Republicans Are Very Mature and Would Never Do Anything to Hurt America's Most Vulnerable Citizens

Republicans Are Very Mature and Would Never Do Anything to Hurt America's Most Vulnerable Citizen

On Saturday, ThinkProgress spoke to Teresa Collett, a Republican running against Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), at the Mayflower Hotel during lobbyist Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. During the interview, Collett expressed outrage at the health reform bill passed by Congress this year and supported by her opponent.

Collett argued that tactically, even if Republicans take over the House, repealing health reform would be difficult because President Obama could easily veto any repeal effort. However, Collett reasoned that a Republican House of Representatives could defund programs to expand coverage made possible by health reform. She also said that “if the stakes are high enough,” she would support a move to shut down the entire federal government to force a showdown over health reform:

TP: I spoke to several of the delegates here, and some of the speakers, who said — including Newt Gingrich — who said it might come down to a budget battle where the federal government might need to be stopped temporarily to force President Obama to the table. What do you think about that?

COLLETT: I think if the stakes are high enough, we might have to do that. Now that has real consequences to real people in lots of different ways. So, certainly that is not the first best option, but what’s at stake is very important so that decision will have to be made at that time.


Collett’s sentiment about shutting down the federal government echoes a similar argument made by another speaker at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), speaking on Friday, said that Republicans would shut down the federal government — even veterans’ hospitals — to eliminate programs like health reform.

Republicans are obvious against Americans having the freedom to have health care coverage, enjoy good health and have some protection against bankruptcy caused by health care expenses. That also means if they have to screw overs vets, the elderly and the disabled to show how much they hate freedom, than that's what they are prepared to do in the 2010 mid-term elections. Why do conservatives have such a vicious hatred for the USA and its citizens.

What's That Smell. The Tea Party and History.

What's That Smell. The Tea Party and History.

Sometimes when you're thinking about how to express something, you find a perfect exemplification of it just by chance in the musty stacks of such an emporium. Here's a remarkable example. I'd been trying to find a way to write about Tea Party ideology, and in particular about the fraudulent history and distorted language it indulges in. Listen to Tea Partiers on cable news—or read the signs they hoist or their Internet comments—and you frequently encounter the flagrant abuse, the historically ignorant misuse, of words such as tyranny, communist, Marxist, fascist, and socialist.

You hear them say, for instance, that we live under "tyranny" because one side lost a health care vote in an elected legislative body. And that, in all seriousness, the president is a communist. For many Tea Party members, the word is not just a vile epithet; it's a realistic political description. Check out this clip in which Tea Party "celebrity" spokeswoman Victoria Jackson flatly tells a flummoxed Fox News host, "The president's a communist." When the host (the Fox host!) starts to object, she responds that Glenn Beck has taught her that progressive is a code word for communist. (Time to put that ugly hammer and sickle logo inside the "O" on your I-hate-Obama T.P. protest sign!)

Unless of course Obama is really a "fascist," as some T.P.ers have it, because he's a liberal, and liberals are fascists (as we all know from that magisterial work of history, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg). So instead of the hammer and sickle, draw a little Hitler mustache on Obama's face on your T.P. hate signs. Or better yet, parade around with a swastika! (The Tea Partiers seem to get a special kick out of this, for some reason.)

Of course Obama is also probably an evil "socialist" which is apparently, in the Tea Party worldview, pretty much the same as a fascist or a communist. (One gets the impression that some T.P.ers have had major, life-changing, "aha!" moments when they first learned that Hitler's party was the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party. Slam dunk!)*

And if Obama's not a socialist fascist communist, he may be—ooh, scary, kids!—a "progressive," which, as Victoria Jackson learned from the erudite Glenn Beck, is really a secret "code word" for communist.

And they believe him! That's the thing. The recent New York Times study of T.P.ers reported that party members are "better educated" than most Americans. But educated in what? Clearly, they—or at least a significant, influential portion of them—are utterly uneducated in history. One can get a college degree without taking a single class in world history and thus still be ripe for the idiot distortions of a Glenn Beck.

Most people with a basic grounding in history find Tea Party ignorance something to laugh about, certainly not something to take seriously. But I would argue that history demonstrates that historical ignorance is dangerous and that it can have tragic consequences, however laughable it may initially seem. And thus the media, liberals, and others are misguided in laughing it off. And educated conservatives are irresponsible in staying silent in the face of these distortions.

The muddled Tea Party version of history is more than wrong and fraudulent. It's offensive. Calling Obama a tyrant, a communist, or a fascist is deeply offensive to all the real victims of tyranny, the real victims of communism and fascism. The tens of millions murdered. It trivializes such suffering inexcusably for the T.P.ers to claim that they are suffering from similar oppression because they might have their taxes raised or be subject to demonic "federal regulation."

The media for the most part has shown itself afraid to challenge the insidious distortions of language and history Tea Partiers promote. In the last few weeks, several news outlets have been propagating the meme that Tea Partiers are "just regular folks." And certainly some are. But if you examined the ideology that shows its face, the one that is apparent in sign carriers and blog commenters and cable spokespersons, you find something disturbing.

Consider this CNN report, which attempts to give a smiley face to the Tea Party's underlying ideology. Even Fox News recognizes Tea Party dogma as a seething cauldron of deranged and vicious lies about history. Look at the guy in the photo in this report and how proud he is of his illiterate swastika sign.

These swastika nuts look ridiculous. But words matter, sometimes in a life-and-death way. Take for instance the Tea Party demonization of "federal regulation" as the instrument of the tyranny that's been imposed on them. I would like every Tea Partier who has denounced federal regulation to write a letter to the widows and children of the coalminers in West Virginia who died because of the failure of "federal regulation" of mine safety.

Tell the weeping survivors that such regulation is tyranny, that their husbands and fathers had to die, but for a good cause: lowering federal spending so the T.P.ers could save a few pennies on taxes. That's worth 29 lives snuffed out in a mine blast, isn't it? They either don't see the connection or don't care.

Indeed the demonization of "federal regulation" could prevent cowardly legislators from strengthening protections for miners and other workers imperiled by unsafe conditions. But the happy T.P.ers will still go out with their swastika and Hitler-mustache signs, whining about tyranny. Wouldn't it be great if there were a liberal politician who, in the wake of the mining catastrophe, had the courage to stand up and say that federal regulations are often a very good thing? Don't hold your breath.

This is just one example of the toxic effect of Tea Party ignorance on the lives of their fellow citizens. But the damage done by the injection of fraudulent history into the body politic by Tea Party ignoramuses and their enablers will be more profound and lasting than one tragedy.

That's because ignorance of this sort isn't inconsequential. Historical fraudulence is like a disease, a contagious psychosis which can lead to mob hysteria and worse. Consider the role that fraudulent history played in Weimar Germany, where the "stab in the back" myth that the German Army had been cheated of victory in World War I by Jews and Socialists on the home front was used by the Nazis to justify their hatreds.

It's a historical lie, but it caught on, and Hitler rose to power on it, asking Germans to avenge the (nonexistent) stab in the back! It may be true that the Tea Party will disintegrate before it acquires any real power, as more and more of its leaders are revealed to be fanciers of racist jokes and bestiality videos. But one can't be assured of it. It's important to expose the lies for what they are before they further debase the language with their false use of words.

By the time of my serendipitous used-bookstore discovery—more on which in a moment—I was already troubled by the Obama/Hitler/socialist/fascist comparisons. But it was the ignorant trivialization of the Holocaust—the identification of Hitler as a "socialist"—that really got to me.

It took me back to the month I spent in Munich's Monacensia library archives a decade or so ago, looking through the original flaking and yellowing copies of Munich's anti-Hitler Social Democratic Party (socialist!) newspaper, the Munich Post. I devoted a chapter of my book Explaining Hitler to the courageous efforts of the Munich Post reporters to investigate the nature of Hitler's evil in the years before he came to power. Their investigation led to a kind of war with the Nazi Party: The Socialist reporters produced revelation after revelation, were met with vicious reprisals, and then produced new, more disturbing revelations.

One of the things these reporters were obsessed with was disproving the "stab in the back" myth, because they knew its sinister propaganda power. They even provoked one of Hitler's cronies who was propagating the "stab in the back" myth to sue them for libel. They called him a "political poisoner" and added that "if he were only an idiot his writing would make him look ridiculous, but he's worse than idiot." (If only some politicians and pundits would have the courage to say something like this about the T.P. poisoners of history.) They wanted him to sue so they could lay out the evidence against the "stab in the back" in court. In the end, they won the argument but lost the suit because the judge was a Nazi sympathizer.

These reporters lost a lot to the Hitler-friendly police and legal establishment in Munich, including a lot of their own blood. But they finally reached the heart of darkness, the ultimate hidden Hitler truth, when they were able to obtain and publish a secret Nazi Party plan for the disposal of the Jews after a takeover, a plan that contains the first known use of the phrase "final solution."

Few paid attention, but they got to the truth. And they were Socialists fighting the Nazis, you might recall. Listen up, T.P.ers: The Nazis were not Socialists. The Socialists were not Nazis. They were blood enemies. In fact, the Socialists fought the Nazis, while conservatives and nationalists stood by and thought Hitler would be their pawn. Hitler, need it be said, was not a Socialist. He hated the Socialists. Had thousands of them murdered as soon as he came to power.

I think this is why it bothers me so much when Tea Party ignoramuses put swastikas on their anti-Obama posters. They disgrace themselves, they insult the dead martyrs to the truth, by lumping socialism with fascism and Obama with Hitler. They not only disgrace themselves; they be-clown themselves, they distort the historical consciousness of everyone they spread the comparison to.

As for lumping Obama in with communism, and communism with liberalism, that's where the bookshop pamphlet comes in.

It was just a stroke of good fortune that a yellowing, 50-year-old pamphlet caught my eye as I was browsing the $1 bargain bin outside the Strand, New York's justly legendary used bookstore.

The title of the pamphlet was "Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

It was Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech." This 1956 speech denouncing mass murder and torture under Stalin's regime was one of the most important and influential historical orations of the past century. Delivered to a closed session over two days, it didn't stay secret for long, later circulating throughout the globe.

Yes, Khrushchev himself was a murderous thug and accomplice of Stalin, but his sickening revelations couldn't be dismissed as the product of Western propaganda by Communists and Communist sympathizers. His speech had a shattering effect on many of them throughout the world. The first crack in the monolithic façade of communism. It was a factor not only in the Hungarian and Polish uprisings of 1956 but began the process of internal and external disillusionment in the Soviet Empire itself, the slow creation of further cracks and then crevices that would eventually culminate in its disintegration.

Now, I'd read a lot about the secret speech, but I'd never actually read it. The full text of the speech—nearly 60 pages in my edition—is not widely available in print, and reading it for the first time, even after all the revelations about Stalin in books like Robert Conquest's pioneering work The Great Terror, Solzhenitsyn's novels, and more recently Gulag by Slate's Anne Applebaum, I still found it shocking.

And it suddenly occurred to me that Tea Partiers really should read this pamphlet, because it would teach them something about what "tyranny" is actually like. It would teach them something about what "communism" was really like. It would make them ashamed of themselves for whining about a health care bill turning America into a tyranny, for slandering liberals as communists who want to impose tyranny on them. It might snap them out of the intoxicated hysteria they whip themselves into.

The secret speech is also relevant to Tea Party slanders about liberals. The 1956 publication of the secret speech served to shatter the illusions of a significant portion of those on the left in this country who still harbored sentimental feelings about the Soviet Union. And helped cement the victory of anti-communist liberalism in America's Democratic Party, an important struggle that the Tea Partiers who think liberals are communists seem to be ignorant of.

Some publisher should bring out a new edition of the "Secret Speech" (perhaps with an introduction by Conquest or Applebaum). It's a totally fascinating document. One aspect of its genius lies in Khrushchev's use of the phrase "the cult of personality" to condemn Stalin. (In this translation it's called "the cult of the individual.") It's brilliant, albeit in a Machiavellian way: While it denounces Stalin' self-hagiography, it does so by transferring the cult of personality to Lenin, who is portrayed as the paragon of all the perfections the deranged Stalin supposedly departed from. Thus blaming Stalin, not the Communist system. All the while offering a pitiless portrait of it.

And there's a novelistic aspect to the way the speech injects the conflict of personality into its opening, when Khrushchev depicts the final clash between Lenin and Stalin as a quarrel over Stalin's alleged rudeness to Lenin's wife on the telephone while Lenin was sick on what turned out to be his death bed. Stalin killed millions, but let's not forget his bad telephone manner.

It is not that we should ignore the tea party only realize they are part of the dark side of American traditions - the crazy and ill-informed. It is one thing to be a neighbor that doesn't know squat about American history and public policy. It is quite another to vote such wackos into office. America is a country about living up to some ideals, not about letting the next wave of nut bags tear down those ideals.

Connecticut Senate race and Linda McMahon's Dead Wrestler Problem

Connecticut Senate race and Linda McMahon's Dead Wrestler Problem

So, where did McMahon's potential dead wrestler problem begin?

There's the 2005 heart failure of Eddie Guerrero Llanes, and the death last year of Eki "Eddie" Fatu -- a cousin of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson who was terminated by the WWE after he refused to go into rehab.

Then there's Chris Benoit. As the Journal Inquirer noted, the father of the late Benoit, who killed his wife and son and then committed suicide three years ago, has blamed his son's actions on head injuries he sustained in the ring. "As I am sure you are aware, WWE matches are scripted, and [McMahon's daughter] Stephanie McMahon Levesque testified before a congressional committee back in late 2007 that all stunts -- an example of that would be a chair shot to the head -- must be pre-approved by Vince McMahon," said Michael Benoit. "This type of scripted match, I believe, is the underlying cause of all the early deaths in this industry."

In addition, as the Connecticut Mirror reports, McMahon has been dealing with attacks from the father of WWE wrestler Lance Cade (real name Lance McNaught), who died suddenly this past August from heart failure at age 29. After McMahon rather brusquely suggested upon Cade's death that "I might have met him once," the deceased wrestler's father slammed McMahon:

"She disrespected him," Harley McNaught said. "She disrespected my family."

"Dead wrestler's father blasts McMahon, WWE" isn't exactly the kind of headline the McMahon campaign is looking for these days. The candidate later clarified a bit, saying:

I think that any father or parent that's lost a child, clearly, has pain relative to that. I understand that. So I understand the pain that he's feeling. I do believe there is more that can be known relative to Lance. I'm letting WWE deal with those issues.

The Dems have also attacked McMahon on another story. As the Journal Inquirer reported last week, the WWE included "death clauses" in their contracts -- removing liability for the company in case of a performer's death. In response to news of that politically problematic clause, McMahon campaign spokesman Ed Patru said that WWE "never exercised that option."

The Connecticut Dems then fired back, hosting Yale Law School professor Bob Solomon on a conference call with reporters to say that the company did argue with just that clause in litigation involving the 1999 death of wrestler Owen Hart, who fell to his death due to a malfunctioning quick-release mechanism while being lowered to the stage in a harness. The case was ultimately settled out of court for $18 million.

WWE spokesman Robert Zimmerman told us in a statement: "WWE talent are highly skilled professionals who only perform and promote their appearances; unlike employees, they do not have any corporate responsibilities or duties, and thus are independent contractors. As independent contractors, WWE talent are able to negotiate all aspects of their contracts including length of agreement, compensation, time off, disability provisions and other benefits that would not be afforded to an employee."

The WWE's longtime attorney Jerry McDevitt also told us that McMahon's husband, WWE chief Vince McMahon, had initially approached Hart's widow with a settlement offer, and ultimately paid her the settlement after the initial lawsuit in Kansas City courts ran into legal complications. WWE later won a $9 million settlement for product liability from the company that manufactured the quick-release mechanism. McDevitt also pointed us to sections of legal rulings from 2009, when Hart's estate attempted to reopen the case, in which the judge dismissed the motion and did not accept the contention that Hart was really an employee. We were also shown part of Vince McMahon's deposition from the lawsuit against the equipment manufacturer, in which he said he had pursued a settlement with Hart's widow because he felt responsibility for what had happened on his watch.

And just weeks after Cade's death, Gertrude "Luna" Vachon, who was on the WWE payroll from 1993 to 2000, was found dead. The WWE had sent Vachon to rehab for substance abuse last year. The News Times called it "the latest public relations setback" for a candidate trying to "parlay her experience in the business world into political capital."

Indeed, McMahon has tried to turn her experience at the helm of WWE into a political plus, with one ad declaring that she "tamed the traveling show world of professional wrestling," and another reminding voters that it's a "soap opera" that "isn't real." But with headline after headline reminding voters of the deadly consequences of a life in the ring, McMahon may have some trouble sticking to the lighter "soap opera" message.

What is the problem with filthy rich Republican millionaires like McMahon, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina? They all made loads of money just walking in the office door. They screwed up everything they touched and still came out millionaires. Aren't conservative business folks supposed to believe in getting a ahead on merit. They seemed to have discovered the fountain of unearned wealth. McMahon can't decide if wrestlers are employees or contractors who she barely knows. She does know she is not liable for anything that happens to them while they are - or are not? making millions for her.

Fox propagandist Dick Morris reveals he knows nothing about tax cuts and deficits

Vote Conservative for Their Integrity

Vote Conservative for Their Integrity : Shady Right-Wingers and Glenn Becks

As Beck attempts to turn the world inside out and upside down by claiming the mantle of a movement he probably would have opposed, and whose means he is too small even to begin to comprehend, Milbank lists some of Beck's greatest moments as a champion of civil rights.

* As a radio host, performed an on-air skit that mocked a stereotyped Asian accent, forcing his station to apologize.
* On CNN, while interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, demanded proof that Ellison isn't working with "our" enemies.
* Called President Obama a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."
* Claims Obama was elected because he isn't white.
* Claims Obama is moving us into slavery.
* Asserted that the president's very name is Un-American.
* Claims Obama seeks reparations from white America, to "settle old racial scores."
* Has claimed Obama is tied to or influenced by "radical black nationalism" and "Marxist black liberation theology" and the New Black Panther Party, which Beck claims is part of Obama's "army of thugs."

It would almost be funny if so many didn't take it seriously. And if their taking it seriously wasn't part of a deeply disturbing hidden agenda. As Frank Rich explained, last Sunday:

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

And Rich referred to the chillingly essential article on the Kochs, by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign. The ticket’s slogan was “The Libertarian Party has only one source of funds: You.” In fact, its primary source of funds was David Koch, who spent more than two million dollars on the effort.

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”

The complete article is at the link. Whatever viral strain of conservatism one studies - it all comes up with the same appeals to eliminationism, a contempt for working class Americans, the desire for a permanent underclass that shops at Wal-Martish stores for products made in China and a dangerous disregard fro the environment and personal freedom.

Vote Republican. They're Not Finished Redistributing Income.

Record U.S. Income Gap Widening Again

In June, an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities confirmed that gap between rich and poor in the United States reached levels not seen since 1929. Between 1979 and 2007, the yawning chasm separating the after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans from the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled. But while the Bush recession which began in December 2007 temporarily halted the stratospheric advance of the wealthy, the rich - and the rich alone - have largely recovered their losses. Which means that the record level of income inequality in America is growing once again.

The CBPP report found a financial Grand Canyon separating the very rich from everyone else. Over the three decades ending in 2007, the top 1 percent's share of the nation's total after-tax household income more than doubled, from 7.5 percent to 17.1 percent. During that time, the share of the middle 60% of Americans dropped from 51.1 percent to 43.5 percent; the bottom four-fifths declined from 58 percent to 48 percent. As for the poor, they fell further and further behind, with the lowest quintile's income share sliding to just 4.9%. Expressed in dollar terms, the income gap is staggering:

Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation -- an increase in income of $973,100 per household -- compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16 percent ($2,400 per household) for the bottom fifth.

To be sure, the deficit-exploding Bush tax cuts played an essential role in fueling the gap. (This is evidenced by the fact that between 2001 and 2007, the income share of the 400 richest American taxpayers doubled even as their tax rates were halved.) As the New York Times revealed in October, by 2007 the top 1% - the 1.5 million families earning more than $400,000 - reaped 24% of the nation's income. The bottom 90% - the 136 million families below $110,000 - accounted for just 50%.

The Republican fetish for redistributing income to the people that work the least and are already wealthy comes from conservatism's old European monarchists roots. By way of some divine aura the wealthy are simply entitled to be wealthy and made even more wealthy when possible. Conservatives do tend to forget that Abe Lincoln said all wealth is made possible by labor.

Republicans Are Sensitive and Humble

Bush-Era Iraq War Architects Emerge To Demand ‘Credit’ For Iraq War ‘Success’

In April 2006, ThinkProgress produced a report titled “The Architects of War: Where Are They Now?” We wrote at the time, “a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded — not blamed — for their incompetence.” Referencing our report in July 2007, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, “To read that summary is to be awed by the comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system.”

Republicans believe lying the US into a war is a good thing. Republicans believe over 4000 troops dying for their lies is something we should all be thankful for. Conservatives believe/believed a little despot dictator was the biggest threat to the US since Hitler. Conservatives believe spending over a trillion dollars on the Iraq debacle was patriotic and they also believe letting 18,000 Americans die every year from lack of health insurance is patriotic. If the average person would bang their head against a wall a thousand times and than stick their head up their arse they will be able to think of the world just like a Republican.

Jonah Goldberg still mad that no one liked his book - The "Liberal Fascism" author insists no one really got what he meant, also insists a book he hasn't read is bad

National Review contributor and terrible columnist Jonah Goldberg likes to complain, a lot, whenever anyone writes anything bad about his book, "Liberal Fascism," which was a book about how liberals are the real fascists, because Hitler was a vegetarian.

But, he always argues, every single one of his critics either didn't read or didn't understand his book. Today he reads reviews of a new book by Markos Moulitsas, called "American Taliban." And, reading these reviews, Goldberg is alarmed to discover that many people still think his book was stupid.

Paragraph one of Goldberg's complaint begins:

The Atlantic has a review of reviews of the Kos book. It's chock-a-block with Liberal Fascism bashing, mostly from people who I suspect haven't read it, plus activist Matt Yglesias who claims to have read it but has A) a very deep personal grudge against me and B) is an admitted fan of lying for political ends.

Paragraph two begins:

I haven't read the Moulitsas book, but I suspect the real differences are pretty obvious. While I do not smear all of my political opponents as monsters (people who say I do this, again, have either not read the book, are too blinkered to understand it, or are lying), it seems pretty clear that's exactly what Kos sets out to do.

In short, everyone who dislikes "Liberal Fascism" didn't read it or didn't understand it. Jonah Goldberg has not read "American Taliban," but he totally understands it, and it is bad.

Jonah is a very sensitive knucklehead. His mom told him he could write. She used her connections to get Jonah a job as a writer. Jonah has been trying to get people to take him seriously as a writer for years. Jonah still cannot write. Yes America, Republicans only get ahead by hard work and merit.

The GOP's new fake racial history - A Southern Republican with designs on challenging Barack Obama in 2012 offers a phony version of history

Almost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners.

Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today conservative Southern whites comprise the heart of the GOP -- just as culturally liberal Northerners, who called the GOP home before civil rights, have migrated to the Democratic Party.

There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."

But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.

So Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."

This is utter nonsense.

For a century after the Civil War, the South was deeply and overwhelmingly Democratic, a consequence of the "humiliation" visited upon white Southerners by the Republican-initiated Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. The level of support enjoyed by Democratic candidates in the region is almost too astronomical to fathom now. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson took 42 percent of the vote nationally in a four-way presidential contest. But in South Carolina, he snared 95 percent. In Mississippi, 88 percent. While he was grabbing 60 percent nationally in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt scored 97 percent in Mississippi and nearly 99 percent in South Carolina. The region's congressional delegation was uniformly Democratic -- and, thanks to the South's one-party status, disproportionately influential, with lifelong incumbents taking advantage of the congressional seniority system to secure the most powerful committee gavels.

For decades, they comfortably coexisted in the national Democratic Party's other major source of support, the machine-folk of the urban North. But as civil rights became a national issue -- and as the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the cities of the North and West turned civil rights into a priority for Democrats outside the South -- the coalition began to splinter. When the party ratified a civil rights plank at its 1948 convention, Southern Democrats staged a walkout and lined up behind Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's governor and (like all Southern Democrats of the time) an arch-segregationist. Running under the Dixiecrat banner, Thurmond won four Deep South states that fall.

Throughout the '50s and early '60s, Southern Democrats sat in political limbo. Their national brethren were inching their way toward a full-on embrace of civil rights, but the GOP wasn't much of an alternative, not with Dwight Eisenhower endorsing integration and not with the party's Northern-dominated congressional ranks strongly backing civil rights legislation.

1964, though, is what changed everything. In signing the Civil Rights Act, LBJ cemented the Democrats as a civil rights party. And in nominating anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater for president (instead of pro-civil rights Nelson Rockefeller) the GOP cast its future fortunes with the white electorate of the South. LBJ trounced Goldwater nationally that fall, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But in the South, voters flocked to the Republican nominee, with Goldwater carrying five states in the region. Mississippi, the same state that had given FDR 97 percent of its votes 28 years earlier, now gave Goldwater 87 percent. That fall, Thurmond, now a senator, renounced his Democratic affiliation once and for all and signed up for Goldwater's GOP. The realignment was well underway, and it had everything to do with race.

Liberals and conservatives have been part of both parties until the late 60s. That is when Republicans became the far right extremists that we all know and can't stand.

Republicans Are Never Ever Lying Hypocrites About Public Policy and Government

Health Care Reform Hypocrisy: States Suing Government Willing To Claim Subsidies From Law

More than half a dozen states suing to overturn President Barack Obama's health care law are also claiming its subsidies for covering retired state government employees, according to a list released Tuesday by the administration.

About 2,000 employers have been approved for the extra help to cover early retirees, mainly private businesses. But the list also includes seven states suing to overturn the health care overhaul as an unconstitutional power grab by the federal government.

The seven are Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and Nevada.

They are part of a group of 20 states that have challenged the law's requirement for most Americans to carry health insurance or face fines from the IRS. They argue that government cannot order individuals to buy a particular product. The administration counters that the mandate falls within broad powers conferred on Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

A spokeswoman said Indiana's Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels disapproves of Obama's overhaul, but will take advantage of specific provisions that benefit his state.

"Congress approved health care reform and the president signed it into law. Gov. Daniels does not agree with it, but Indiana will seek funds that help Hoosiers when there are no complicated strings or costs attached," said press secretary Jane Jankowski.

The list of employers who have expressed an interest in the subsidies includes about half the Fortune 500 companies, as well as state and local governments, educational institutions, unions and nonprofit organizations, the administration said. A total of 16 states have been approved, and more are expected to apply.

As medical costs soared in the last 20 years, employers have dramatically scaled back retiree health coverage. The share of large companies providing the benefit dropped from 66 percent in 1988 to 29 percent last year.

"Not only has this coverage disappeared, but individuals between 55 and 64 who are pre-Medicare are really struggling with the private health insurance market," said Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius. "This is one of the most vulnerable populations." Insurers usually charge older adults several times more than what people in their 30s and 40s pay.

To try to stabilize a precarious situation, the health care law provides $5 billion to help employers maintain coverage for early retirees age 55 and older but not yet eligible for Medicare.

The government subsidy amounts to 80 percent of medical claims between $15,000 and $90,000 – significant assistance to help cover high-cost retirees and eligible family members.

Companies can use the federal money to lower their own costs, or pass on the savings to their retirees through lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. Firms that receive federal help have to formally notify their retirees that they've gotten a subsidy.

The retiree assistance is designed as temporary relief until the health care law is fully in place in 2014. That's when competitive insurance markets will open for business, and eligible individuals can get government tax credits to help pay premiums. It's unclear what would happen if the $5 billion runs out before 2014.

The private employers approved for the subsidy include Levi Strauss, United Airlines, Kellogg Co., Mattel, Hewlett-Packard and Dow Chemical, to name a few.

Its an open secret that right-wing wackos like the tea nuts don't let register in their petty hateful brains because that would mean their elected leaders and the corporations headed by conservatives are using the tea nuts. IF ONLY MINNESOTANS WERE AS IMPORTANT AS PAWLENTY'S AMBITIONS....

The heads of Minnesota's most influential medical associations -- which nearly always keep political matters at arms' length -- issued a sharp rebuke. "The governor's decision just doesn't make sense for Minnesotans," the Minnesota Council of Health Plans, the Minnesota Hospital Association and the Minnesota Medical Association said in a joint statement late Tuesday.

That's clearly true, but this gambit has nothing to do with making sense for Minnesotans, and everything to do with pandering to right-wing activists in Iowa and New Hampshire. Pawlenty's constituents will not get aid available to other Americans, but his campaign will get a talking point.

Hari Sevugan, the DNC's press secretary, said in a statement, "After rejecting $7.8 billion dollars for his cash-strapped state where taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet and denying health care to a quarter million of his fellow Minnesotans, Tim Pawlenty's executive order to state employees might as well have read 'You will henceforth work for my Presidential ambitions instead of the people of Minnesota.'"