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Sunday, August 23, 2015

The Daily Drift

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Petition Calling For Jon Stewart To Moderate A Presidential Debate Is Being Signed By Thousands

Petition Calling For Jon Stewart To Moderate A Presidential Debate Is Being Signed By ThousandsA petition on Change.org calling for Jon Stewart to moderate a 2016 presidential debate is currently the fastest growing on the site.

‘We need a national atmosphere of the spirit of Jimmy Carter’

Cornel West speaks to CNN (screen grab)
Cornel West: ‘We need a national atmosphere of the spirit of Jimmy Carter’ instead of Trump

Alan Grayson Introduces Bill To Increase Social Security Benefits

Rep. Alan Grayson Introduces Bill To Increase Social Security Benefits

Bernie Sanders To Introduce Legislation Abolishing Private Prisons When Congress Reconvenes

Bernie Sanders To Introduce Legislation Abolishing Private Prisons When Congress Reconvenes

Bernie Sanders’ Red State Revolution Causes 2 SC Rallies To Move To Bigger Venues

In a statement, the Sanders campaign announced that two rallies in South Carolina had to be moved to larger venues after crowd projections outgrew the original locations. …
Bernie Sanders Portland, Maine
The demand to see Bernie Sanders is so high that his campaign was forced to move two rallies in South Carolina to larger locations.
In a statement, the Sanders campaign announced that two upcoming rallies in South Carolina had to be moved to larger venues after crowd projections outgrew the original locations.
The Sanders campaign announced, “With turnout projections mounting, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign has shifted the location of Sunday’s rally in Charleston, South Carolina, to the Charleston Convention Center. The two-day swing includes stops in Greenville, Columbia and Sumter.”
Bernie Sanders has found fantastic success in red states. Sanders has drawn big crowds in Texas and Louisana, and he drew a then 2016 record crowd when 11,000 showed up to support him at a rally in Arizona.
There is a valuable lesson about the generalities of political polarization in what Sen. Sanders is accomplishing. The Sanders message that the government must work for ordinary Americans and that the billionaires and special interests must be defeated in order to return power back to the people is a natural fit for many residents of red states.
Red state Democrats who get little attention from the national Democratic Party are coming out in droves to hear a presidential candidate ask them for their support. The message in both the Obama 2008 campaign and what Sanders is doing in 2016 is that Democrats shouldn’t limit themselves to a box of blue states and a few swing states.
A liberal economic message can be popular in all parts of the country. Sen. Sanders is leading a political grassroots revolution, and it is logical that some of the people who would be most willing to join the cause are the ones who have experienced the tyranny of the wingnut billionaires first hand in their own states.
Bernie Sanders is building a national movement of people in both red and blue states who are fed up with a corrupt system that is being controlled by a handful of billionaire donors.
Senator Sanders is challenging the billionaires on their own turf, and judging from the response of the people, he’s winning.

The Truth Hurts

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The Country’s Job Creators Are Increasingly Women Of Color

Somebody better not tell the wingnut racists ... it will destroy their little minds

It’s the Stupid Economy: Why Income Inequality Ought To Be This Election’s Hot Topic

trickle-down-economics
The health of an economy should correlate directly to the health of the people living within it, not to their economic impoverishment.
Bernie Sanders’ socialist presence in the presidential primary mix as well as populist sentiment brewing on both sides of the political aisle promise, hopefully, to keep the much-needed conversation on income inequality front and center in our national debates.
Unfortunately, the discussions of income inequality too often get subsumed into questions about the health of the U.S. economy overall—as politicians preach to Bill Clinton’s same old song, “It’s the economy, stupid.” We need, though, to recognize that these are not the same discussions at all. In fact, many proposals to prop up—or restore the health of–our current economic system are actually at odds with improving the standard of living for workers in America. For example, while “Right-to Work” laws might to some extent be effective in creating business-friendly environments attractive to corporations, in states with such legislation workers tend to receive less in both wages and benefits. Nonetheless, despite this data, Governor Bruce Rauner of Illinois is pushing for right-to-work legislation by creating “economic empowerment zones” in which local communities could decide if workers can opt out of paying dues to the unions which protect them in the workplace and bargain for their wages and benefits. In this case, empowering the economy means disempowering workers and decreasing their wages and benefits.
We have to ask, is this the type of economy we want to improve, stupid? Can’t we organize our economic life more smartly?
Brownback’s efforts to improve the local economy in Kansas by dramatically slashing taxes on businesses and the wealthy overall have resulted in severe social decay, leaving a wasteland without adequate revenue to sustain public schools or vital social services.
So much for trickle-down economics. But even the ludicrous pretense that the wealth redistributed to the top will trickle down has been dropped.
Trump, for example, in a recent interview with The Detroit News actually outlined a plan to drive down wages, pointing the finger at auto-workers who, he believes, earn too high of a wage. Expressing dismay that Ford plans to open a factory in Mexico, Trump proposed an alternative strategy for lowering labor costs that would keep jobs in the U.S. by closing plants in Michigan and moving production to more corporate-friendly regions: “You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you’d full-circle—you’ll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less. We can do rotation in the United States—it doesn’t have to be in Mexico.”
We see here no plan to address income inequality as a social ill but only to exacerbate it as a corporate benefit for the wealthy. Moreover, Trump reveals that the sought-after boosts in corporate profits are not intended at all to trickle down. The wealth only trickles up from wage reductions workers suffer, perpetrating another mass re-distribution of wealth from the bottom to the top.
For all their railing against calls for re-distribution of wealth, our nation’s economic elite seem to engage quite a bit in the practice.
Of course, even many of the most persistent arguments marshaled to defend policies aimed at addressing the wealth gap rely, typically, on their own brand of trickle up economics. Nick Hanauer, for example, a venture capitalist with the Seattle-based firm Second Avenue partners, dismisses “the dire warnings of economic calamity [that] rain down” whenever the prospect of raising wages arises. He terms this alarmist response “Chicken Little economics,” documenting that these alarms have sounded with every substantial increase in the minimum wage since 1938 without the economic sky ever having fallen. In urging New York to raise its minimum wage to fifteen dollars, he points to Seattle and San Francisco as cities that significantly increased their minimum wage to the benefit rather than detriment of their economies. Raising the minimum wage, so goes the argument, creates more able consumers, buoying the economy as a whole and causing wealth to trickle up.
Still, these arguments center around the question of whether raising the minimum wage—a small step in addressing income inequality—helps or hurts the economy. They never question the current economic arrangement in any fundamental way. Consider, for example, some of the following headlines on stories covering this ongoing issue on CNBC.Com: “State Minimum Wage Hikes: Help or Hindrance?” and “Easy Street or the Breadline?: New Year Wage Hike Debated.”
The debate usually goes like this: Opponents of a minimum wage increase offer the threatening prospect that the strain on employers will be so great that businesses, particularly small ones, will be forced to eliminate positions, especially entry-level jobs, resulting in more bust than boom for American workers. The other side usually represented asserts that since raising the minimum wage provides more disposable income for the lowest paid workers struggling to meet their needs, the increase will function as an immediate economic stimulus since the money earned will be immediately pumped back into the economy, which is largely driven by consumer spending. These proponents who see the increase as economic stimulus tend to downplay the Congressional Budget Office’s forecast that while 24.5 million workers will get a raise, 500,000 workers might lose their jobs were the federal minimum wage to be raised to $10.10.
While there is plenty of illogic in this debate, first we have to highlight the ill-conceived nature of the question itself, as asking whether increasing the minimum wage will hurt or help the economy leads us down a dead end.
Here’s what I mean:
From a progressive political perspective, what if we discover that raising the minimum wage would hurt the economy? Should we then cease to advocate for the infinitesimal redistribution of wealth that would help low-wage workers, who play such a key role in producing the wealth of our nation, meet their basic needs? Should the progressive position be that those working for low wages must continue to do so and stop asking for more, regardless of whether or not they can meet their basic needs on those wages, so that more people aren’t thrown out of work and the economy isn’t hurt?
Of course not, but progressives need to re-frame the debate. To those who argue that raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy, we need to ask how smartly organized is an economy in which those who do vital and necessary work cannot afford to meet their most basic needs.
The health of an economy, it seems to me, should correlate directly to the health of the people living within it, not to their economic impoverishment. If a healthy or strong economy requires that those who work within it to produce and distribute goods and services are not able themselves to access those goods and services to meet their needs, then we need to question the human viability of that economy, not worry about whether we’re hurting the economy with our policies. Indeed, an economy that achieves health when the people working within it suffer is one that we need to hurt by dismantling and overhauling it. The economy is supposed to serve us; we aren’t supposed to serve the economy.
What we need to do is remind ourselves that the purpose of an economy is, in the most efficient way, to produce and distribute goods and services to meet the needs of those living within the economy. As the wealth gap increases, it seems clear our economy is not doing that. Malcolm X famously said, “We didn’t land on Plymouth rock. Plymouth rock landed on us.” We might adapt this saying to characterize an economy that seems to land hard on the people who work within it rather than working hard for its people.

Madeline Albright Calls Out Jeb On His Lies About ISIS And On the shrub’s Record In Iraq

Candidates all say things on the campaign trail that stretch, bend and sometimes mangle the truth. There are fact checkers galore every time one of them gives a speech. However, Jeb was taken to task by one fact checker who knows her stuff — former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.In an op-ed piece for Politico, Secretary Albright certainly pulls no punches, calling Jeb a liar and shining a bright light on his attempts to rewrite history:
Republican pretender candidate Jeb Bush’s brazen attempts to rewrite history in a series of campaign appearances last week cannot go unchallenged. By blaming President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the rise of ISIL, Jeb is clearly seeking to absolve his brother’s junta of responsibility for today’s problems in Iraq. This argument may serve Jeb’s political interests, but it does a disservice to the truth.
Albright, the country’s first female Secretary of State, shared the ACTUAL history of ISIL, reminding us that the cabal emerged after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, LONG before President Obama and Hillary Clinton (acting as Secretary of State) were on the scene. Secretary Albright went on to castigate ‘the smartest shrub’ for forgetting that his brother, the shrub, negotiated the military pull-out date from Iraq. President Obama wanted to stay in Iraq longer to further stabilize the country, but could not because the Iraq government refused to grant U.S. soldiers immunity from prosecution. She continued to criticize Jeb for his rhetoric, which she believes is damaging to diplomatic efforts in the region, as well as how the United States is perceived globally.
In conclusion, Secretary Albright slams it home by stating,
“The United States cannot afford another shrub who blinds himself to global reality and who forges ahead into chaos. Americans deserve a president who will acknowledge the past and will forge a better future.”
Well played, Madam Secretary … well played.

Why Republicans Will Have Trouble Winning The Latino Vote, In One Poll

Hillary Clinton Just Used Two Tweets To Show Republican Candidates Are Being Racist Assholes

Hillary Clinton Just Used Two Tweets To Show Republican Candidates Are Being Racist A**holesThis is how Democrats will win — by standing up for the victims of Republican hate-speech. Kudos to Hillary Clinton!

The Rest Of The World Gets It ...

Deez Nuts Takes 9% In North Carolina

Deez Nuts Takes 9% In North Carolina

The Crazies Overrun North Carolina As Trump Leads In New Poll

Trump leads Clinton 45-42 in North Carolina, raising Republican cabal fears that he might be more electable than his critics realize.…
clinton-trump
A Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey released on August 19th has numbers that should make Democrats take notice. In a hypothetical head to head match up with Hillary Clinton, in the swing state of North Carolina, Trump leads 45-42. He holds a virtually identical 43-40 lead over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the same poll.
Trump also holds a commanding lead over his Republican cabal competitors in North Carolina. In the Republican primary race, Trump has 24 percent support, well ahead of Carson (14 percent) and Jeb (13 percent).
North Carolina is a pivotal swing state. Barack Obama won the Tar Heel State in 2008, defeating John McCain by a narrow 49.7 to 49.4 margin. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state over Obama 50.4 to 48.4 percent.
While Democrats don’t need to carry North Carolina to win a general election, the state has become a competitive state that can serve as a barometer for a candidate’s political viability. A Republican cannot afford to lose North Carolina. A Democrat can win without it, but failure to carry the state all but guarantees a tight election, since North Carolina only leans slightly more red than the nation as a whole.
The PPP poll is one of the first indications that while Trump’s ideas remain a joke, his campaign may not be a joke. His viability in North Carolina hints at the discomforting possibility that he may turn out to be electable. At the very least, his 43-40 edge over Clinton shows he is an upgrade over Jeb, who manages just a 42-42 tie with Clinton in North Carolina.
Of course, the general election is still over a year away, and Trump is certainly a volatile candidate who could say or do something that disqualifies him from consideration by a large cross section of the electorate. However, he has already said outrageous things that should have derailed his campaign, and voters have either agreed with him or simply shrugged their shoulders. For Democrats, it is far too early to panic about the thought of a Trump junta. However, it is not too early to take the threat seriously and to start mobilizing voters to make sure it never happens.

Jeb Suggests Donald Trump Is A Secret Progressive

Palin: I'm 'So Happy' With Trump'

Palin: I'm 'So Happy' With Trump'

Bill O’Reilly: We’re All Gonna Die Because Liberals Don’t Punish The Poor Enough!

Bill O’Reilly: We’re All Gonna Die Because Liberals Don’t Punish The Poor Enough! Bill O’Reilly wants you to think we’re on the verge of becoming South Africa – because Oscar Pistorius! Who’s probably on his way to New York City or Chicago right now so he can kill people with abandon, thanks to Mayors Bill de Blasio, Rahm Emanuel and, of course, President Obama!

Wingnuts Scared Michelle Obama Will Run in 2016: ‘Burn Down The White House’

Conservatives Scared Michelle Obama Will Run in 2016: ‘Burn Down The White House’  (SCREENSHOTS)
Wingnuts have decided that “gorilla” and “tranny” Michelle Obama is going to run for President — and they’re ready to “burn down the White House” if she is elected!

Final Nail In The Coffin For Republican Cabal 'Autopsy' Report ...

As Republicans Rally Around Trump's Anti-Immigration Plan
Remember the republican cabal autopsy report, the document the republican national coven commissioned following the cabal’s pummeling in the 2012 elections? It may be hard to remember since the report, which called for the cabal to remake its image but supported no substantive changes in public policy,... MORE

Wingnut Hate Speech Radio Hack: Let’s Use Hispanic Slaves To Build Southern Border Wall

Conservative Radio Host: Let’s Use Hispanic Slaves To Build Southern Border Wall (AUDIO)Nearly every Republican candidate has been on his show. Not one has condemned his comments.

Hillary Clinton Obliterates Jeb For His Defense Of Hateful “Anchor Babies” Slur

hillary-clinton-voting
The Hillary Clinton campaign came down hard on Jeb after the Republican defended the use of the slur “anchor babies.”
Hillary For America Latino Outreach Director, Lorella Praeli, pulled no punches in a statement:
During a press conference Jeb tried to outdo Trump and other Republican pretender candidates by doubling down on the hateful term ‘anchor baby’ when referring to the U.S. born children of immigrants.

It’s a disgrace to see these candidates attack a group of American citizens who not only have the same rights as everybody else in this country but also represent the very values this country was built on.

If Republicans continue to wonder how to label these children, Hillary has already made it clear to them: They are not ‘anchor babies.’ They are babies. They are our neighbors. They are our families. They are part of our communities. They are American citizens. Period.
Jeb was asked by reporters if he regretted using the term anchor babies during a recent radio interview, and he snapped at the reporter, “You give me a better term and I’ll use it.”
Jeb knew that the term was offensive because as co-chair of the Hispanic Leadership Network, he signed off on a memo that warned wingnuts that the term anchor baby could be viewed as offensive.
The biggest indicator that anchor baby is an offensive slur is that Latinos have reacted to Bush’s comments with outrage. Rep. Linda Sanchez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said, “From the depths of my heart, I look at someone like Jeb, who really should know better and that all I can think of is the Spanish term, sirvengüenza, which means somebody who is completely without shame to attack children this way.”
The Clinton campaign was correct. Jeb’s use of the slur was a disgraceful bit of shameless political pandering in a desperate attempt to out do Trump’s racism. Jeb was trying to reassure Republican voters that he is a racist bigot too.
The people that Jeb, Trump, and their fellow Republicans are demonizing are children. Innocent children who did not get to choose where they were born. These kids are also legal citizens of the United States of America. Republican cruelty to children is the Republican cabal’s new family value.
Republicans can resist. They are giving in to their racist impulses and throwing away any chance that they once had of winning in 2016. The only anchor that Republicans should be talking about is the anchor of racism that is sinking their cabal.

Jindal's 'Anchor Baby' Double Standard

Jindal's mother moved to America already three months pregnant, but he still said he was happy to use the term anchor baby in the current debate about birthright citizenship.

Anti-Planned Parenthood Coven Caught Passing Stillbirth Photo Off As Abortion

Your Weekly Guide To The Wingnutosphere

Here are the best reports, investigations, exposées, and debunkery of the wingnutosphere this past week.

Kiddie Time at the Republican cabal 2016

Hot hate for Fiorina, Weiner's wiener hacking, politicizing rape, and Ann Coulter charging Trump for use of her rump oh my!…

Why The Wingnuts’ #AllLivesMatter Is Complete Bull Shit

Why Conservatives’ #AllLivesMatter Is Complete B.S.
When you take into account their positions on the death penalty, the wars they’ve championed, and their desire to take away healthcare, they don’t really believe All Lives Matter.

They Can't Get A Room ...

The Guesthouse Inn cancelled reservations belonging to the Council of  'Conservative' Citizens, a white supremacist group. The group had planned a weekend conference that included a “meet and greet” and other events.

'Christian' Pastor Out On Bond For Child Sexual Abuse, Arrested For Child Sexual Abuse

Featured image credit: video screen capture WCHS
This guy’s family members and supporters literally have to be seen to be believed.
Read more

For The Third Time, David Barton Falsely Claims Obama Administration Won't Prosecute Child Pornography


As we have noted several times before, David Barton is not about to stop repeating one of his shrieking points merely because it happens to be demonstrably false, and other day he provided more evidence that he simply does not seem to care about the truth of the things that he says. Since 2011, we have he... MORE