Forum Post: The GOP’s new plan: Hit Dems from the left ~ Old News Here
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The GOP’s new plan: Hit Dems from the left ~ Old News Here
On Social Security and now immigration, House GOPers are trying (and failing) to sneak up on Democrats' left flank
[Feigning mortal disappointment and outrage from the left over Obama and Dems has plagued open political forums and boards since the 2008 Election. Sorry Alex, this is not new.]
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Earlier this month, while progressive groups were slamming President Obama from the left on his decision to include a cut to Social Security benefits in his budget, the man responsible for getting Republicans elected to Congress .. .also hit Obama from the left. The move was surprising, considering that the vast majority of Republicans disagreed with Rep. Greg Walden, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and John Boehner even said said so publicly.
Walden’s move was understandable, though. He’s in a bit of a predicament: On one hand, Republicans want to reform (i.e., cut) entitlement programs, but on the other, Walden needs to get Republicans elected to Congress and the public hates the idea of cutting Social Security. What’s an NRCC chairman to do? Go with the poll numbers, and forget your party, apparently.
So now, the NRCC is trying the trick again, but this time on immigration — another issue where hard-liners in the GOP are out of step with the public. A website the committee set up to attack Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff jabs him for “lik[ing] to waste taxpayer dollars almost as much as he likes the strictest immigration laws in the nation he passed as Speaker of the Colorado House.”
Indeed, Romanoff helped pass “several bills that Democrats call the toughest in the nation,” as the AP reported at the time. But the NRCC hit runs into trouble once you finish reading that sentence from the AP: “… and Republicans say don’t go far enough.” Even though the state’s Republican governor signed the bill, “Republicans said the legislation still left glaring loopholes, including allowing benefits for minors.” And this was 2006, long before Arizona’s SB-1070 and its copycat laws in Alabama, South Carolina and elsewhere. Since then, the GOP moved further to the right on immigration while Romanoff moved left, even earning jabs for flip-flopping.
And if the NRCC is attacking Romanoff for being too conservative on immigration, their guy is presumably more liberal on this issue, right? As it turns out, Rep. Mike Coffman, current occupant of the suburban-Denver seat, is no Marco Rubio.
Coffman (perhaps best known for a 2012 birther rant, for which he later apologized) co-sponsored a bill to repeal birthright citizenship; once said “The Dream Act will be a nightmare for the American people”; signed an amicus brief supporting Arizona’s SB-1070 law; and wanted to pass a law making all ballots English only.
In February, he backtracked on his opposition to the DREAM Act as his party was preparing to play ball on immigration reform, but he still said he hadn’t made up his mind about legal status for adults.
Again, it’s understandable why the NRCC would want to try to use Romanoff’s out-of-date position against him, considering that as many as 70 percent of Americans favor a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but when your party and candidate are well to the right of the guy you’re attacking, it’s impossible to outflank him from the left and mean it.
Alex Seitz-Wald
Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/the_gops_new_plan_hit_dems_from_the_left/
They're Ba'ack! Both Overt & Covert GOP Zombies Defy Natural Death & Shame: http://occupywallst.org/forum/theyre-baack-both-overt-covert-gop-zombies-defy-na/
Papantonio: Anti-intellectualism Is Destroying Democracy In America (VIDEO)
Posted on April 25, 2013 by Gary Bentley •
Anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism have become almost epidemic in America. In fact, a talented writer by the name of Susan Jacoby wrote an important book several years ago titled The Age of American Unreason. The only hesitation anyone should have about reading that book is that it is pretty scary stuff.
According to Jacoby, more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 never read a single book in the course of an entire year. Americans of all ages are losing their ability to concentrate and analyze what they hear. In fact, the rule of thumb for a political candidate was that they needed to deliver their political message in around 40 seconds; today that political sound bite needs to be delivered in eight seconds to match our ability to concentrate.
Today in American schools, teachers who used to be able teach civics, humanities, and classic literature are now forced and ordered to stuff students’ brains with just enough information to pass standardized tests that are required by short-sighted politicians. Those politicians cajole school administrators, teachers and students into perpetuating a system that lacks the design to help children learn and think critically. Instead, they are taught to simply regurgitate numbers and words.
If you want to gain a little perspective on how dumbed-down we have become, take a map of the Middle East to work and ask one of your coworkers to point out Iraq. Ask them to find that place where 5,000 Americans have died for a war based on lies, that place where we will spend $3 trillion on an endless war—a war motivated by nothing less than empire building.
So the question is are we really preparing Americans to listen to the inane fraud-talk that flows out of the mouths of shallow demagogues that overwhelm both politics and the media? Or are we content with a culture that is morphing into a mass of people incapable of critical analysis?
Jacoby is one of several contemporary writers who believe that it is impossible to sustain democracy if we are unable to intellectually analyze those times when the very people who are leaders in that democracy are lying to us.
If the Susan Jacobys are right and anti-intellectualism is a trend in America, then spoon-feeding our children with facts and figures designed merely to pass a standardized test will never prepare them to preserve democracy.
The truth is when we firmly grasp timeless themes that can be found in novels like The Grapes of Wrath, Elmer Gantry or Nineteen Eighty-Four, we are on our way to better protecting democracy against the Mitch McConnels, the Rush Limbaughs, the Rand Pauls, Peter Kings, Louie Gohmerts, the Bill O’Reillys and Glenn Becks who infect the process of intelligent conservative rational thinking.
Joshua Holland will be on the show today – he wrote a piece for Alternet that gives us an idea about how serious the problem really is.
In 2011, Newsweek asked 1,000 Americans to take the standard U.S. Citizenship test, and 38 percent of them failed. One in three couldn’t name the vice-president. A 2009 study in the European Journal of Communications looked at how informed citizens of the U.S., UK, Denmark and Finland were of the international news of the day, and the results weren’t pretty.
“Overall,” the scholars wrote, “the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed, averaging 62–67 percent correct responses, the British were relatively close behind with 59 percent, and the Americans lagging in the rear with 40 percent.” We didn’t fare much better when it came to domestic stories.
Joshua Holland concluded that widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.
What happens when lots of citizens don’t have a solid grasp of what’s going on in the real world?
By this time, most people who follow non-corporate media have heard about the Dunning – Kruger study that, in a nutshell, established that most Americans are too stupid to recognize that they are stupid. But add to that a German study by Dr. Mato Nagel, and you begin to understand that the more politically conservative you are, the more GOP you have in your blood and brain, the less capable you are of recognizing how incompetent and woefully underinformed and ill-equipped to make rational decisions about politics and Democratic policies.
The truth is when you look at the studies, if you fall into that knee-jerk, always right wing conservative camp of politics, you are what is considered the low hanging fruit in politics.
You are the most likely to accept massive, irrational lies delivered by manipulative neo-nut demagogues. You are the ideal target for extreme politics like fascism.
These are not new ideas surfacing in these studies. Take a few hours and read Eric Frumm’s classic work called Escape From Freedom, and you will conclude that it is typically the least informed, most irrational, and the most extreme conservatives that are the most susceptible to dictatorships and facism.
Chances are, if you are one of those corporate media-following bone heads who still believe that:
Weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.
Or Saddam Hussein blew up the Twin Towers
Or Obama is a secret Muslim
Or Obama wants to take your guns
Or Obama has FEMA prison camps set up for Teabag Republicans…
Then search no further – you truly are the undereducated, child-like, impressionable, irrational, dangerous cog in America’s political system that puts Democracy most at risk.
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http://www.ringoffireradio.com/2013/04/25/papantonio-anti-intellectualism-is-destroying-democracy-in-america/
More enlightenment: http://www.ringoffireradio.com/