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anything to win

Mideast blowup could be political right’s
September surprise bid to win election

Sep 15th, 2012
by S.W. Anderson.
7 comments

old-time bombSome demented Americans create a salacious video about the prophet Muhammad, Muslims’ most revered mortal; an excerpt is uploaded to YouTube, and 14 months later an angry mob converges on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Then, in Benghazi, heavily armed terrorists invade and destroy our embassy, killing the ambassador and three other State Department personnel.

Angry demonstrations and attacks against American diplomatic posts flare throughout the Mideast, like fire whipped by treacherous winds spreading across a drought-parched prairie.

Why this and why now?

Is this series of events just coincidental to the late stage of a presidential campaign that’s not going well for America’s anything-to-win Republican Party, its billionaire backers who are used to getting their way, its racist, resentful tea party cohort and its corps of dirty-tricks specialists? It’s possible, but other possibilities should be considered and thoroughly investigated.

What follows is a possible explanation for this week’s events. We don’t claim it’s true, only that it could be — and should be investigated.

One or more super-rich conservative Republicans grow anxious and displeased watching the early 2012 GOP primaries. It seems likely Mitt Romney will be the nominee, leaving the party with a candidate its radical-right base considers a closet moderate and not to be trusted.

Republican governors and legislatures across the country, especially in swing states, are making good progress passing voter-suppression laws. The new laws, passed in response to a problem proven to be minuscule, are clearly designed to keep as many likely Democratic voters as possible from casting ballots in the November election. But our super-rich conservative Republican(s), hereinafter referred to as Deep Pockets, know voter suppression laws could fall prey to court decisions. This effort might even backfire, making targeted voters all the more determined to overcome obstacles thrown in their way.

As spring turns to summer, Deep Pockets sees 2008 happening all over again. Romney isn’t pulling ahead in polls. Even though Romney chose Rep. Paul Ryan to be his No. 2, the public remains unimpressed. Romney is continually called out for lying, and the media publicize repeated instances in which Ryan sought federal funds from programs he had condemned and voted against. Romney’s foreign bank accounts and refusal to release more than two years’ tax returns generates more bad publicity.

The GOP convention comes off as largely a dud. Speaker after speaker touts his own accomplishments, mentioning Romney only as a brief afterthought. Romney’s acceptance speech is credited as his best to date, yet few in or out of the party seem any more enthused about him. Polls show no post-convention bounce. Then the Democrats hold their convention and President Obama gets a good bounce. The media and pundits talk incessantly about the stark difference.

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Wisconsin government goes to highest bidders
as Walker scores historic recall election win

Jun 6th, 2012
by S.W. Anderson.
11 comments

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is feeling the love, after voters backed him Tuesday for a nine-point victory, making him the first governor to win a recall election in U.S. history.

And to think, all it took to bury the chances of Walker’s Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, was $45.6 million, most of it from outside interests and individuals.

If any nonwealthy Wisconsinites voted for Walker in spite of reservations about him and what he’s doing, they had better fasten their seatbelts and prepare for a rough ride in the months ahead. Walker was a conservative Republican, anything-to-win bully before the recall. Now, expect him to feel liberated to pursue his radical, union-busting, trickle-down agenda with no holds barred.

After all, Walker has fat-cat Republicans and special interests all over the country willing to write big checks for him. His state is well stocked with people who can be persuaded by the propaganda those big checks buy to vote against their own best interests.

So for Walker, the Koch brothers, et al, it’s blue skies and green lights all the way in Wisconsin.

No one should be surprised if the repercussions spread beyond Wisconsin. Middle-class people and unions in other states with Walker-type Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures could well see their powers that be emboldened to do more and worse in the months and years ahead.

We hope for their sake the middle-class and working-class voters who gave Walker his easily bought victory don’t end up being road kill when the election’s buyers reap their rewards.

And make no mistake, those election buyers will reap their rewards.

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P.S.: This Mother Jones item, toward the end, provides revealing insight into the kind of big-money interests backing Walker. Think fracking.

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GOP House passes latest of many
anti-worker, union-busting bills

Dec 1st, 2011
by S.W. Anderson.
6 comments

As part of its ongoing war against working people generally and organized labor especially, the House Republican majority today passed H.R. 3094, which would make it easier for businesses to delay a vote by workers on unionization.

The bill, passed on a basically party-line 235-188 vote, thwarts a National Labor Relations Board rule change from earlier in the year intended to allow workers to more quickly and easily vote on joining a union.

Along with limiting the time between workers petitioning for and holding a unionization vote, the NLRB rule change says any employer legal challenges will only be taken up by the board after a vote. H.R. 3094 requires that legal challenges be considered before any vote, ensuring more and longer delays.

Here’s what Kimberly Freeman Brown, director of the labor-rights advocacy group, American Rights at Work, has to say about Republicans’ latest assault on workers.

“Right now, workers face delays of months and sometimes years before they get to vote for a union, if they get to vote at all. And the longer the delay, the more likely employers are to engage in unlawful intimidation of their employees. Rather than correct that problem, this bill would mandate a delay, during which time unscrupulous employers could engage in threats, coercion, and even firing of voters.

“This isn’t just a labor issue. It’s about maintaining standards that hold big corporations accountable so that the rest of us have a fair shake. And if the overwhelming repeal of Ohio’s Senate Bill 5 was any indication, Americans simply won’t stand for attempts to strip those protections away.”

H.R. 3094 is the handiwork of Rep. John Kline, R-Minn.

For those out of the loop about why Republicans are so intent on crushing organized labor, they’re going for a politically self-serving twofer. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson explains excellently Republicans’ twin motives for trying to destroy unions and stick it to working people at every opportunity.

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Easy to tell when Romney lies — his lips are moving

Nov 5th, 2011
by S.W. Anderson.
7 comments

“I‘ve been as consistent as human beings can be. I cannot state every single issue in exactly the same words every single time, and so there are some folks who, obviously, for various political and campaign purposes will try and find some change and try to draw great attention to something which looks like a change which in fact is entirely consistent.”

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—Mitt Romney, businessman, former governor and Republican
presidential candidate, in New Hampshire, to Seacoast Media’s
editorial board, as quoted Nov. 3, 2011, by The Hill

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Sure, Romney, like the following teeny, tiny, little bitty, doesn’t really mean anything different, very slight changes in wording.

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Some little change? Entirely consistent?

Right, and that warm liquid running down the public’s collective leg is just a little rain.

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Bachmann selfishly demagogues issue
that could cost women their lives

Sep 14th, 2011
by S.W. Anderson.
9 comments

Michelle Bachmann

Rep. Michelle Bachmann

An ugly dustup among Republican presidential primary candidates this week offers proof aplenty why none of them belongs in the White House, except on a visitor’s pass.

The row began at Monday’s candidate debate in Tampa, with Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota ripping into Texas Gov. Rick Perry for his 2007 decision to approve mandatory immunization of girls 8 to 12 years old against human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted pathogen that causes cervical cancer.

The HPV immunization, Gardasil, is produced by drug maker Merck, whose political action committee has injected $28,500 into Perry’s campaign coffers since 2001. Noting Merck donated $5,000 to Perry in 2006, Bachmann charged him with crony capitalism for approving a lucrative program for the drug maker one year later.

Perry disingenuously countered that he couldn’t be bought for (only) $5,000, eliciting audience laughter.

Of course, being a conflict among radical-conservative Republicans, this wasn’t just about how Perry’s a sold-out politician repaying his corporate sugar daddies.

The fight over requiring vaccinations for young girls . . . involved government prerogatives and cancer. But it also had a strong moral subtext: Bachmann and other social conservatives objected to forcible inoculations against a disease spread by sexual activity, while Perry defended himself with the language of the antiabortion movement.

“I am always going to err on the side of life. And that’s what this was really all about for me,” he said Monday night.

Indeed, Perry’s decision, however rooted in corrupt motivation, is defensible on lifesaving grounds. But among fundamentalist Christians, it’s not uncommon for ostentatious righteousness to trump mundane considerations like life and death. It also bears mentioning that Perry’s commitment to erring on the side of life slipped off the radar after righteous ( and woefully ignorant) Texans prompted state lawmakers to kill enabling legislation for the Gardasil program.

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Boehner talks business orthodoxy
for cynical fun and political profit

Jul 26th, 2011
by S.W. Anderson.
26 comments

Boehner

Boehner

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, thinks our federal government should be run just like a business, and said so in his TV speech last night following President Obama’s address about raising the debt ceiling and deficit-reduction efforts.

Before I served in Congress, I ran a small business in Ohio. I was amazed at how different Washington, D.C., operated than every business in America. Where most American businesses make the hard choices to pay their bills and live within their means, in Washington more spending and more debt is business as usual.

If there was no other reason to regard Boehner as ignorant about the government he’s made himself a part of for many years, that statement would be more than enough.

The reason is simple: the business of business is making profit, while the “business” of government is serving the people in all sorts of ways, unfortunately sometimes including waging war, based not on financial imperatives, but rather on people’s needs and preferences.

The difference is cast in stark relief when the economy is depressed. The first thing businesses do when the economy goes south is cut the payroll. Sound government economic policy in those circumstances is to shore up demand by increasing spending, thus acting as a countervailing force that discourages additional layoffs and promotes hiring.

Because tax revenues decline during recessions and depressions, stimulative spending is necessarily deficit spending. There is no harm in that. To the contrary, by limiting or reversing a downward spiral in which falling demand leads to more and more layoffs, ensuring even lower demand, government’s deficit spending is an investment in hastening recovery. Recovery brings with it revenues to reduce the deficit and start paying down the national debt.

That all goes against Republicans’ ideology. Boehner revealed part of why that ideology is out of sync with reality, bad for the economy and, if implemented, hellish for millions of Americans. It’s a matter of inappropriately imposing business imperatives and standard operating procedure on our government and the people our government serves.

Such inappropriateness isn’t attributable to ideology alone. Republicans’ recently rediscovered zeal for fiscal austerity is propelled by political ambition. By blowing up the need to raise the debt ceiling into a manufactured crisis and using that to blackmail the president and congressional Democrats into an orgy of budget slashing, Boehner and the rest of the Republicans are trying to reverse economic recovery into a downward spiral.

It all sounds so innocent, though. To hear Boehner tell it, he and his horde just want government to be as sensible and responsible as managers of businesses large and small.

The cynical truth is that what Boehner and the rest of the Republicans really want is to send the “misery index” through the roof ahead of the 2012 election. If that means financially ruining millions more working-class and middle-class Americans, bankrupting thousands more businesses, a few states and localities, so be it.

Because, what Boehner and the Republican Party are really about is the same thing President George W. Bush was really about when he set the country up for the mess it’s in: anything to win.


For an excellent, brief, yet remarkably complete synopsis of the current economic situation, see A boom in corporate profits, a bust in jobs, wages.


Texas Republican candidate: Our way or else

Oct 22nd, 2010
by S.W. Anderson.
19 comments

“If the government is not producing the results or has become destructive Quote logoto the ends of our liberties, we have a right to get rid of that government and to get rid of it by any means necessary.”

(Asked if violence is an option): “The option is on the table. I don’t think that we should remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms.”

—Stephen Broden, pastor and Republican candidate,
Texas 30th congressional district,
during an interview, Oct. 21, 2010.


Sedition, (n) rebellion or incitement: actions or words intended to provoke or incite rebellion against government authority, or actual rebellion against government authority.

Treason (n) 1. Violation of allegiance toward one’s country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one’s country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies; 2. A betrayal of trust or confidence.

Texas Republican (n) See “Sedition” and “Treason” above.

Iowa GOP surrogates liken Obama to Hitler, Lenin

Jul 14th, 2010
by S.W. Anderson.
30 comments

L oons and lowlifes of the tea party kind in Mason City, Iowa, have a billboard up showing Adolf Hitler, President Obama and Vladimir Lenin side by side.

This despicable attempt at propaganda neatly overlooks the fact Hitler is infamous for military aggression against smaller, weaker countries — something ex-President George W. Bush is guilty of and Obama is not.

But then, since when have radical-conservative Republicans dealt in truth and made sense?

That’s right, the people behind the billboard are Republican right wingers carrying water for the GOP in tea party camouflage. You can bet the rent that if an investigative reporter were to look into their background, he’d find characters right out of the 23 percenters who supported Bush to his last regrettable day in office. Check them out again two years from now and you’ll find them waving Republican banners and cheering that blighted party’s next second-coming-of-Reagan wannabe.

How convenient this is for the GOP. Republicans have a surrogate group putting up scurrilous billboards, routinely showing blatantly racist, thoroughly dishonest posters and signs and lying like swiftboaters at their worst. But if asked about what the tea partyers are saying and doing, Republicans dodge any involvement or responsibility.

How convenient for Republicans, too, that the corporate media are devoting even less investigative effort and fact-checking on tea party types than they did on the swiftboaters. But oh how the media give these lowlifes free publicity and exposure with which to push their message.

Republicans kick million people who are down
in fiendish bid for their own political gain

Jun 25th, 2010
by S.W. Anderson.
8 comments

GOP buzzardFollowing the cynical, politically selfish example set earlier this year by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., senators of the Party of No, joined by DINO Sen. Ben Nelson, Neb., killed a desperately needed extension of unemployment benefits Thursday.

As Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., points out, Republicans complained the $30 billion jobless pay extension for people out of work six months or more wasn’t paid for, so it would add to the deficit — something that didn’t matter at all to them when a billionaire’s estate recently went completely untaxed thanks to their legislation.

As a result, more than a million people now have no way to make ends meet. Nothing. Tuition tax credits to help the next generation be more employable are going away too.

The $110 billion bill included provisions to keep states from dumping large numbers of teachers, police and fire personnel, and tax breaks for businesses intended to spur hiring. It was downsized considerably from an earlier, more-expensive version.

This clearly has nothing to do with the deficit. That’s a lame cover story. Republicans in Congress voted aye, aye, aye all the way for eight years, as President George W. Bush proceeded to rack up more debt faster than any president ever had, ultimately ballooning the deficit to greater heights than all previous presidents combined. Of course, that was then, when marching in lockstep with their fearless misleader was all that matterered.

Ever since Barack Obama became president and Democrats won control of Congress, the party of yes, yes, yes has been the Party of No. Their real objective, as made clear by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., is to bring about Obama’s Waterloo and that of congressional Democrats as well.

Republicans know when people are anxious and angry because they have no job and no job opportunity in sight, they turn their wrath on the party in power at election time. Pulling the safety net out from under them might be the dirtiest kind of political trick, but Republicans are old hands at anything-to-win tactics.

Everyone in America should be made to know that what Republicans are doing now isn’t just partisan politics as usual. It goes way beyond their typical election-year dirty tricks.

What Republicans are doing now is pure damn evil.

S.C. justice conveniently blind

May 3rd, 2010
by S.W. Anderson.
7 comments

Unbothered by his own glaring conflict of interest, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster says Gov. Mark Sanford is clear of criminal charges for Sanford’s use of state aircraft for family trips, pricier business-class commercial flights, questionable use of campaign money and two trips to Argentina to see his lover.

What a small, cozy world South Carolina is among fellow Republican officials.

Of course, Lt.Gov. Andre Bauer, who’s competing with McMaster to succeed Sanford as governor, might not feel all that cozy, because the AG’s decision to not prosecute foreclosed a chance for Bauer to run as an incumbent — probably an advantage.

That conflict of interest and resulting appearance of a complete whitewash leaves Sanford crowing about vindication and insisting he’s always watching out for taxpayers. Not everyone is convinced.

McMaster’s decision to conduct the investigation has been questioned by legal scholars and others who believed his own canidadacy for governor represented a conflict of interest. At the time Sanford’s affair first broke, McMaster staffers made public comments urging Republicans not to oust the governor and allow Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer to assume the governorship.

McMaster said the law did not allow him to turn the case over to another prosecutor and he was not elected to hand off difficult decisions.

No suh, no shying away from some self-leveraged political advantage for this South Carolina Republican.

Perhaps more disgusting than Sanford’s behavior and McMaster’s apparent whitewash is the bottom line for South Carolinians: in all likelihood, their next governor will either be racist crackpot Bauer or McMaster.

Bauer made the news a few months back when he declared in a campaign appearance that the way to have fewer poor people is to quit feeding them, because getting enough to eat just makes them breed more.

Then again, if most South Carolina voters continue their “any Republican, no matter how crackpot and/or crooked, is better than a Democrat” ways, they deserve what they get.

We just feel bad for South Carolinians who know better and want better for their state, but keep being outvoted. It must be maddening.

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