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Utah Lawmaker: I Don't Mind "the Gays," but "I Don’t Want ‘Em Stuffing it Down My Throat all the Time"
Posted by Zaid Jilani, Think Progress on November 20, 2009 at 2:32 PM.

Earlier this month, the Church of Latter Day Saints made headlines when it threw its support behind a measure in Salt Lake City that barred “landlords and employers from discriminating based on sexuality,” making it the first city in Utah to adopt the gay rights measure. Now, the Mormon Church is backing a similar statewide bill, enlisting the help of a variety of lawmakers to help get it passed. One such lawmaker is Sen. Chris Buttars (R), who, despite his adamant support for an earlier proposition that banned same-sex marriage, does believe that sexual orientation deserves protection from employer and landlord abuse. However, while explaining his opposition to allowing same-sex couples to adopt children, he told the press that while he doesn’t “mind” gays, he doesn’t want them “stuffing it down [his] throat all the time“:

BUTTARS: I meet with the gays here and there. They were in my house two weeks ago. I don’t mind gays. But I don’t want ‘em stuffing it down my throat all the time. Certainly not in my kid’s face.

Watch it:

In the past, Buttars has said that gay men and women are “the greatest threat to America going down.” “I believe they will destroy the foundation of the American society,” he said in February. “In my mind, it’s the beginning of the end. … Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide.” Last year, the NAACP called for his resignation because of his comments about a controversial bill: “This baby is black, I’ll tell you,” said Buttars. “This is a dark and ugly thing.”

Krauthammer Commits Terrorist Act on the Opinion Pages of the Washington Post
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on November 20, 2009 at 1:41 PM.

Perhaps we should be concerned about Charles Krauthammer. He's been awfully stressed-out since the last election, and this week's decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York has him in a bit of a state ...

For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the "propaganda of the deed." And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 -- not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.

And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life -- and KSM, a second act: "9/11, The Director's Cut," narration by KSM.

Smell a bit of jealousy here? Krauthammer and Mohammed share a similar interest: instilling a profound dread of Islamic fundamentalism in the hearts of the American public -- the world public. Krauthammer's owned 9/11 for 8 years, and he'll have the final cut, not the damn director!

September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself ...

Right, the Bush bunch and all those right-wing bloggers never spoke on that day's behalf.

A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

We've seen terror trials. Judges have been pretty about not allowing the defendants to use them as a megaphone to promote their worldviews.

But setting aside reality for a moment -- and you have to in order to really soak in a good Krauthammer column -- I'm going to ask you to forget about politics and consider just what in the world might KSM say at that trial that has right-wingers cowering under their beds? Do you think he could -- gasp! -- accuse the U.S. of being craven imperialists? Of supporting Israeli "genocide" against the Palestinians? Might he dare suggest that we're waging a war on Islam? That we're trying to impose our decadent values on the rest of the world? My God, do you think he could accuse us of having some sort of interest in Middle East oil?!?

If KSM were permitted to utter these shocking allegations, would they come as a surprise to anyone? Is the danger here that nobody in the Muslim world has ever heard of such outlandish ideas before? Will ordinary Muslim men and women, hearing Mohammed's suggestion that America might be the Great Satan for the first time on some Al Jazeera broadcast suddenly drop whatever they're doing and strike out against the infidels?

I mean, seriously? If you're not already predisposed to al Qaeda's message (which one assumes is widely available), would you really give what Mohammed says during testimony a lot of credence (again, in the unlikely case they let him ramble)? Is he that articulate? Are we trying the scruffy dude who says he chopped off Daniel Pearl's head or Noam Chomsky here?

Whatever the risk, for Krauthammer it's just not worth it...

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Will the Tea-Baggers Come After McCain? Will Palin Ride to His Rescue?!?
Posted by Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog on November 20, 2009 at 12:08 PM.

I don't put much stock in the wingnut-skewed Rasmussen polls, but there's one out now that says John McCain might be at risk of a teabag purge -- according to the poll, McCain is barely ahead of talk-radio host and ex-congressman J.D. Hayworth, 45%-43%, in a potential primary matchup. (Hayworth isn't a declared candidate.)

In response to this, Bill Kristol writes:

Still, who could help McCain beat back a populist conservative challenger? Sarah Palin. I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative -- a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist -- than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth.

Really? And risk damaging Brand Palin, which stands for the rescue of America from both Marxist Kenyan fascism and the RINOism of which all teabaggers believe John McCain to be the living embodiment?

Nahhh -- there's no way she's going to endorse someone against a candidate who is (or might be) identified with the teabag Cause. And as we can tell from her memoir, she's certainly not going to do anything for McCain out of gratitude for his decision to make her a star. So no, Bill -- you're wrong again.

Video: Progressive Change Campaign Committee Robocalls For the Public Option
Posted by AlterNet Staff, AlterNet on November 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

Last month, as Majority Leader Harry Reid considered whether to include a public health-insurance plan in the bill he would put before the Senate, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee ran as him hard, pressuring the leader with television ads in his home state of Nevada, where Reid is expected to face a difficult re-election campaign for his Senate seat.

Now, having won that battle -- Reid indeed included a public option in the Senate bill -- PCCC is marshaling support for Reid as he shepherds the bill though the legislative process, making robocalls recorded by Lee Slaughter, the Nevada nurse who appeared in the ad that was used to pressure Reid. People receiving the call are given a keypad option that allows them to sign up for PCCC's public option campaign. (The online sign-up page is here.)

Below find a video that features Slaughter's robocall as its audio.

VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

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More Republicans Think Obama Stole an Election than Democrats Believe Bush Did
Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left on November 20, 2009 at 9:53 AM.

A new survey from PPP (PDF) shows that 26% of Americans, most of whom are Republicans, think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama.

For the sake of comparison, a Gallup poll immediately following Gore's concession in the 2000 election showed that 18% of the county, a significant percentage of whom were African-American, believed that Bush stole the election.

In 2004, the numbers for Bush were even lower.  Back then, in the wake of Kerry's concession, a Gallup poll showed only 13% of the country believed that Bush stole the election.  (FWIW, I was among the 5% or so that shifted from 2000 to 2004.)

This is simultaneously a demonstration that hard-core conservatives live in an entirely different reality than the rest of the country, and that the hardcore conservative base is as much as twice as large as the hardcore progressive base. 

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Out-of-Control Rick Perry Overrides Rare Clemency Vote, Executes Man Who Killed No One
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on November 20, 2009 at 8:37 AM.

This post originally appeared in PEEK.

Rick Perry is out of control.

Even as the controversy over his execution of an innocent man goes unresolved, last night the Texas Governor rejected a rare clemency recommendation from the state Board of Pardons and Paroles for a man facing execution for a murder he did not commit.

Robert Lee Thompson was an accomplice in a violent convenience store robbery in Houston in 1996, when his co-conspirator fatally shot the sales clerk, a man named Mansoor Bhai Rahim Mohammed. Thompson himself fired shots that wounded Mohammed, but it was his partner, Sammy Butler, who pulled the trigger that would leave him dead. Butler was tried and sentenced to life. A different jury found Thompson guilty and sentenced him to death.

Thompson was sentenced under Texas's Law of Parties, a cynical legal statute that allows multiple parties to be found guilty of the same crime, even if they did not directly participate in it. Similar to other felony murder statutes, Texas's law states that "if, in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another felony is committed by one of the conspirators, all conspirators are guilty of the felony actually committed, though having no intent to commit it."

Under the Law of Parties, defendants can be held responsible for "failing to anticipate" that the "conspiracy" would lead to a murder.

Numerous defendants who did not kill anyone have been executed under the Law of Parties; that Perry wouldn't hesitate to sign off on Thompson's execution should comes as no surprise. But yesterday Thompson was granted a recommendation for clemency by the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles -- an extremely rare move. The Board, whose members are political appointments, has only recommended clemency two other times in recent memory.

One of these was two years ago in the case of Kenneth Foster, Jr., who also faced execution under the Law of Parties. In his case, the murder took place while he was in a car, 18 feet away. A grassroots campaign rose up to stop Foster's execution and in August 2007, Perry took the Board's recommendation and spared his life.

Yesterday, the Board voted 5 to 2 to spare Robert Lee Thompson, a "highly unusual" move in the words of the Houston Chronicle, and one described by Thompson's lawyer, as "hugely significant."

"I'm thrilled," he said, upon hearing news of the Board vote.

But in Texas, the Governor has the final say in clemency decisions. Despite the rare recommendation, Perry, who faces a close primary election next year against Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, was unmoved. Hours after the Board's vote, he released a statement saying that he saw "no reason" to spare Thompson's life.

Thompson was executed on schedule, at 6pm Texas time. According to AP reporter Michael Graczyk, "his mother cried uncontrollably, stomped her feet and finally demanded to be taken from the witness area before her son was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m."

Statements were released by the Texas Moratorium Network on behalf of family members of death row prisoners also sentenced under the Law of Parties, including one from Terri Been, whose brother, Jeff Wood, came close to being executed in August 2008 for a murder he did not commit.

"I must say that I was surprised to hear that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles grew a conscious and voted in favor of clemency for Robert Thompson, since they unanimously voted for the execution of my brother, Jeff Wood, who was also convicted under the law of parties despite the fact that he is factually innocent of murder," said Been. "However, I was not surprised to hear Perry didn't jump on board the clemency train as the man has no sense of true justice."  

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Mom Lets Cops Taze 10 Year-Old Daughter Who Refused to Take a Shower
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise on November 20, 2009 at 7:50 AM.

This story should put the annoying "bad mommy" confessional genre out of its misery. Nothing can top this. Bad mommies have officially jumped the shark:

An Arkansas mom allegedly allowed a police office to taze (link fixed) her 10-year-old daughter because the girl was having a tantrum. The girl will face disorderly conduct charges. The head of the Arkansas State Police says he isn't sure if the officer made a mistake when he shocked an unarmed child who wouldn't take a shower.

Any Afghan 'Surge' Is a Snare and a Delusion
Posted by Meteor Blades, Daily Kos on November 20, 2009 at 5:00 AM.

Given the record of Goldman Sachs (as detailed in McClatchy's five-part series), AIG, Halliburton and other supposedly upright U.S. corporations, it's a tad arrogant to complain about the corruption of other countries. Endemic or not, the wink-wink, nod-nod deals of much of the Third World amount to peanuts when compared with the rip-offs visited on taxpayers, investors and consumers here at home. So, while the U.S. ranks 19th on the Transparency Index's corruption scale, and Afghanistan ranks 179th, one step off the bottom, there's a little more to the picture than can be addressed by such metrics.

Be that as it may, corruption is viewed as one of the key obstacles in dealing with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. That corruption, as the "leaked cables" sent to the White House by U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry pointed out, may make the sending of more troops foolish if President Karzai, newly sworn in after a tainted election, cannot be made to root it out. As Tom Engelhardt explains, however, rooting it out is like asking Karzai either to commit suicide or "drink the sea":

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New Right-Wing Craze Prays That Obama's 'Days Be Few'
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on November 20, 2009 at 4:00 AM.

The newest far-right craze is an anti-Obama slogan that is making its way onto t-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, and even teddy bears: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8,” which reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” The meme is also taking off on Twitter, with conservatives calling it “hilarious.” Commentators have noted that it’s unclear whether the intent is to hope for an end to Obama’s time in office — or an end to his life. But a look at the lines in the rest of the psalm hint at the latter:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

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Health Care: Reid Promises Bill With or Without Republicans, Harkin Talks to AlterNet, Schumer Lays an Egg
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on November 19, 2009 at 5:21 PM.

Standing before an audience of union members, former Obama campaign volunteers and media in a cramped room in the Capitol Visitors Center, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke in historical terms of the health-care bill he melded out of the bills crafted by two Senate committees. Reading from a letter to Congress written by President Harry Truman 64 years ago to the day, Reid called upon the Senate to get behind his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

"He knew that the health of the American people is linked to the health of the American economy," Reid said of Truman. He then noted that a person who was one year old at the time Truman penned the letter would, this very day, become eligible for Medicare. (C-SPAN has video here.)

Reid stood surrounded by Democratic senators from the Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., his assistant majority leader. In their triumphant mood, each of the Democrats seemed to assume their individual personae quite fully.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., invoked the spirit of the late Ted Kennedy, whose reins of the HELP Committee Dodd took while crafting the bill during the last days of Kennedy's illness. The affably pugilistic Durbin played true to form, noting that the largest criticism he heard from the Republican side was that the bill was 2,000 pages long.

"I might remind the Republican side of the aisle that when it comes to the size of legislation, it was that bank-bailout bill that the last president proposed that was only three pages long," Durbin said. "Now, there's a work of wisdom."

Durbin also projected a raft of legal challenges from insurance companies after the bill is passed. "[Y]ou better make sure you have a lot of pages there to cover the law suits they're going to file to try to stop us," he said.

Chuck Schumer of New York, standing in for Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (who was in his home state of Montana tending to his sick mother), exceeded expectations of persona-fulfillment with a very bad joke about breakfast foods. Referring to "that impresario, that great chef, Harry Reid," Schumer said, "I have this tie on here: it has eggs and cheese and pork. So, it's a great omelet. Harry made a great omelet. You sometimes have to break a few eggs to make a great omelet, but he did...We have great cheese from the Finance Committee and great pork from the HELP Committee. I couldn't say we had great pork from the Finance Committee or I'd be in trouble."

At one point during Schumer's McMuffin speech, Dodd leaned over to whisper in Harry Reid's ear. Would that we could know what he said.

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How to Achieve Real, Populist Reform
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on November 19, 2009 at 5:00 PM.

This is a must read profile of Dr Elizabeth Warren, a genuine great American populist reformer (who happens to teach at Harvard -- I know, shocking.)

In Elizabeth Warren’s world, credit card contracts would be so simple a teenager could read and understand them in four minutes. Loans would be as easy to compare as toasters, and online credit scores would be free.

“We need a new model: If you can’t explain it, you can’t sell it,” said Warren, 60, a Harvard University law professor who is head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in an interview.

The 1966 high school debate champion of Oklahoma may get what she wants. The House of Representatives will vote in December on her idea. She suggested a Financial Product Safety Commission in a 2007 article in the magazine Democracy. President Barack Obama proposed it to Congress in June as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

I urge you to read the whole thing. Her mind is so lively and so finely tuned to the real economic environment that I wish I could lock every Democrat in Washington in a room with her for as long as it takes to get them to hear what she is saying and learn how to think along these lines. She's one of the very few who articulates the kind of reform populism that makes sense to average citizens and which might keep the know-nothing Palinite freakshow from looking good to increasingly desperate, working people in this country.

Update: Here's some neat post partisan populism: The Ron Paul, Alan Grayson bill to audit the fed just passed through the committee. Baby steps, folks.

The Best Paragraph Written About Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue"
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on November 19, 2009 at 4:48 PM.

I'm giving the nod to va, at Whiskey Fire:

The most unbelievable thing about Going Rogue, by the author-function "Sarah Palin," is that it's supposed to be self-serving. The problem a self-serving narrative about Sarah Palin confronts is that it's about Sarah Palin, whose entire life, it appears, consists of worse and worse attempts to create self-serving narratives explaining away bigger and bigger fuck-ups. Going Rogue's burden is that it must claim to be the definitive, encyclopedic explanation, the final excuse, for a long history of failure begat by failure; it's an epic of failure, if you will, and if the goal here is some kind of ultimate vindication, well, it is monumentally unsuccessful. Going Rogue is, at bottom, the story of every one of Sarah Palin's projects ending in grotesque catastrophe; it is only self-serving in the sense that these catastrophes either prove benign or turn out to be some other schlub's fault. If everything I knew about Sarah Palin came from this book (and basically it does), I would say her life has been like a play in which a deus-ex-machina descends at the end of every act to bestow peace and harmony, except the deus forgot to put on pants and everyone's just standing around going "uhhhh..." and then the lights go out and the scene changes.

Paragraphs 2 through 5 offer some fine and fun writing as well, so I urge you to read the whole thing.

Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love the Senate Health Care Bill
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on November 19, 2009 at 3:33 PM.

BENDING THE PROVERBIAL CURVE.... For some conservatives, including some center-right Democrats, the very point of tackling health care reform is to get health care costs under control. Ezra Klein has a great item today, explaining how the Senate reform bill does just that.

If this piece of the bill was passed on its own, it would be the most important cost control bill ever considered by the United States Congress. But you could never have passed it on its own. You needed the coverage to make the grand bargain work. Republicans like to call this bill a trillion-dollar experiment to expand the health-care system, and in some ways, it is. But it's also a multitrillion-dollar experiment to cut costs in the health-care system, and it deserves credit for that, and support from fiscal conservatives. It's easy to talk about cutting costs, but this is the chance for people to actually do it.

The "grand bargain" is an important concept that often goes overlooked in the debate. For the left, which has been clamoring for health care reform for several generations now, the point of fixing the system is the moral outrage of allowing tens of millions of Americans to go without coverage. The uninsured are one serious illness away from bankruptcy, or one layoff away from family peril, and progressives have long demanded a remedy.

For the right, the principal reason to even entertain the possibility of reform is fiscal -- conservatives are worried about spiraling costs and massive deficits.

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Economy Is Going to Get Much Worse
Posted by Steven D., Booman Tribune on November 19, 2009 at 2:02 PM.

I think the economy is pretty darn awful, but with record profits on Wall Street and all the happy talk about a recovery from the recession (albeit a jobless recovery) it's confusing for many people as to what our economic future really holds. Well, here's relevant statistic that sums it up nicely, one that shows the so-called recovery is mostly a smoke and mirrors vaudeville magician's routine by the same people who either got us into this fine mess in the first place, or enabled the ones who did. Take a peek at this excerpt from Inner Workings David Goldman's blog at Asia Times:

This morning’s news that housing starts “unexpectedly” dropped by 11 percent month on month is consistent with my grim view of the American economy. The crystal-meth monetary policy at the Fed makes everyone feel better, until they don’t. The nonstop rise in the price of dollar hedges tells us that it can’t last forever. Large balance sheets attached to the Fed’s money pump can show profits, and the price of spread assets (as PIMCO’s Bill Gross keeps emphasizing) is stupid rich. But at the capillary level, through, the economy is dying and gangrene is setting in.

Here’s year on year growth in commercial and industrial loans from weekly reporting banks in the US:

[Attached chart shows 20% decline in commercial and industrial loans in the 12 months]

A TWENTY PERCENT decline in commercial and industrial loans? That's not a recovery, it's a fricking catastrophic collapse in the fundamental underpinnings of our economy. It's Wall Street sucking Main Street and Government dry, grabbing all the cash while they can. Not surprisingly they are using that cash pump from the Federal Reserve to drive up commodities prices. What does that tell you? It tells me things are about to get much, much worse, and no one in Washington has a clue what to do. It's, and let's be honest, the worst economic performance since the Great Depression. Jobs that created the foundation of our economic growth in the 20th Century have flat disappeared, as Nouriel Roubini (you know, the economist whose predictions were right all along while the Friedman disciples like Alan Greenspan fiddled as the US economy burned to the ground) makes clear.

While America's official unemployment rate is already 10.2 per cent, the figure jumps to a whopping 17.5 per cent when discouraged workers and partially employed workers are included. And, while data from firms suggest that job losses in the past three months were about 600,000, household surveys, which include self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs, suggest a number above two million.

Moreover, the total effect on labour income – the product of jobs times hours worked times average hourly wages – has been more severe than that implied by the job losses alone, because many firms are cutting their workers' hours, placing them on furlough or lowering their wages as a way to share the pain.

Many of the lost jobs – in construction, finance, and outsourced manufacturing and services – are gone forever, and recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs can be fully outsourced over time to other countries. Thus, a growing proportion of the work force – often below the radar screen of official statistics – is losing hope of finding gainful employment, while the unemployment rate (especially for poor, unskilled workers) will remain high for a much longer period of time than in previous recessions. [...]

[T]he credit crunch for non-investment-grade firms and smaller firms, which rely mostly on access to bank loans rather than capital markets, is still severe. Or consider bankruptcies and defaults by households and firms. Larger firms – even those with large debt problems – can refinance their excessive liabilities in or out of court, but an unprecedented number of small businesses are going bankrupt. The same holds for households, with millions of weaker and poorer borrowers defaulting on mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and other consumer credit.

Consider also what is happening to private consumption and retail sales. Recent monthly figures suggest a rise in retail sales. But, because the official statistics capture mostly sales by larger retailers and exclude the fall by hundreds of thousands of smaller stores and businesses that have failed, consumption looks better than it really is. [...]

Moreover, income and wealth inequality is rising again. Poorer households are at greater risk of unemployment, falling wages or reductions in hours worked, all leading to lower labour income, whereas on Wall Street, outrageous bonuses have returned with a vengeance. With the stock market rising and home prices still falling, the wealthy are becoming richer, while the middle class and the poor – whose main wealth is a house rather than equities – are becoming poorer and being saddled with an unsustainable debt burden.

So, while the United States may technically be close to the end of a severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression. Little wonder, then, that few Americans believe that what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is actually the phoenix of recovery.

The Tea Baggers and their talk of a tax revolt and railing against the mythical socialist takeover of America by the Obama administration isn't the problem.

The problem is that we've been scammed by Wall Street financial firms (the megalithic survivors) into juicing their balance sheets while getting less than zero in return for our billions of dollars of bailout expenditures by the Fed and Congress and trillions more for Federal guarantees of Wall Street's toxic junk financial derivatives.

In short, our investment of tax dollars in an essentially opaque, unregulated, subsidized and protected financial sector is proving to be a very, very bad bet for the future of any real economic recovery for the vast majority of Americans who don't work for Goldman Sachs and their ilk. This isn't a rational free market by anyone's definition. It's a con game, one that Obama's economic team has been more than willing to ignore in the interest of helping their friends, even if that means unacceptably high unemployment and lower investment in the real drivers of our economy -- small businesses, workers and manufacturing.

And unless we see a sea change in the economic strategies being pursued by the Obama administration, any talk of a fundamental political realignment in which Democrats benefit from a generational shift in political power is as much a pipe dream as Karl Rove's plan for a one party Republican state. Indeed, if Democrats in the Executive Branch and in Congress continue to ignore the fundamental changes in economic policy necessary to reverse our present course, the likelihood of something far sinister, a fascist or neo-fascist movement or a coup by a right wing military junta is not out of the question. Because when democratic civil governments becomes unable or unwilling to address fundamental issues of economic security they can lose their legitimacy literally overnight.

Just look at the history of the Weimar Republic, or Italy after WWI, if you want an object lesson in democratic governments that failed because their political leaders, operating within a weak, corrupted and gridlocked systems, were more concerned about their political careers and futures than addressing the critical economic issues that had spread misery and despair among millions of their constituents.

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Rep. Virginia Foxx Credits GOP for Civil Rights Legislation
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on November 19, 2009 at 1:00 PM.

FOXX'S NOTION OF 'REVISIONIST HISTORY'.... On the House floor today, Rep. Virginia Foxx, a right-wing Republican from North Carolina, boasted of her party's alleged progressive history on civil rights.

"Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the '60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle," said Fox. "They love to engage in revisionist history."

Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.), stunned, tried to set Foxx straight, pointing to the role of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the 1960s. "John Lewis, a member of this House, was beaten on the Edmund Pettus bridge to get that civil rights legislation passed," Cardoza reminded Foxx. "Tell John Lewis that he wasn't part of getting that legislation passed."

Matt Corley added, "To support the claim that Republicans were actually the architects of civil rights, conservatives often point out that a 'higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill.' But this ignores the 'distinct split between Northern and Southern politicians' on the issue."

This comes up from time to time, and since some confused people like Virginia Foxx have trouble remembering the details, it's worth the occasional refresher.

The Democratic Party, in the first half of the 20th century, was home to competing constituencies -- southern whites with abhorrent views on race, and white progressives and African Americans in the north, who sought to advance the cause of civil rights. The party struggled, ultimately siding with an inclusive, liberal agenda.

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