Republican Hypocrisy category archive

One thing is certain:

Mitt cannot be accused of selling out.

To sell out, one must have a principle to put on the market.

Clarence Page takes a look at the racist undertones of teabaggery. A nugget:

Modern social conservatives, in my experience, do not hate black people en masse. To the contrary, there are two kinds of blacks they love. The first is those, like (Condoleeza–ed.) Rice, who are mainly mute on the subject of race, seldom so impolite as to say or do anything that might remind people they are black. The second is those who will engage on race, but only to lecture other blacks for their failures as conservatives conceive them. And that, friends and neighbors, is Herman Cain all over.

“I don’t believe racism in this country today holds anybody back in a big way,” he told CNN recently. Had he contended too many African-Americans use racism as an excuse for failure to succeed and even failure to try, Cain would have gotten no grief from me; I’ve made that argument often.

(snip)

But what made the claim truly bizarre is that two days later, Cain branded himself a victim of racism. Specifically, he said some black people are “racist” because they disagree with his politics. So blacks aren’t held back by racism, but Cain is?

Lord, give me strength.

Click to read the rest.

Take the Which Mitt Quiz today.

Honestly, he could work in a pizza place, along with Herman Cain’t.

A snippet:

Mitt Romney said that corporations are people. Democrats believe that people are people.

Er, yeah.

Image via Kiko’s House.

Robert Reich explains (emphasis added):

Government can hire people directly to maintain the nation’s parks and playgrounds and to help in schools and hospitals. It can funnel money to help cash-starved states and local government so they don’t have to continue to slash payrolls and public services. And it can hire indirectly – contracting with companies to build schools, revamp public transportation and rebuild the nation’s crumbling highways, bridges and ports.

Not only does this create jobs but also puts money in the hands of all the people who get the jobs, so they can turn around and buy the goods and services they need – generating more jobs. Not exactly rocket science.

But congressional Republicans are firmly opposed. Why don’t Republicans get it? Either they’re knaves – they want the economy to stay awful through next election day so Obama gets the boot. Or they’re fools – they’ve bought the lie that reducing the deficit now creates more jobs.

Follow the link to see Dr. Reich demolish the “cut spending and deregulate” shibboleth.

Aside:

Me, I’m betting on “fools led my knaves.”

The flips are so rapid as to be invisible to the naked eye:

The Republican-dominated Pennsylvania state House of Representatives is considering making English the official language of the state.

My ex-local rag sums it up:

These measures are remedies in search of a problem, since the vast majority of U.S. residents are fluent in English, and most immigrants are eager to learn.

Like requiring photo identification to vote, or empowering police to pull over anyone “suspected of being unlawfully” in the country, these English-only measures tap into anti-immigrant feelings that actually dishonor this nation of immigrants.

The amount of free-floating bigotry in Wingnut World appalls one.

The willingness of the “party of Lincoln” to capitalize on it disgusts one.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

The Republican Party seems to have become made up of not very nice people.

Via Steve Benen.

Responding to a particularly odious racist video (you will have to click through to view it–I suffered through about 30 seconds before being about to bear no more), Chauncey DeVega decodes the code:

Republican “Small government”=”Southern Strategy.”

As is common with DeVega’s work, the post is long, tightly-reasoned, and amply supported with evidence.

Here are two nuggets (I couldn’t restrict myself to just one). The full post is here:

Ignoring for a moment Lee Atwater’s naked confession on the matter, rank and file former Reagan Democrats, suburban swing voters, and today’s Tea Party GOPers would bristle in defense at the suggestion that race or racism plays any role at all in their disdain for “big government.”

To Conservatives, such an argument is bizarre and strange: How could tax cuts and government rollbacks have anything at all to do with racism or racial resentment?

(snip)

Of course, the evidence suggests otherwise. The chants of “take our country back” beg the response “from who?” The narrative of “real America” plays on xenophobia towards non-whites, and a fear of how some type of Other is always at the gates, ready and willing to steal the hard earned just rewards of the (white) American middle class. Ultimately, in a previous year the fixation would have been on Reagan’s mythical welfare queens or nefarious “quotas” and “affirmative action” programs that deny white men job opportunities.

Most certainly, there are women (referring to the video–ed.) straight out of central casting who view food stamps and public assistance as a credit card of sorts and raise their children to believe that receiving support from the State is a “job” to be aspired to, a career to invest in. Likewise, they have twins in “respectable circles” who broke this country’s economy by advocating for irresponsible tax cuts for the very richest Americans, embracing robber baron capitalism, and gutted the American middle class through financial crookery.

Their crimes are different by orders of magnitude. That fact is irrelevant. Herein lies the rub: Colorblind Conservatism looks at the former with immediate suspicion and disdain, while the latter looks back in the mirror and is greeted with a smile.

In your heart, you know he’s right.

As a follow-up to my previous post, Wisconsin:

While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) law dismantling collective bargaining rights has harmed teachers, nurses, and other civil servants, it’s helping a different group in Wisconsinites — inmates. Prisoners are now taking up jobs that used to be held by unionized workers in some parts of the state.

As the Madison Capital Times reports, “Besides losing their right to negotiate over the percentage of their paycheck that will go toward health care and retirement, unions also lost the ability to claim work as a ‘union-only’ job, opening the door for private workers and evidently even inmates to step in and take their place.” Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.

Why pay for labor when you can steal it?

And some persons may have thought that Dennis G’s practice of referring to the Republican Party as “the Confederate Party” was hyperbole.

Via Paying Attention.

They aren’t even trying to hide their motives any more:

In states where a photo identification is required to vote, Republican lawmakers have been able to avoid legal challenges to the rule by giving away free voter ID cards, thereby ducking the label of a “poll tax.”

But in Wisconsin, which recently passed one of the nation’s most restrictive voter ID laws, another roadblock exists: ignorance.

A leaked memo written by a high-ranking Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation official stipulates that DMV workers are not to offer the voter ID, leaving it to the patron to explicitly ask for the free ID, then fill out the proper paperwork.

Addendum, the Next Day:

I was wrong. They are trying to hide it:

A Wisconsin state employee has been fired after he revealed that a Department of Transportation official had instructed workers to not notify citizens that IDs necessary for voting could be obtained for free.

Via Raw Story.

Facing South reports on evil people who want evil things.

When government employees have to step in to pay for what they need to do their jobs because their employers refuse to, that is for all practical purposes a hidden tax, one born solely by those employees:

When English teacher Stacey DeCotis first saw her new fifth-grade Hanover classroom, it had some desks and not much else. So she went shopping for a small library of books and a host of decorations to liven things up.

Then, with the first day of school just around the corner, DeCotis paid a visit to Teachers Rule, an educational supply store in Rockland, where she stocked up on supplies and personalized items for the students’ first day.

In all, DeCotis spent several hundred dollars – all from her own pocket – to get ready for the first day of classes.

“Some people think I’m crazy to spend so much,’’ she said as she perused the aisles one morning. “But I’m not alone.’’

Public school teachers paying for classroom supplies is not new. But today’s stumbling economy has deepened the need, as budget-crunched schools look to trim costs and more students show up without even basic supplies.

Governments get away with this because, despite rightwing propaganda to the contrary, the great majority of teachers care deeply about doing their jobs and serving their students. So they pay this de facto tax and just keep in trying to teach.

A retired Republican staffer explains why he retired after three decades–his disgust at the tactics of the contemporary Republican Party. A nugget:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'”

Click and read.

Via Jay Bookman.