Why Does Arizona and Fox Hate the Constitution

Legal experts -- including Fox's Napolitano -- dispute Fox's analysis that AZ lawsuit is "baseless"

On Fox & Friends, senior legal analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. claimed that the Justice Department's lawsuit against Arizona's controversial illegal immigration law is "baseless," "nonsensical," and "almost laughable." But legal experts -- and even Fox's own Judge Napolitano -- dispute this claim, saying the Arizona law is "un-American" and "unconstitutional."

[ ]...Fox News' own Judge Napolitano: Arizona law "is unconstitutional" because AZ "can't write a law that says the federal law means something different in Arizona than it does in the other 49 states." On the July 7 edition of Fox Business Network's Varney & Co., Fox legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano railed against the Arizona law, calling it "un-American." Napolitano called the law "unconstitutional" and noted that the Supreme Court has ruled that immigration laws are "strictly a federal issue."

[ ]...Constitutional law expert Dellinger: DoJ "had no choice but to bring this suit." New Republic reported that constitutional law expert Walter Dellinger said the DoJ "had no choice but to bring this suit":

Giving the national government control over immigration into the United States was a major decision made by the framers of the Constitution. That is neither a liberal nor a conservative position. Allowing states to set their own immigration policy could lead in the future to more rather than less unlawful immigration. Given the freedom of movement within the United States and the implications of immigration for domestic national issues and foreign policy, it is unthinkable to leave immigration policy to thirteen or fifty different states. Calibrating the right combination of enforcement tools to utilize is at the core of the national power over immigration, and state laws are preempted whether they purport to add to or subtract from the system put in place by Congress. Whether current federal enforcement is adequate or not, whether Arizona's law is wise or not, whether suing is good politics or not are all beside the point: it is essential that the federal government's control over immigration into the United States be protected from state interference. In my view the Justice Department had no choice but to bring this suit.

Do conservatives even read the Constitution they swear to care so much about. maybe they read, but lack the reading comprehension skills to understand what it says. In either case they certainly don't bother to read legal precedent.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) Still CooCoo - Back To Beating The 'Death Panels' Drum. Bachmann is in serious trouble if we start requiring people to have mental competency exams before holding federal office. The government death panel nonsense has been debunked, like all wing-nut myths - The "death panels" are already here. Sorry, Sarah Palin -- rationing of care? Private companies are already doing it, with sometimes fatal results

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) Lapses Into Incoherent Fiscal Nonsense

Deficit Fraud Jon Kyl: ‘You Should Never Have To Offset’ Tax Cuts

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has been one of President Obama’s most vocal critics on the budget deficit (most of which is actually attributable to the President’s predecessor). “The Obama administration is spending trillions of dollars we do not have on things we do not need,” Kyl has said.

But today on Fox News Sunday, Kyl threw his concerns about the deficit out the window when discussing tax cuts. Kyl said Congress should not allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, but when host Chris Wallace asked, “How are you going to pay the $678 billion to keep Bush tax cuts for the wealthy?” Kyl wouldn’t answer. And in fact, he went so far as to say tax cuts should never have to be paid for:

WALLACE: We’re running out of time, so how are you going to pay $678 billion just on the tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year?

KYL: You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

Kyl is not only a deficit peacock, but he’s also a deficit fraud. On the one hand, he attacks Obama for rising deficits but at the same time says that multibillion dollar tax cuts “never” have to be offset.

Earlier this year, Kyl defended Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) for blocking a measure to extend unemployment benefits. “All Senator Bunning was saying quite correctly is it ought to be paid for,” Kyl said. So while Kyl advocates on behalf of the wealthy, he has no problem reverting back to being a deficit hawk at the expense of the less well-off.

Just recently Kyl claimed the President told him something about immigration. The right-wing media echoed every word. A few days later, Kyl emerged from his mental fog and walked back his claim. Nice to know that we're in the middle of an economic crisis Kyl helped create and he can't seem to have a coherent thought about any important issue facing the country. In his defense that is pretty much true of most conservatives.

The Wealthy are the Biggest Mortgage Defaulters

While Republicans continue to block jobless benefits for those they deem undeserving, a different morality play is at work in the nation's foreclosure crisis. As the New York Times reported this morning, the biggest defaulters on mortgages are the rich. Even as U.S. income inequality hit levels not seen since 1929, wealthier Americans, whose recovery from the recession is already well underway, are walking away from their homes at far greater rates than everyone else.

That decadent attitude which lets the rich just walk away from their responsibilities has been cultivated by conservatives for decades. And so much for the Republican narrative that the poor and working class are the irresponsible ones.

Matter of fact it is unconstitutional not to be a wing-nut

Smiley faced fascist Jim DeMint: Not Being Extremely Conservative is an Impeachable Offense

It appears that, for Senator DeMint (T-SC), the only members of Congress that haven’t violated their oath of office are hard-right conservatives.

Supposedly, after we all pledge to a limited government, we can work together and debate how to do that. But the Democrats have completely forgotten that oath, and so have some Republicans. I hope those Republicans are sent home. And I hope we get some people up here who take their oath of office seriously.

Here’s the text of the oath of office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Another conservative completely oblivious to not only what the U.S. Constitution says, but the oath of office he actually took. If being a good citizen and good conservative means means one is obligated to shrink government than can we retroactively impeach Bush and Senators like DeMint who voted for his agenda - George W. Bush: A "Big Government Tax-Cut & Spend Conservative?"

The the era of big government is back, thanks to the Bush Administration.

That’s the conclusion of a Brookings Institute study. The Wall Street Journal reported that the think tank is releasing a study Friday which found that the “number of full-time employees working on government contracts and grants has zoomed by more than one million people since 1999, bringing the overall head count to more than 12.1 million as of this past October.”

More here on what happened during DeMint's watch and he did nothing to correct course - Growth in federal spending unchecked

A Lesson in Conservative Economics. Pay Attention.

Spending and Short Term Deficit Not the Cause of Our Problems

"Runaway government spending" is an easy target now. It is not the cause of our problems. Government spending will not "crowd out" private investors. It is essential in stimulating the demand on which the private sector and even our ability to sustain healthy debt to gross national product ratios depend.

Further cuts in domestic job creation, sure to result from the refusal by Congress to extend unemployment benefits, will be counterproductive. It will lead to more unemployment, more benefit spending for prisons, emergency health care, domestic violence, and further declines in government revenues - a true death spiral.

That message, however, hardly ever gets a hearing. CNBC anchors regularly proclaim: "only the private sector creates wealth." I wonder what these anchors would be using for their research and communication but for massive government subsidy and research and development on computers and the Internet.

Critics also claim that the Obama stimulus did not work. Using carefully sourced data the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office shows that the stimulus package created jobs and saved others that would have been lost.

The problem here is political.

As even some business economists pointed out at the time, the initial Obama package was far too small. Dean Baker points out the federal package amounted to less than half of the trillion-dollar hole caused by the housing bubble collapse. Government stimulus was reduced even further by cuts in state government spending.

Perhaps President Barack Obama could not have achieved more, but he should have chastised Congress and made clear the country would need more and soon. Obama's inflated claim on behalf of that modest legislation is a major reason that more federal job creation is so politically difficult.

The deficit mania has other deeper roots. A core within the business community, especially financial services, never accepted the New Deal.

Social Security always has been especially offensive. It is a universal program that worked and became very popular. It constitutes the major reason poverty rates among the elderly declined dramatically. Had George W. Bush privatized Social Security, our great recession likely would have become Great Depression II.

Unable to go after the program directly, conservatives attacked Social Security through fallacious arguments that the program, which its bipartisan trustees certify as fully funded through 2044, is a fiscal time bomb. As Baker points out, the real fiscal time bombs are exploding private sector dominated health costs, the bank bailouts and war costs of a trillion dollars and counting. Concern about deficits never has prevented the business press or our senators from supporting these corporate behemoths.

Paul Krugman also provocatively argues that more than immediate monetary interests drive this issue. Ideological and even identity issues are in play. Krugman cites John Maynard Keynes' powerful aside on classical capitalist culture: "The completeness of [the notion that government can do nothing] is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."

The anti-deficit mania has tangled roots both in immediate monetary interests and in the broader political culture. It has surprising support among some working-class citizens, who stand to lose from its implementation. They are led by, and in turn sustain, the so-called Blue Dog Democrats. Nonetheless, its deep and tangled roots constitute no reason to treat it as inevitable

.

It's simple. Conservatives do not want to spend on unemployment benefits or to create jobs because they think a bad economy is their ticket back to a majority in both houses. At which time they will punish the middle and working class by making them pay for the way Republicans managed the economy from 2000 to 2008. They'll also let Wall St off the hook for new regulations that would prevent another Great Recession, because Republicans love recessions. The 14 million unemployed are the ones suffering not the greedy rich that form the Republican base. Those rich benefactors pay for the endless TV ads which create a completely false narrative which shifts the blame to Democrats and than we have another cycle of boom and bust; which again Republicans use to get back in power. Its all a crazy carnival ride that America needs to stop riding.

The Sorry Truth - Most Conservatives Are Fascist and Obama is Not a Socialist

Is Obama a socialist? What does the evidence say?

The assertion is getting louder: President Obama is a socialist, a wealth-redistributing wolf in Democrat's clothing gnawing at America's entrepreneurial spirit.

It's easy to buy "Obama is a socialist" bumper stickers on the Internet. Political commentator Dick Morris said, in a column circulated on GOPUSA.com, that conservatives are "enraged at Barack Obama's socialism and radicalism." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich titled his new book "To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine."

So, is Mr. Obama trying to form The Socialist Republic of America? Or are the accusations mainly a political weapon, meant to stick Obama with a label that is poison to many voters and thus make him a one-term president?

As is often the case in politics, the answer is in the eye of the beholder. Some people feel genuinely certain that Obama aims to make America into a workers' paradise – a land where government-appointed pay czars tell Wall Street tycoons how much they can make and where the feds take large ownership positions in companies like General Motors (GM) and insurance giant American International Group (AIG). Even if Obama is not a card-carrying Socialist, they say, he displays a disdain of the private sector.

"You start with his apparent acceptance that there are major segments of the US economy for which it is reasonable for the US government to own or manage," says Michael Johns, Heritage Foundation policy analyst, "tea party" movement leader, and former speechwriter for President Bush. "Look at the auto industry, mortgage industry, the health-care industry to some extent, and, obviously, banking."

Others just as assuredly refute the idea that government involvement in failing industries defines a president as socialist – or that wealth is being redistributed from the Forbes 500 richest Americans to the nation's "Joe the plumbers."

What Mr. Johns, Mr. Gingrich, and others brandishing the "socialist" s-word are really complaining of is a return to the policies of John Maynard Keynes, the English economist who advocated vigorous government involvement in the economy, from regulation to pump priming, says labor historian Peter Rachleff of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.

"Socialism suggests getting rid of capitalism altogether," says Dr. Rachleff. "Mr. Obama is not within a million miles of an ideology like that."

For what it's worth, socialists deny that Obama is one of them – and even seem a bit insulted by the suggestion.

"I have been making a living telling people Obama is not a socialist," says Frank Llewellyn, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America. "It's frustrating to see people using our brand to criticize programs that have nothing to do with our brand and are not even working."

Adds Billy Wharton,co-chair of the Socialist Party USA: "I am not even sure he's a liberal. I call him a hedge fund Democrat."

The socialism tag is nothing new for the White House. In speeches, Obama chalks up the criticism to "just politics."

But he also works to counter it, sprinkling speeches with words about the appropriate role of government. "Government cannot and should not replace businesses as the true engine of growth and job creation," he said June 2 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

That may be one reason some tea partyers doubt that Obama himself is humming "The Internationale" before breakfast.

One of the reasons conservatives call President Obama a socialists, besides just being infantile name calling, is that modern conservative is a form of fascism. What some historians have called soft-fascism or smiley faced fascism. Instead of the people being slaves of the government collective, we're all wage slaves of the corporate collective. Notice when the economy tanked it was the corporate elite that still made a profit as millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs. Ironically many of the tea nut conservatives complained during their protests last year about keeping the government out of their Medicare - ignorant of the fact that Medicare is a government program.

Pelosi's accurate unemployment benefits comment

Right-wing media freak out over Pelosi's accurate unemployment benefits comment

Right-wing media figures are jumping on Nancy Pelosi's comment today that unemployment benefits are a "job creator" that "creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name." (Representative comment from Doug Powers: Pelosi is "around the bend," "demonstrating lunacy").

They are not, of course, pointing out that she's basically right.

As we've repeatedly noted, economists, including Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf and McCain economic advisor Mark Zandi, have pointed out that increases in unemployment benefits are among the most effective forst of economic stimulus. In congressional testimony, Elmendorf has said:

Transfers to persons (for example, unemployment insurance and nutrition assistance) would also have a significant impact on GDP. Because a large amount of such spending can occur quickly, transfers would have a significant impact on GDP by early 2010. Transfers also include refundable tax credits, which have an impact similar to that of a temporary tax cut.

A dollar's worth of a temporary tax cut would have a smaller effect on GDP than a dollar's worth of direct purchases or transfers, because a significant share of the tax cut would probably be saved. The nonbusiness tax cuts in H.R. 1 would reduce revenues much more in calendar year 2010 than in calendar year 2009 because much of the reduction in taxes would be realized by households when they filed their returns in 2010.

Likewise, Zandi has said that "Extending UI [unemployment insurance] Benefits" would boost GDP by $1.64 for every dollar spent, a greater "Bank for the Buck" than any other provision he analyzed except increasing food stamps ($1.73 per dollar spent).

Not the first time the conservative fringe has freaked out over the truth.

Another day another Republican lie. Conservatism is ironic -morally bankrupt it bills itself as the party of values. GOP's false talking point: Jones Act blocks Gulf help

Nutty is as Nutty Does -The Keep Your hands Off My Medicare Conservatives

Figuring out the psychology of "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"

It's not simply about making the Obama administration look bad. Many Republicans actually love economic recessions. No better means of disciplining the labor force has ever been devised.

That's the real message behind the GOP's Senate filibuster denying extended federal benefits to roughly a million long-term unemployed. The same bill, which failed 57-41, would also have provided $16 billion in Medicaid help to states overburdened by declining tax revenues.

In consequence, several hundred thousand cops, teachers, firefighters and other public employees are sure to be laid off due to state budget cuts. Fat lot of good that will do the economy. But working stiffs will be keeping their heads down, won't they?

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., whose state has the nation's second-highest unemployment rate (13.6 percent), put it forcefully: "The Republicans in the Senate want this economy to fail. In cynical political terms ... they want our country to fail to win an election, and they're willing to take the people of this country with them."

But that's only part of the story. One of the enduring mysteries of American life is how Republicans keep succeeding by failing. The presidency of George W. Bush ought to have inoculated American voters against GOP economic theories for a generation. Tax cuts for the wealthy led not to greater prosperity, but runaway budget deficits, a doubled national debt and the weakest job creation since World War II. See-no-evil financial deregulation damn near destroyed the world banking system.

By the time President Obama was inaugurated last January, the economy was bleeding 750,000 lost jobs a month; the Congressional Budget Office had already projected the FY 2009 deficit at $1.3 trillion -- a budget written by the Bush White House. After taking over in 2001 with a healthy budget surplus and some economists warning against paying down the debt too fast, Bush doubled it to over $10 trillion in eight short years.

Yet there was Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, on CNN, allowing as how he's "waiting for this administration to take responsibility." He accused the Obama administration of "tripling" the annual deficit, as brazen a falsehood as can be imagined. Is it even necessary to say that neither Cornyn nor any Republican who twiddled his thumbs throughout Bush's two terms has condescended to explain what exact combination of revenue increases and spending cuts is needed to reduce the deficit short term?

Alas it's absolutely necessary. According to the Center on Budget and Priorities, "(T)he fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next 10 years."

New spending by the Obama administration -- mainly the economic stimulus and auto industry rescue -- is dwarfed by Bush's spending on the Iraq and Afghan wars and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit. If Democratic attempts to stimulate the economy have proven less than adequate, that's because they've both been hostage to GOP obstructionism and restrained by the fiscal straitjacket Republicans left behind.

But a lot of voters simply don't know it. Indeed, many people actively refuse to understand anything important about what the federal budget consists of or the role of government in modern economies. Millions remain captive to what Paul Krugman calls "zombie lies": long disproven canards like the one that says cutting tax rates invariably leads to higher revenues. Because it's so counterintuitive, parroting it makes Rush Limbaugh fans feel like intellectuals.

Many Americans are ignorant of the issues and the broadcast media - from which most Americans still get their news - is terrible about education people about the issues and recent history. They seem afraid to report that Bush lied us into a trillion dollar war and conservative policies trashed the economy. We had tea baggers literally on government Medicare protesting against government health care - seemingly completely unaware that Medicare is a government run health program.