Poetic Justice
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/white-house-mixes-colorado-wyoming-map-130725157.html
Bob, it’s a mistake to get your history from Glenn Beck, because he will only give you half the story, at best, and even that will be packed with lies.
Before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was, by current-day standards, the conservative party. Like all conservative parties, it opposed progress and advocated clinging to the status quo — with the status quo being the preservation of slavery.
The 19th century conserva-Dems viewed slaves as private property no different from livestock, except that this “stock” represented a combined value of $3 billion, which is equivalent to $81 billion in today’s money. The conservatives adamantly opposed the idea of the government forcing private citizens who happened to be slave owners to divest themselves of their property.
Plus, while the North was quickly industrializing, the Southern planter oligarchs had not bothered to diversify their economy, which was based entirely on the business model of agricultural production by enslaved people. Ending slavery would bankrupt not just the oligarchs but the economy of the entire region.
The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s out of the progressive abolitionist movement. Its number one objective was upending the status quo by freeing the slaves, which, by current standards, makes it the more liberal party. The Republicans’ most famous leader, then and now, made his name in politics as an anti-war member of Congress. In the late 1840s, Rep. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois — sort of a Dennis Kucinich of his day — was part of tiny minority in Congress who opposed the War with Mexico.
After Lincoln was elected president in 1860, all but a few Southern conservative Democrats in Congress resigned from Congress, went home and traitorously took up arms against the United States. The Democratic Party in the North split into a pro-Union faction that went to war against the Confederacy and an anti-war faction known as the Copperheads.
Over the next century after the Civil War, the two parties began to morph from the ideologies they held in the mid-19th century to the polar opposite positions from their original positions* they hold today.
In the late 19th century, the Republican Party began to cozy up to the robber barons, for example. Three decades or so later, after Republican pro-banking, pro-Wall Street anti-regulatory policies in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations led to the Great Depression, the Democratic Party in the North became the party of unions and working people. Meanwhile in the South, the Democratic Party held onto its conservative white supremacist ideals.
The schism in the Democratic Part led to the walk-out by the white-supremacist Dixiecrats under Strom Thurmond in 1948.
In 1964, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party completed its 180 degree transition from conservative to liberal with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed equal rights for blacks and other races.
This move so outraged the old Dixiecrats that it paved the way for GOP Pres. Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” In the next election after the Civil Rights law was signed, Nixon’s Republican Party welcomed the old Dixiecrat white supremacists into the GOP, including Strom Thurmond himself.
(Check out this candid, off-the-record assessment of the GOP’s switch to the party of white supremacy by the late Republican operative Lee Atwater, the George H.W. Bush political guru from the 1980s, who is credited with teaching young Karl Rove and George W. Bush how to lie, cheat and steal and get away with it in politics.)
The marriage from hell of the one-time party of Lincoln to the ideological sons of his bitterest enemies, the planter oligarchs, was consummated in 1980, when Ronald Reagan, as his first act after winning the GOP presidential nomination, officially opened the Republican Party’s general election presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss.
Reagan chose Philadelphia, Miss., to honor an act of white supremacist terrorism that took place there in June 1964, when Ku Klux Klan members, including a deputy sheriff, abducted and killed three Civil Rights volunteers.
Reagan’s symbolic move sent a signal to racist ideologues in the South and around the country — including in California, his home as well as Nixon’s — letting them know in no uncertain terms that white supremacy had a home in the “new” Republican Party.
Since then, the American mainstream white supremacist faction inside the Republican Party has rebranded itself several times — while also reaching out to its Christian nationalist allies by expanding its hateful ideology to target gays. It was known as the Moral Majority in the 1980s. In the 1990s, it became the Christian Coalition. In the 2000s, it was known as Bush’s base.
Today, white supremacy is alive and well in the GOP, manifesting itself now as the corporate-funded tea party “movement,” which coalesced not coincidentally 22 days after the inauguration of the United States’ first African-American president.
* Updated for clarity.
Today, white supremacy is alive and well in the GOP today, manifesting itself now as the corporate-funded tea party “movement.”
jebus, there are people really this stupid. keep regurgitating what the talking heads of the left tell you to say.
btw:
A new study published in The Journal of College Admission suggests that homeschool students enjoy higher ACT scores, grade point averages and graduation rates compared with other college students. The finding are especially interesting because there has been a paucity of research focused on how homeschooled students fare in college.
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/spending/blog/college-solution/can-homeschoolers-do-well-in-college/2551/#ixzz1ZLRM8QP0
Did Perry write the sign?
Jon: nice summary. However, I have two quibbles. I dispute that the Republicans and Democrats of today have “polar opposite positions”. Despite the existence of a liberal wing within the Democratic Party, the two parties seem to be in general agreement on topics such as war, economic policy, and the security state. Second, I do agree with “not me” that white supremacy is not the principle reason for existence of the corporate Tea Party, although it certainly does exist within their ranks. The Tea Party puppets are mostly instructed to be anti-government and anti-taxation.
Thanks, Orangutan. On the first point, I meant polar opposite of their positions in the mid-19th century, not from each other today. (I updated the sentence to make that point clearer, I hope.) I agree that corporatist influence exists in the Democratic Party, but if you ignore Republicans’ down-home patriotic jingoism and judge them based entirely on their actions, it is clear that the main, centralizing objective of the GOP is to promote the interests of their corporate sponsors and wealthy patrons at the expense of the middle class and poor.
On the second point, I don’t believe the tea party’s ranks would even exist if a black man had not been elected president. Evidence of this is the fact that when the spending and deficits they railed against in 2009 first grew out of control during the presidency of a white Southerner in the mid-2000s, they couldn’t be bothered to get up off their couches. It wasn’t until February 2009, 22 days after Obama was inaugurated, that it all became so unbearably outrageous that they finally got off their fat asses and collectively flew into a spittle-spewing rage.
Also check out Lee Atwater’s summation, in an off-the-record interview in 1981, of how the GOP sublimated Jim Crow policies into its small-government, anti-taxation messaging in order to attract the white supremacist establishment into the Republican ranks:
I’ve happily used this shot for some mild mocking/trolling.
But, it’s shopped.
Here’s the original. http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/9757/1edhz.jpg
(Unless it’s reverse-shopped to correct it! Head asplode! Butnah, look at the margin of space on the left.)
But still, lol home-schooling.
As Perry might say, Dj — you’re saying a buncha “scientists” have theorized that this photo is fake. Here’s our position: We do agree that the science is not settled on this. But the idea that we would decide whether the photo was photoshopped based on a scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to us, is just nonsense. After all, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact — well, heck, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.
I don’t know, Dj. I checked Snopes and found nothing stating that it’s fake. I can’t say for sure that it’s not PhotoShopped, since I didn’t take the pic, but I can’t find any confirmation that it is. Can you? If so, please provide a link. Thanks.
VOTE RON PAUL!