Justin's Political Corner

One reasonable way of looking at democratic governance is that it carries out the collective will of a society, especially in areas where the private sector can’t do the job or needs regulation to prevent it from doing harm. Of course, there are always many variables and points of disagreement, from the need to protect individual rights to the wisdom of each decision.

But something extreme has surfaced in modern American politics: an ideological hatred of government. From the Tea Party to libertarianism, there is a “principled” rejection – at least rhetorically – of almost everything that government does (outside of national security), and those views are no longer simply fringe. By and large, they have been embraced by the national Republican Party.

There has also been an effort to anchor these angry anti-government positions in the traditions of U.S. history. The Tea Party consciously adopted imagery and symbols from the Revolutionary War era to create an illusion that this contempt of government fits with the First Principles. However, this right-wing revision of U.S. history is wildly askew if not upside-down. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, and even many of their “anti-federalist” critics, were not hostile to an American government. They understood the difference between an English monarchy that denied them representation in Parliament and their own Republic.

Indeed, the key framers – James Madison, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton – might be called pragmatic nationalists, eager to use the new Constitution, which centralized power at the national level, to build the young country and protect its fragile independence. While these framers later split over precise applications of the Constitution – Madison opposed Hamilton’s national bank, for instance – they accepted the need for a strong and effective federal government, unlike the weak, states’ rights-oriented Articles of Confederation.

More generally, the founders recognized the need for order if their experiment in self-governance was to work. Even some of the more radical founders, like Sam Adams, supported the suppression of domestic disorders, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Adams’ and his cohorts’ logic was that an uprising against a distant monarch was one thing, but taking up arms against your own republican government was something else.

But the Tea Partiers are not entirely wrong when they insist that their hatred of “gubmint” has its roots in the founding era. There was an American tradition that involved resisting a strong and effective national government. It was not, however, anchored in the principles of “liberty,” but rather in the practice of slavery.

The rest of the Second Amendment – that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – was meant by definitions of the day to ensure the right to “bear Arms” as part of a “well-regulated Militia.” Only in modern times has that meaning been distorted – by the American Right – to apply to individual Americans carrying whatever gun they might want.

But the double-talk about the Second Amendment didn’t begin in recent years. It was there from the beginning when the First Congress acted with no apparent sense of irony in using the wording, “a free State,” to actually mean “a slave State.” And, of course, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” didn’t apply to black people.

The Second Congress enacted the Militia Acts, which mandated that military-age “white” men must obtain muskets and other supplies to participate in bearing arms for their state militias. Thus, the South was guaranteed its militias for “domestic safety.”

Madison’s realignment with his Virginia neighbor, Jefferson, bitterly disappointed Washington and Hamilton. However, after Jefferson gained the presidency in 1801, he and Madison joined in one of the biggest federal power overreaches in U.S. history by negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France – despite the absence of any “enumerated power” in the Constitution that envisioned such an act by the central government. 

With the election of Abraham Lincoln from the anti-slavery Republican Party, Southern states saw the writing on the wall. Defense of their beloved institution of owning other human beings required extreme action, which manifested itself in the secession of 11 Southern states and the enactment of a Confederate constitution explicitly enshrining slavery.

The South’s defeat in the Civil War forced the Confederate states back into the Union and enabled the Northern states to finally bring an end to slavery. However, the South continued to resist the North’s attempts to reconstruct the region in a more race-neutral way. The South’s old aristocracy reasserted itself through Ku Klux Klan terror and via political organization within the Democratic Party, reestablishing white supremacy – and oppression of blacks – under the banner of “states’ rights.”

There were, of course, other American power centers opposed to the intrusion of the federal government on behalf of the broader public. For instance, the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries used their money and their political influence inside the Republican Party to assert laissez-faire economics, all the better to steal the country blind. That power center, however, was shaken by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Recognizing the abject failure of the “free market” to serve the nation’s broader interests, the voters elected Franklin Roosevelt who dealt a New Deal that stimulated the economy, imposed securities regulations and took a variety of steps to lift citizens out of poverty.

In the post-World War II era with the United States asserting global leadership, the South’s practice of racial segregation became another eyesore that the federal government haltingly began to address under pressure from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. By the 1960s, the South had lost again, with federal laws prohibiting racial segregation.

The momentum from these two government initiatives – intervention to create a more just economy and racial integration – helped build the American middle class and finally fulfilled some of the grand principles of equality and justice espoused at the founding. However, the energy behind those reforms began to fade in the 1970s as right-wing resentment built.

Finally, in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the combined backlash against Roosevelt’s New Deal and King’s new day prevailed. Too many whites had forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression and had grown angry over what they viewed as “political correctness.”

Over the last several decades, the Right also built an imposing vertically integrated media machine that meshes the written word in newspapers, magazines and books with the spoken (or shouted) word on TV and talk radio. This giant echo chamber, resonating with sophisticated propaganda including revisionist (or neo-Confederate) history, has convinced millions of poorly informed Americans that the framers of the Constitution hated a strong central government and were all for “states’ rights” – when nearly the opposite was true as Madison, Washington and Hamilton rejected the Articles of Confederation and drafted the Constitution to enhance federal power.

Further, the Right’s hijacking of Revolutionary War symbols, like yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, confuses the Tea Party rank-and-file by equating the founding era’s resistance against an overseas monarchy to today’s hatred of an elected U.S. government.

Amid this muck of muddled history, the biggest secret withheld from the American people is that today’s Right is actually promoting a set of anti-government positions that originally arose to justify and protect the South’s institution of slavery. The calls of “liberty” then covered the cries of suffering from human bondage, just as today’s shouts of outrage reflect resentment over the first African-American president.

h/t: AlterNet

Wayne Allyn Root is no fan of President Barack Obama. He’s a former Libertarian Party candidate for vice-president and a “birther” who has questioned whether the president was really born in America. (Root studied at Columbia University when Obama was there and has questioned whether Obama really attended the school.) Root has been audited by the IRS—twice. And in recent days, within the right-wing media, he has become something of a poster child for the IRS scandal, suggesting that the IRS targeted him because of his political activity.

On Fox News last week, he proclaimed,  “I am the face of Obama’s IRS attacks.” In WorldNet Daily,he recently wrote, “As an outspoken critic of Obama, I’ve been under IRS attack since January of 2011. I am living proof of how bad it is, when it started and that it was directed at individuals, not just conservative groups.” Root has offered his services to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), should Paul need a congressional witness.

But the root of his troubles could be not his anti-Obama politics, but his own finances, for Root’s less-than-conventional tax returns might have indeed warranted a close look. 

Last October—months before the IRS scandal broke—Root maintained that he’d had a “spotless” tax history until January 2011, when he got an “unsettling” phone call from the IRS letting him know his tax returns from 2007 and 2008 (the year he ran for vice president) were being audited. In August 2011, the IRS sent him a deficiency notice indicating that he’d underpaid his taxes in those years by about $57,000. The agency demanded he fork over the unpaid taxes, along with nearly $13,000 in penalties. Root challenged the IRS in tax court and prevailed. But then, within days, he says, he was hit with yet another audit, for tax years 2009 and 2010. “That order had to come from the highest levels of government,” he has asserted.

Root insists his experience proves the IRS scandal goes beyond what the IRS Inspector General found: that the agency gave unwarranted scrutiny to conservative groups filing applications for nonprofit status. But as many conservative groups are now asserting without evidence that they are victims of IRS political harassment, there are good reasons to consider Root’s claims skeptically.

Given that Root declared 88 percent of his income nontaxable in 2007, he has a tough case to make that the IRS went after him because of his political views. And as he’s pointed out, when he appealed the decision in tax court, he won. (Root was not available for comment, but his spokeswoman says he’s still being audited for the later tax years.)

Root isn’t the only person whose recent claims of political persecution by the IRS deserve some doubt. The list of those who insist the IRS came after them due to politics includes Anne Hendershott, a conservative author who says in 2010 the IRS wanted to look at the expenses she claimed for her writing work; Franklin Graham, whose Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is already tax-exempt but who helped arrange for his famous father to endorse Mitt Romney for president last year; Jewish groups that support Israel; a couple of pro-life pharmacists; Family Research Council founder and evangelist James Dobson; and an anti-abortion group whose claims of being an IRS target date back to the Bush administration. Even Mitt Romney has been declared a victim. “ I think some people are getting a little paranoid,” suggests Cervone, who believes “100 percent” that the IRS was wrongly targeting some groups. But he thinks it is highly unlikely that individual taxpayers were singled out due to their political views.

None of these high-profile claims seem related to the conduct identified by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General, who confirmed that the IRS inappropriately scrutinized nonprofit status applications by conservative tea party groups in 2011 and 2012. But the apparent wrongdoing by the IRS has given license to anyone ever audited by the IRS to claim they were victims of political persecution, rather than legitimate candidates for audits. In Root’s case, the system sort of worked. His returns set off well-known alarm bells for auditors, but he was able to defend his tax returns. That story, though, doesn’t sell as well on Fox News.

H/T: Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones

This morning, the National Review broke the news that tea party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is considering a presidential run, a scoop that should surprise no one who’s paid attention to his short Senate career. As Jonathan Bernstein explains, Cruz has spent his few months in the Senate alienating his colleagues by constantly trying to distinguish himself as the more-conservative-than-thou alternative to “establishment” Republicans. Such behavior makes no sense if Cruz is interested in building the coalitions necessary to legislate, but it makes perfect sense if he has his eyes set on winning a tea-soaked GOP primary in 2016.

 Here are five examples of such theories that Cruz actually believes in:

• George Soros leads a global conspiracy to abolish the game of golf. In a January 2012 article published on Cruz’s senate campaign website, the future senator argues that a twenty year-old non-binding United Nations resolution signed by 178 nations including the United States under President George H.W. Bush, is actually a nefarious plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” Cruz attributes this plot to a common tea party boogieman — “[t]he originator of this grand scheme is George Soros, who candidly supports socialism and believes that global development must progress through eliminating national sovereignty and private property.”
• Communists infiltrated Harvard Law School. Almost three years ago, Cruz gave a speech to the tea party group Americans for Prosperity in which he claimed that revolutionary communists were a major presence on Harvard’s law faculty. According to Cruz, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Cruz’s claims came as a big surprise to Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, a Republican who served as President Reagan’s solicitor general, who says that “I would be surprised if there were any members of the faculty who ‘believed in the Communists overthrowing the U.S. government.’”
• Islamic law threatens the United States. Echoing a common fear among very conservative politicians that Sharia law is somehow creeping into American life, Cruz told a senate candidate’s forum last year that “Sharia law is an enormous problem” in the United States. In reality, there are barely any examples of Islamic or Sharia law even being mentioned in American legal proceedings, and when it is mentioned it is typically because a contract, will or other document drafted by a private citizen invokes Sharia law, not because the court wishes to replace American law with something else.
• Obama wants the immigration bill to fail so he can campaign on it in 2016. Cruz claims that “the reason that the White House is insisting on a path to citizenship” in the immigration bill making its way through Congress “is because the White House knows that insisting on that is very likely to scuttle the bill” giving Obama an issue to campaign on in 2014 and 2016. In reality, a path to citizenship was a key prong of the immigration bill President Bush supported in 2007. It’s also a major prong of the Gang of Eight bill — agang which includes Republican Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). So if the path to citizenship is actually an Obama plot to give himself a campaign issue, Obama has some unexpected co-conspirators in this scheme.
• George W. Bush led an assault on Texas’ “sovereignty.” Cruz’s first campaign ad touted his victory in a Supreme Court case permitting the state of Texas to execute a Mexican national, despite the fact that Texas violated America’s treaty obligations by not permitting this Mexican citizen “to request assistance from the consul of his own state.” President Bush objected to Texas’s effort to flout a treaty that even North Korea had honored when it detained two American journalists for five months in 2009. Cruz dismissed Bush’s objections as an intrusion on “the sovereignty of the States.”

If elected to the White House, Cruz is unlikely to step back from his penchant for Glenn Beck-style conspiracies.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

The right-wingers have been in full-on gloat mode since the capture of the Boston Marathon bombers — not because it turned out that they were right about the nature of the perpetrators (they weren’t), but because speculation that they might be right-wing extremists was wrong. Only wingnuts can convert a sigh of relief into an attack on their opponents.

The problem is that all they’re really doing is attempting, yet again, to whitewash away the very real existence of violent extremists on their own side.

Leading the charge is William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, who published a post over the weekend titled“Add Boston Marathon Bombing to pile of Failed Eliminationist Narratives”:

Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition. It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.

The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.

In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative. And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:

James Holmes
Jared Loughner
The Cabby Stabber
The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
Amy Bishop
The Fort Hood Shooter
The IRS Plane Crasher
The Pentagon Shooter

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.

Of course, it would always help if people like Jacobson managed to review the posts of the people he’s attacking — since neither I nor anyone at Crooks and Liars ever speculated in print that the perps were white right-wing extremists. Others did, however — and frankly, we discussed it among ourselves. But we knew that it was irresponsible to speculate publicly until we knew more, and so we waited — unlike a few progressives, and even many, many more conservatives. (More about that in a moment.)

The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing extremism’s potential role was entirely rational, considering that in the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States, compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be publishing soon.)

Trust me on this, Mr. Jacobson, as a person who has attended their gatherings and spent time observing their ideology up close and personally: There is nothing remotely left-wing, or anything other than right wing, about the ideology promoted by people like the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan and American Renaissance and a whole bevy of other hate groups out there operating in America today. The notion that they are not from the political right is simply risible.

It just depends where on the very real spectrum of right-wing thought each happens to fall. You see, the reason they call these people right wing extremists is that they begin with simple, perhaps even mainstream, conservative positions and extend them to their most outrageous and illogical extreme.

Conservatives are, for instance, skeptical of the power of the federal government to intervene in civil-rights matters; right-wing extremists believe it has no such power whatsoever, but it has been usurped by a Jewish conspiracy that is imposing its will on white people.

Conservatives are skeptical of internationalism and entities like the United Nations. Right-wing extremists believe the U.N. represents a diabolical plot to overthrow American sovereignty and impose totalitarian rule.

Conservatives believe that abortion is murder of a living being and oppose its use on demand. Right-wing extremists believe that this justifies committing murder and various violent crimes in order to prevent it.

Conservatives believe affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination. Right-wing extremists believe it is part of a plot to oppress white people.

Conservatives oppose taxation, and tax increases in particular, on principle. Right-wing extremists believe that the IRS is an illegitimate institution imposed on the body politic by the aforementioned Jewish conspiracy.

Conservatives oppose increased immigration on principle and illegal immigration as a matter of law enforcement, and believe the borders should be secure. Right-wing extremists believe that Mexicans are coming here as part of an “Aztlan” conspiracy to retake the Southwest for Mexico, and that we should start shooting border crossers on sight.

You get the idea.

Moreover, the claim that right-wing extremists have nothing to do with the Tea Party is just flatly risible. I have two simple words regarding that claim: Oath Keepers.

But the conspiracist Oath Keepers are hardly the only extremist element that has been absorbed within the ranks of the Tea Party. The list is long, but it’s headed up by the Minutemen who have become Tea Party leaders. Moreover, as I explored in an investigative piece for AlterNet, the movement became a functional extension of the Patriot/militia movement in many precincts, especially in rural areas, away from the television crews.

Jacobson’s limitations on what constitutes “right wing” are not only ahistorical, afactual, and fully at odds with reality, they’re also predictably self-serving. So it’s not surprising that, given his criteria, even his list of “failed eliminationist narratives” is fatally flawed.

Most of the examples he provides, notably the Bill Sparkman episode, were never discussed by me or by anyone at C&L as instances of right-wing violence, because we never considered them such. However, there are three cases here that we did indeed describe as involving right-wing extremists. And you know what? We still do.

We realize, for instance, that the post-shooting narrative favored pretending that Jared Lee Loughner was somehow not a terrorist because he was mentally ill (a claim they for some reason do not make when it comes to Nidal Hasan, the mentally ill gunman in the Fort Hood shooting rampage). They also found other mitigating factors, such as Loughner’s youthful liberalism, to claim that he was not a right-wing extremist, despite the obvious liberal-ness of his targets. However, none of that can overcome the reality that at the time he acted, Loughner was carrying out what he saw as a mission on behalf of his now-adopted right-wing beliefs involving a global monetary conspiracy. He was indeed a right-wing extremist, and other experts on the subject who have examined the record have reached the same conclusion.

Similarly, we found that the IRS plane bomber was indeed a terrorist, and that he was acting on behalf of the very same extremist anti-tax ideology we described above. And the Pentagon shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was acting out on his beliefs derived from Alex Jones’s conspiracy theories — and Jones, despite many efforts to pretend otherwise, is clearly a classic right-wing conspiracy theorist and extremist from the old John Birch mold.

Yes, we recognize very much that there is a significant difference between mainstream conservatives and right-wing extremists, as we’ve outlined above — but those differences, frankly, keep diminishing, and the ideological distances keep shrinking.

We would love nothing more than to report that conservatives were bravely standing up against extremists on the right and doing their part as citizens to bring an end to their toxic contributions to our society. Believe me, as a onetime moderate Republican from a conservative state, I would love nothing more than to see mainstream conservatives stand up against right-wing extremism, as they once did in the 1980s when Idaho became one of the first states to pass a hate-crimes law.

But those days are long gone. There are still a handful of thoughtful and decent conservatives remaining who will stand up to confront this problem, but they are tiny in number and nil in influence. Instead, conservatism is dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck and William Jacobson (not to mention nearly everyone at Fox News), who instead of taking the problem of right-wing extremism seriously, dismiss its presence, downplay its influence and spread, and otherwise look the other way while viciously attacking anyone with the nerve to point it out.

Conservatives have instead made a cottage industry out of whitewashing away their extremists, most notably when decrying any efforts by law enforcement to confront the issue, and this latest effort in the wake of the Boston bombing is just the latest chapter.

In the meantime, of course, the tide is rising as the number of extremist groups in America reaches record proportions. And mainstream conservatives are aiding and abetting them — first by pretending that they don’t exist while attacking anyone who points out that they do, and second by silently giving them a warm embrace into the ranks of the Tea Party. It bodes ill for us all.

H/T: David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on Monday warned an audience of a threat to the Lone Star state far greater than those from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: Democrats.

Abbott made his comments at a McLennan County Republican Club lunchtime event in Waco, TX, using the venue to repeatedly slam the Obama administration’s policies. In doing so, Abbott took the time to warn his fellow Republicans of the encroaching threat that Democrats pose to their very way of life. Pointing to the group Battleground Texas, composed of veterans of the Obama presidential campaigns, the Abbott argued that the Democratic Party is a far greater concern to the state than North Korea:

“One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons,” Abbott said. “The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration and his political machine.”

Austin was one of the cities seen on a North Korean map, supposedly comprising the targets should North Korea carry out nuclear strikes in the United States. North Korea’s vast supply of missiles, however, are unable to reach that far, whether or not they are able to be nuclear-armed.

During his speech, Abbott also weighed in heavily against the recently passed United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which the U.S. is still reviewing. “We fought a war in 1776 to fight against foreign dictators telling us what to do, not now to turn around and give that power to them,” Abbott warned about the treaty, calling it an “incredible danger.” He has already threatened to file suit against the administration should President Obama sign it, despite admitting that it does not infringe on the Second Amendment.

h/t: Hayes Brown at Think Progress Security

When North Carolinians elected Republican Pat McCrory in November, they thought they were getting a “moderate” Republican.  Indeed, McCrory’s public record looked like a moderate Republican, he sounded like a moderate Republican and if you follow the logic about ducks, that means that as governor, McCrory would be a moderate Republican.

North Carolinians are seeing the flaw in duck logic, because something happened to their once moderate Republican governor.  It’s like the moment he was handed the keys to the Governor’s mansion he turned into a Tea Party militant overnight.

Yes, the State of North Carolina is turning into a Kochtarian Utopia, with McCrory as the face of a Moderate Republican and multi-millionaire Art Pope, playing the role of Dick Cheney. Mr. Pope is the CEO of Variety Wholesalers Inc. and has been active in Republican politics throughout his adult life. That is, after he co-founded The Libertarian Party as a 20-year-old college student, studying political science at UNC – Chapel Hill.

Pope, who  counts the Kochs among his friends, makes the administrations of Rick Snyder, Scott Walker, and even Florida’s Rick Scott look like amateur hour.  When Republicans won control of the State’s legislature in 2010, for the first time since 1870, 75% of the funding  that made it possible came from “independent” groups with ties to the personification of all that is glorious in the eyes of the Tea Party, the  great, white Art Pope.

Once the Republicans gained control of the State’s legislature for the first time in over a century, Pope provided his expertise in gerrymandering which means, as is the case in the Republican controlled House of Representatives in Washington, even when they lose, they still retain control.

Since McCrory took over the Governor’s mansion with Pope as his budget director, the litany of Tea Partyesque legislation has been spell binding. Attacking women’s rights, access to education, savage cuts to unemployment benefits, voting suppression on steroids and much, much more. Also proposed under Art  Pope’s watchful eye, Romneyhood, a constitutional amendment for a right to work for less, and government handouts for homeschooling. 

 As Think Progress said, Pope with McCrory as his face is rapidly turning North Carolina into a Tea Party Utopia.

“With no remaining checks to Republican rule in North Carolina, the state has now become a haven for some of the most ideological — and ill-considered — tea party fantasies dressed up as legislation.”

We wouldn’t see proposals to impose any religion, let alone a specific religion, on the populace of North Carolina under a “moderate” Republican Administration and it certainly doesn’t make sense under Libertarianism. Yet, that’s just one of the laws proposed by the Pope/McCrory Administration.  This is particularly ironic, since Pope is familiar with the first amendment, when it comes to his “right” to throw as much money as possible at races where Republicans can’t sell their ideas.

If Pope and McCrory have their way, NC’s Racial Justice Act that sought to take racism out of North Carolina’s criminal justice system will be a thing of the past.

This is symptomatic of the Tea Party’s version of libertarianism, in which free speech applies to the uber rich when they buy politicians, but freedom of religion is reduced to “allowing” North Carolinians to choose which Church, spouting the state religion, they will attend.  Somehow, the first Amendment that Pope pointed to when defending his “right” to buy the State’s government no longer matters under the Pope/McCrory Administration.

It’s the sort of “libertarianism” that frowns upon assuring civil protections of people who are vulnerable to discrimination in favor of preserving the racists’ ‘freedom’ to be racists.

But wait, there is so much more. North Carolina shows us why the Tea Party is drawn to having inexperienced “fresh faces.”  It’s so much easier for Dick Cheney types  to pull their strings behind the curtain.

In 2012, Pope served as the co-chair for Pat McCrory’s transition team before he was appointed to be the state’s chief budget writer in McCrory’s Administration.  When his appointment as Budget Director was announced, observers of North Carolinian politics knew what lay ahead. McCrory serves as the Public face of his Administration, with Art Pope pulling his strings from behind the scenes.

Most of the proposed voter suppression legislation is the same boilerplate laws we saw passed by Republicans before the 2012 election. However, the Pope/McCrory voter suppression package has a couple of additional laws that only a Kochtarian can see as an enhancement of liberty. First up is a law to remove the child deduction from parents whose children vote where they go to college instead of in their home town.  It has the same effect as a poll tax,  even if Pope and McCrory would deny that it is a poll tax.

Of course, Voter Integrity Project of NC which has ties to Art Pope, are salivating over this law. Like good soldiers of the Koch controlled Tea Party, they’re armed with talking points,  so they don’t have to worry their little heads by thinking about what they are advocating.

North Carolinians will be hearing about how this law, proposed by one of Art Pope’s puppets, is really just about “equalizing” the vote because college students are such a privileged lot. This message provided courtesy of one of Art Pope’s “grassroots” organizations will appear to be a “grassroots” concern, with Art Pope, once again, pulling the strings.  Granted, recognizing why this policy is constitutionally problematic would mean taking a look at the 24^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. But Pope’s puppets need not worry about it.  He does all the thinking, and all they have to do is propose his law and parrot his message. It’s so much more efficient when one person does the thinking and makes all the decisions, you know.

The Voter Integrity Project operates much like those other wonderful “grass roots” organizations, Americans For Prosperity and the Tea Party where Pope (and his bff’s the Koch Brothers” also have ties, in which “grassroots” really means “top down.” Their sugar daddies run the show, while the “grass roots” members act as broadcasters of their sugar daddy’s message. after legislators bought by their sugar daddies propose the policies envisioned by Art Pope and the Koch Brothers.

Pope isn’t stopping at voter suppression though.  As the person responsible for writing NC’s budgets, Pope is using the budget to eliminate NC’sJudicial Public Finance Program.

In short, the program provides public financing for judicial elections, rather than the sort of “grass roots” financing that comes from people like Art Pope.  Considering that Pope believes that money is speech, his opposition to this program is predictable.  After all, money is only speech when the money in question belongs to the uberrich and besides, public financing of elections sort of puts a damper on the uberrich’s financial megaphone silencing the voices of everyone else.  Then there’s practical reality.  To assure the laws proposed by the legislators that Pope invested in remain in tact, Pope needs the ability to buy judges to rubber stamp his laws should they, somehow be subject to constitutional challenges.

Just think of it, the same guy who writes the law, buys a lawmaker to propose it and has his “grassroots’ organization broadcast his talking points.  Just in case you people get uppity and decide to challenge the will of Pope, if he gets his way, he’ll have bought judges to rule in his favor.  It’s so efficient and so consistent with the liberty that Kochtarianism stands for.

The lesson of North Carolina is a reminder of the sort of Republican Party we’re dealing with today.  It’s a Republican Party controlled by people who believe they are entitled to buy legislators and judges to silence the voices of Americans who don’t belong to the billionaire boys club. It’s a party of plutocrats that not only can’t relate to most Americans, and all American values, but hold contempt for both. The real leaders aren’t those moderate faces on the campaign trail, they are those men hiding behind the curtain.

h/t: Adalia Woodbury at PoliticusUSA

A US couple who had fled to Cuba after snatching their two young sons from the care of their grandmother are behind bars in Tampa, Florida, local law enforcement said Wednesday.

A US airplane carrying Joshua Hakken, his wife Sharyn Patricia and their sons, aged two and four, landed in Tampa from Cuba early Wednesday, local media reported.

Hakken was attempting to flee US authorities when he took his wife and boys to Cuba aboard his sailboat on Monday.

Joshua Hakken was booked in the Hillsborough County, Florida jail and faces charges that include child neglect, kidnapping, burglary, and grand theft auto, while Sharyn Hakken will face charges of kidnapping, interference with child custody and child neglect, according the website of the sheriff’s office.

TV footage showed the couple arriving in the United States in handcuffs.

Officials in Florida had been searching for Joshua Hakken since April 3 when he allegedly broke into his mother-in-law’s house near Tampa, tied her up and fled with his young boys.

The Hillsborough County sheriff’s office said that Hakken lost custody of the children after being arrested in Louisiana on drug charges in June 2012, following what police described as “an anti-government rally.”

h/t: The Raw Story

That is what a number of Tea Party activists are saying and they are organizing a boycott to protest the conservative station’s coverage, especially what they view as the network’s relative silence in investigating the attacks on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.”

The three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership. (A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had little effect.)

A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.