrastructure, a failing regulatory apparatus and so on. Libertarians and fiscal conservatives, such as the misleadingly named Club for Growth, say that this proves that government does not work. The reality, of course, is that government can’t work when you tied its hands behind its back.

Is the failure of our food-inspection regime due to government’s built-in inefficiencies, as the fiscal hawks would say, or is it because we’ve reduced the number of food inspectors and asked industry to police itself? Did the financial collapse happen because of some inherent government failing, or was it because we gutted the rules and handed the keys to the financial cop car to the crooks? The same goes for the rest of the regulatory apparatus, which was gutted under Reagan and the two Bushes (Clinton did not exactly rebuild the system, but at least he didn’t make it worse).The questions, I think, imply the answer.

And what about the growing inequality in the nation? Is this shift happening because the wealthy have been smarter and work harder? Or is it because we slashed taxes for the rich at the same time that we criminalized the poor and took away the handful of lifelines we had offered?

The Republicans are peddling a lie, trying to convince the American people that their plans will magically transform a nation in decline into a reborn superpower, when what they really are offering is further erosion and decay. (The Democrats are only nominally better on this, unwilling as they are to stand up to their corporate sponsors.)

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Sherrod controversy in context: The uses of racism by the right

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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Rachel Maddow last night offered the best summary of the larger meaning of the Shirley Sherrod controversy — one that demonstrates how it is part of a larger narrative the GOP has been using since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the fleeing of southern whites from the Democratic Party.

There are a number of interesting things that could be said — about Fox News’ bias and its infection of the mainstream media, about the weakness of national reporting, the ease with which black women continue to be scapegoated and the capitulation of the Obama administration to Washington’s consensus narrative — but the Maddow point, that the GOP is using lingering white fear of black advancement to fan the flames of resentment in the hopes of recreating the Nixonian southern strategy, is perhaps the most important. I’ll let her explanation stand on its own.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Conason offers voice of sanity on ACORN

You have to hand to the right wing. It certainly gets worked up over the most bizarre things.

Take its fascination with ACORN, with an organization of volunteers that works in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods teaching its residents to help themselves and stand up for themselves. It certainly borders on the psychotic.

Does ACORN have problems? Yes. But as Joe Conason writes on Salon,

To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator.

The uproar over the hidden-camera fiasco — like the wing-nuttery of death panels and the tea-baggers — does nothing more than divert our attention from what really matters. After all, if we’re talking about ACORN, we’re not talking about the nearly 50 million Americans without health coverage, the spiking unemployment rate, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture and all of the other things about which we should be talking.

Or, you could call it military socialism

This is a great Barney Frank quote that I read on Paul Krugman’s blog, but that originally came from Think Progress. Frank, a Massachussets Democrat, said during a press call hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund that the Republicans were being hypocritical in their opposition to the Democrats’ stimulus bill, given the GOP’s consistent use of the military budget to prime the pump:

These arguments will come from the very people who denied that the economic recovery plan created any jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.

As with the family values schpiel, the GOP has been shown to have no clothes.