Mzcellani

A Good Old TV Show

2011-08-24T18:41:00.007-04:00

It's this kind of thing that is keeping the politicians from having townhalls this summer. Even the democrats are slacking and I don't understand why. They have answers to people's questions and they should be answering! Anyway, this reminds you of why the show was such a big hit. No one does middle/ lower income better than Roseanne.

Spring Pasta Casserole

2011-04-09T11:46:00.000-04:00

Preview Post - FineCooking.com

Michelle Bachman and My Last Straw

2011-03-12T23:17:00.000-05:00

This is what she said:

"What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty. You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history," - Michele Bachmann, mistaking New Hampshire Massachusetts.

People stand/ sit there and listen to her say all this kind of nonsense because, well, she is a member of their cult so it's, you know, all okay regardless what she says. Go head, Michelle! Say any stupid, uninformed, ridiculous thing you want, your particular voters care not a whit about truth or morality. Conservatives as emotional reactionary types, isn't that special? If anyone knows someone who has compiled her idiocies as they have Palin's, I'd like to know where to find it.

Record Highs And Lows

2011-02-22T14:49:00.000-05:00

Here is a compilation of Bush economists who state that his tax cuts did not increase revenue but reduced it. I don't know why we need to be told that but there it is.

Here you read that "If there's one thing that economists agree on, it's that these claims are false. We're not talking just ivory-tower lefties. Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in a prominent role in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts enacted during the past six years have not paid for themselves--and were never intended to. Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, even devotes a section of his best-selling economics textbook to debunking the claim that tax cuts increase revenues.

The yawning chasm between Republican rhetoric on taxes and even informed conservative opinion is maddening to those of wonkish bent. Pointing it out has become an opinion-column staple. But none of these screeds seem to have altered the political debate. So rather than write yet another, I decided to find out what Arthur Laffer thought.

Laffer is a bona fide economist with a doctorate from Stanford. He's also largely responsible for the Republican belief that tax cuts pay for themselves. Now 67, Laffer runs economic-consulting and money-management firms in Nashville. About the best I could get out of him on the question of whether the Bush tax cuts have paid for themselves was "I don't know." But that's only part of the story.

...In other words, the Bush tax cuts were meant to create big deficits. But Laffer's O.K. with that. "The Laffer Curve should not be the reason you raise or lower taxes," he says. Perhaps not, but it does make for great campaign promises.

Here's a look at the Laffer curve's effect in real life and guess what? in all three categories central to the claim of supply-side proponents, the economy performed significantly better in the wake of tax increases than it did in the wake of major tax cuts.

(Note: All data below have been adjusted to account for inflation.)

Private investment:

After the ‘81 Reagan tax cuts, private nonresidential investment over the next seven years grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent.
After the ‘93 Clinton tax hike, private investment over the next seven years grew annually at 10.2 percent.
After the 2001 Bush tax cut, private investment grew annually at 2.7 percent.
(Data source: CAP/EPI study, Sept. 2008,, based on Bureau of Economic Analysis data.)

Federal revenue:

From 1981-1993, federal revenue increased by 20.7 percent over 12 years.
From 1993-2001, federal revenue grew by 46.6 percent over 8 years.
From 2001-2009, federal revenue decreased by 13.9 percent. (Even if you don’t include the deep recession year of 2009 — you might say we’re invoking the mercy rule — revenue increased just 3.3 percent over the eight years of Bush’s presidency.
(Source: OMB Historical Table 1.2)

GDP growth

From 1981-1993, real GDP grew by an annual average of 2.97 percent.
From 1993-2001, real GDP grew by an annual average of 3.56 percent.
From 2001-2009, real GDP grew by an annual average of 1.56 percent.
(Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)

Here we are at a point in our history where we have record shattering deficits, record low rates of taxation and the largest income AND wealth gap in our history, arguably tied with the Great Depression, with ever-rising health care costs that drag the economy down and we have approximately 30% of the population that will not pay heed to any of this. Not Any! Resentment and defense of an old culture is amazingly good at getting people to ignore what's in front of their face. Maybe I'm going to go get the history of job growth for the three presidential terms and add it here later. But you know he didn't hardly create any.

Obama’s Uncanny Gift For Mimicry.

2011-02-09T21:31:00.000-05:00

This is so interesting, and it's great writing. There is more to the article but it's premium content at The New Republic. I have been steadfast in my determination to NOT pay for site access but I'm beginning to think the day is coming when...
The article is here if you have access or are willing to sign up for a two week free preview.

Nicholas Lemann

It’s worth listening to the audiobook version of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, because not so long ago Obama had both the time and the inclination to spend many hours voicing the recording himself. His regular speaking voice is by now in all our heads, but in the spoken version of the book we also get something that has had to be put away from public display: Obama’s uncanny gift for mimicry. Again and again he will encounter a character and deliver the material that appears within quotation marks on the printed page in the character’s voice. He can do men and women, old and young, foreign accents and street slang.

To pull this off requires not just vocal ability but an intensity of observation of other people—a quality of attention, of absorption—so fierce it’s as if one’s life depended on it. And there is a sense, in the case of Obama, in which his life did depend on it, sociologically and psychologically. He had to imagine his way into the center of American society from a very unusual point on the periphery, to invent an identity for himself that felt comfortable, to find a way to love parents whom one would more naturally resent for having been so often absent. There is no more vivid imitation in the book than the one of his father, whom he barely knew—big, lilting, funny, dominating, elusive. How hard Obama must have strained to drink in every drop of his father’s presence during the rare moments when he had it—but how little effort was required for him to figure out where his father ended and he began.

One of the zillions of differences between Obama and George W. Bush is that it is impossible to imagine Bush inhabiting another person in the way that Obama can. Yes, he prides himself, like many politicians, on his ability to “read people,” as he puts it in his memoir. Yes, he comes up with reasonably apt nicknames. But these are aspects of the exercise of power, not of empathetic understanding. Bush finds ways to extend his force field to encompass other people—but he doesn’t go to them, as Obama, at least when he was young, did. In his second book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama spends a page or two tossing off a perfect little drypoint sketch of Bush, on the basis of a brief encounter at a White House event; whereas in Decision Points, everybody but Bush exists, characterologically, as a figure in the drama of Bush, not as an independent figure under observation. Here’s a brief Bush-Obama encounter (just after the November 2008 election), as rendered by Bush, the opposite of vivid and more about Bush than Obama: “Barack was gracious and confident. It seemed he felt the same sense of wonderment I had eight years earlier when Bill Clinton welcomed me to the Oval Office as president-elect. I could also see the sense of responsibility start to envelop him.”

“Poor Dear, There’s Nothing Between His Ears.”

2011-02-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

“Poor dear, there’s nothing between his ears.”
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

“President Reagan doesn’t always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing.”
former president Jimmy Carter, March 6, 1984

“His errors glide past unchallenged. At one point…he alleged that almost half the population gets a free meal from the government each day. No one told him he was crazy. The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year.”
Simon Hoggart, in The Observer (London), 1986

“The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”
Columnist David Broder

“He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless”
Patti Davis (formerly Patricia Ann Reagan) talking about her father, The Way I See It

“If he gets even more sedate, we will have to water him twice a week. ” Molly Ivins, on Reagan

“It’s such a fun admininistration–half of it is under average, and the other half is under indictment”

It’s been said for months now that when we got to the bottom of the Iran-contra mess, we’d find out the president was either a fool or a liar. According to Admiral John Poindexter, he’s both…He could just wear a button that said THE BUCK STOPPED BEFORE IT GOT HERE.”

“If the man had a brain, he’d play with it.”

“The charm of Ronald Reagan is not just that he kept telling us screwy things, it was that he believed them all. No wonder we trusted him, he never lied to us. That patented Reagan ability to believe what he wants to–damn the facts, full speed ahead–gave the entire decade its Alice in Wonderland quality. You just never knew what the president would take into his head next–or what odd things were already lurking in there.”

Saint Ronnie

2011-02-05T20:22:00.000-05:00

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan

Tomorrow will mark the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth, and all week, conservatives have been trying to outdo each others’ remembrances of the great conservative icon. Senate Republicans spent much of Thursday singing Reagan’s praise from the Senate floor, while conservative publications have been running non-stop commemorations. Meanwhile the Republican National Committee and former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich are hoping to make few bucks off the Gipper’s centennial.

But Reagan was not the man conservatives claim he was. This image of Reagan as a conservative superhero is myth, created to untie the various factions of the right behind a common leader. In reality, Reagan was no conservative ideologue or flawless commander-in-chief. Reagan regularly strayed from conservative dogma — he raised taxes eleven times as president while tripling the deficit — and he often ended up on the wrong side of history, like when he vetoed an Anti-Apartheid bill.

ThinkProgress has compiled a list of the top 10 things conservatives rarely mention when talking about President Reagan:

1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.
2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.
3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemploymentjumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile,income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagandisproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980′s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.
4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously.Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control therunaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.

The other 6 things are here at Think Progress

Conservatives seem to be in such denial about the less flattering aspects of Reagan; it sometimes appears as if they genuinely don’t know the truth of his legacy. Yesterday, when liberal activist Mike Stark challenged hate radio host Rush Limbaugh on why Reagan remains a conservative hero despite raising taxes so many times, Limbaugh flew into a tirade and demanded, “Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes?“

Civil Wars - Barton Hollow

2011-02-05T18:14:00.001-05:00

This is some great music!! Really, really good.

Paul Ryan's Record Of Deficit Spending

2011-01-26T21:01:00.000-05:00

This comes from The Republican Liberty Caucus Of Wisconsin, which is here

Paul Ryan on Bailouts and Government Stimuli-Voted YES on TARP (2008)
-Voted YES on Economic Stimulus HR 5140 (2008)
-Voted YES on $15B bailout for GM and Chrysler. (Dec 2008)
-Voted YES on $192B additional anti-recession stimulus spending. (Jul 2009)

Paul Ryan on Entitlement Programs
-Voted YES on limited prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients. (Nov 2003)
-Voted YES on providing $70 million for Section 8 Housing vouchers. (Jun 2006)
-Voted YES on extending unemployment benefits from 39 weeks to 59 weeks. (Oct 2008)
-Voted YES on Head Start Act (2007)

Paul Ryan on Education
Rep. Ryan went along with the Bush Administration in supporting more federal involvement in education. This is contrary to the traditional Republican position, which included support for abolition of the Department of Education and decreasing federal involvement in education.

-Voted YES on No Child Left Behind Act (2001)

Paul Ryan on Civil Liberties
-Voted YES on federalizing rules for driver licenses to hinder terrorists. (Feb 2005)
-Voted YES on making the PATRIOT Act permanent. (Dec 2005)
-Voted YES on allowing electronic surveillance without a warrant. (Sep 2006)

Paul Ryan on War and Intervention Abroad
-Voted YES on authorizing military force in Iraq. (Oct 2002)
-Voted YES on emergency $78B for war in Iraq & Afghanistan. (Apr 2003)
-Voted YES on declaring Iraq part of War on Terror with no exit date. (Jun 2006)
-Voted NO on redeploying US troops out of Iraq starting in 90 days. (May 2007)

Congressman Ryan supports the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, federal bailouts, increased federal involvement in education, unconstitutional and undeclared wars, Medicare Part D (a multi trillion dollar unfunded liability), stimulus spending, and foreign aid.

According to Michelle Malkin in 2009, “[Paul Ryan] gave one of the most hysterical speeches in the rush to pass TARP last fall; voted for the auto bailout; and voted with the Barney Frank-Nancy Pelosi AIG bonus-bashing stampede. Milwaukee blogger Nick Schweitzer wrote: ‘He ought to be apologizing for his previous votes, not pretending he was being responsible the entire time, but I don’t see one bit of regret for what he did previously. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him get away with it’.”

Congressman Ryan: if you don’t like debt, stop voting for debt.

Keep The Debt In Perspective

2011-01-26T20:38:00.000-05:00

I am much relieved to read this, the whole article is here

Proportionality and the national debt

The projected $70 trillion debt referenced above is accumulated over the next 75 years.

But how does it compare to the nation's ability to pay? That is, what proportion is $70 trillion to the 75-year national income?

Just like the prospective homeowners, we don't know how fast America's national income will grow, but we can estimate high, low and "best guess" numbers.

At a "pessimistic" economic growth rate of zero percent, the gross domestic product will total $1.05 quadrillion over the next 75 years; at an "average" 2 percent rate, the GDP will total $2.46 quadrillion; and, at an "optimistic" 3 percent rate, the GDP will total $3.95 quadrillion.

Comparing $70 trillion to these three numbers, we see that debt as a percent of the GDP varies from 7 percent at zero economic growth to 2.84 percent at 2 percent growth and to slightly more than 1.77 percent at 3 percent growth. Such computation demonstrates that while the projected $70 trillion debt figure represents an important problem, it is also a problem that is quite manageable. Sure, let's get better control over the national budget, but there is no need to panic or take sudden actions with Social Security, or continue the neglect of our roads and rail networks.

Omitting information is misleading

In national budget discussions, projecting large, scary numbers such as $70 trillion should not be introduced without placing them in proportion to the economy's projected ability to pay. Omitting this second factor is to introduce false and possibly misleading information, to present a deceptive picture.

During the recent debates over the extension of the Bush-era tax rates, and the current debate over raising the debt ceiling, the urgent economic challenge of stabilizing the economy at reduced unemployment rates seems lost in the din over the 75-year projection of the national debt. Three debt-reduction commission reports made alarming assertions without using basic arithmetic to properly portray a sense of proportion.

Because much of the general public has only a tenuous understanding of such large numbers, we propose the following rules for the commentariat — reporters, politicians, pundits and professors.

Rule No. 1: Never use large debt numbers without stating the time period in which they are incurred and the corresponding proportion to ability to pay.

Rule No. 2: Never repeat statements made by others that fail to adhere to Rule No. 1, unless it is to include the missing information.

Rule No. 3: Report all failures to adhere to Rule No. 1 as a failure of professional ethics.

Charles O. Kroncke is associate dean in the University of South Florida College of Business. William L. Holahan chairs the department of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Spending Statistics

2011-01-21T20:06:00.000-05:00

The link he gives does not have the article any more so I can't verify this to my satisfaction but it's interesting to think about, anyway. This is from Atypical Guy.

Since 1970, spending has grown 64% faster when a Republican sits in the White House than when a Democrat does.
…
In the twelve years that a Democrat has sat in the White House, spending has increased at an average rate of 1.29% per year; during the 22 years of Republican presidencies, government spending has risen at an average rate of 2.12%. In other words, spending has grown 64% faster when a Republican sits in the White House than when a Democrat does.

During the 20 years Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress, spending has grown at an average rate of 1.84% per year, more than double the average rate of 0.89% per year during the six years the GOP ran Congress. (During the other eight years, when control of Congress was split between the two parties, spending grew at an average rate of 2.52%. The split-control years all occurred during Republican presidencies.)

When Democrats controlled the White House plus both houses of Congress, spending grew at 1.70% per year, slightly below the average growth rate of 1.83% for the entire period.

The slowest spending growth occurred when a Democrat sat in the White House and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Spending rose by an average of just 0.89% during the six years of this situation, which all occurred with Bill Clinton as president and Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.

During the 14 years Republicans controlled the White House and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, spending grew at an average annual rate of 1.92%. During the eight years with a Republican president and a split Congress, spending grew at 2.54% per year.

The results are quite clear – not only do Republican presidents spend far more money, but they often spend it on such “necessities” as creating wars. Sadly, the American people are extremely unlikely to let the use of any for of facts, figures, or statistics inform their decisions.

Millionaires’ Gain and Middle-Class Pain

2011-01-21T15:11:00.001-05:00

I cannot believe people vote for republicans. They show their hand in everything they do, if only their voters would look. While I'm sure some people understand clearly what the agenda is and vote for it because they LIKE the plan to destroy our democracy and install...I don't know what. Do they want a corpocracy? (A society dominated politically and economically by large corporations).We are nearly there in some respects. Do they want an aristocracy? (Government by a ruling class) You could say we're nearly there too and this plan would probably accomplish it. Maybe a plutocracy? (Government by the wealthy) Well we've always had that to a large degree and with the strength of the lobbyists and the new Citizens United ruling it can only get worse. Andrew Fielding at the Economic Policy Institute looks at the plan:

Ryan Roadmap proposes:
• Raising taxes only on those Americans making between
$20,000 and $200,000, while slashing taxes in half
for the wealthiest Americans. The middle class would
pay higher average tax rates than millionaires – an
unprecedented reversal of progressive U.S. tax policy.
• Eliminating taxation of corporate income and replacing
it with a consumption tax that would disproportionately hit middle-class Americans.
• Placing the entire burden of deficit reduction on
spending cuts. The Ryan Roadmap prioritizes dismantling social insurance programs, not balancing
the budget.
• Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with inadequate
vouchers to purchase health insurance in a broken
marketplace.
• Privatizing Social Security for wealthy Americans
and ending Social Security’s role as universal social
insurance with benefits tied to lifetime earnings.

There is much more over here.

Here's some takes on the plan:

The Ryan Tax Plan: Higher Taxes for 90% of Americans, Less Revenue for the Government
http://www.bullfax.com/?q=node-ryan-tax-plan-higher-taxes-90-americans-less-revenue-go

From The Fourth Branch:

Frankly, Ryan’s plan is a disaster. The roadmap was designed to take drastic measures to eliminate the deficit and, eventually, the national debt. Not only does Ryan’s roadmap promote draconian and foolish policies in pursuit of a goal of no national debt, it utterly fails to achieve that one stated goal. In fact, Ryan’s roadmap would put the US economy in a far worse position than it’s in today while making American lives miserable in the process.

According to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, full implementation of Ryan’s roadmap would raise the debt to GDP ratio to 175%, a staggering number which would likely crush the US economy. For perspective, the US debt to GDP ratio has never exceeded 122% which is where the US economy was in 1945 following the Great Depression and World War II.

The article is here

Ezra Klein:

Paul Ryan's budget proposal does not balance the budget

All the republicans want to do is take from the middle and lower income people and give to the rich and the corps, even when they claim to care about balancing the budget. No reasonable person can believe they care about the budget, at all, considering their behavior since Reagan was inaugurated.

Here are charts showing increases to the debt and deficit under republican administrations and decreases under democrats.. When something is so consistent, no excuse-making by Heritage Foundation can explain it away. First, the debt:

The deficit:

The income gap: (the Reagan revolution)

At the website Who Rules America you can find charts and analysis telling us things such as the top 5% hold 62% of all the wealth our country had in 2007. The top 1% had 43%. Then there's this: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, 1983- 2004, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%. A whopping 94% went to the top 20%, which of course means that the bottom 80% received only 6% of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the '80s, '90s, and early 2000. It can only be so much worse now. There is no way someone can claim with a straight face that they vote republican because they believe in balanced budgets, paying down the debt, fiscal responsibility, creating a healthy middle-class or creating a healthy economy. They don't create jobs either but that's for another day.

Obama Versus Cheney

2011-01-17T10:18:00.001-05:00

Barack Obama's Vision of America versus Lynne Cheney's

Zoo News

2011-01-13T16:36:00.001-05:00

I found a new favorite blog. It's called Zoo News and it has viewers from 150 countries. AND it has my template. :)

http://zoonewsdigest.blogspot.com/

Primitive Conservatives and Decisive Liberals?

2011-01-13T14:50:00.002-05:00

Our political allegiances could be hard-wired into our brains, neuroscientists believe.

Researchers have found evidence that the brains of conservatives are a different shape to those of Left-wingers.

Scans of 90 students’ brains at University College London uncovered a ‘strong correlation’ between the thickness of two particular areas of grey matter and an individual’s political views.

Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion.

It is an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe.

However, those aligned to the left had thicker anterior cingulates - which is an area associated with anticipation and decision-making.

The research was carried out by Geraint Rees director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience who said he was 'very surprised' by the finding, which is being peer reviewed before publication next year.

It was commissioned as a light-hearted experiment by actor Colin Firth as part of his turn guest editing BBC Radio 4's Today programme but has now developed into a serious effort to discover whether we are programmed with a particular political view.

'The anterior cingulate is a part of the brain that is on the middle surface of the brain at the front and we found that the thickness of the grey matter, where the nerve cells of neurons are, was thicker the more people described themselves as liberal or left wing and thinner the more they described themselves as conservative or right wing,' he told the programme.

'The amygdala is a part of the brain which is very old and very ancient and thought to be very primitive and to do with the detection of emotions. The right amygdala was larger in those people who described themselves as conservative.

'It is very significant because it does suggest there is something about political attitudes that are either encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that our brain structure in some way determines or results in our political attitudes.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342239/Brain-study-reveals-right-wing-conservatives-larger-primitive-amygdala.html#ixzz1AwkkQEn0

Hey, Serfs!

2011-01-13T12:48:00.000-05:00

Good job, Reagan! And to think conservatives and republicans are not satisfied yet. How low do they want us to go? Can you say plutocracy, anyone? And look at how much more we work than the rest of the world. At the rate we're going, we'll all be working 70 hours a week for minimum wage which will be $6.00 an hour if we're lucky. Lots of interesting charts at Imgur.

Shares of After-Tax Income, Selected Income Groups, 1979 & 2007 « Charts and Graphs - Imgur

Where Income Tax Money Is Spent « Charts and Graphs - Imgur

2011-01-13T10:00:00.002-05:00

This should be more widely known. It puts the lie to 'fiscal conservative's' mantra that spending is the problem, because they never mention cutting anything but those things that would hurt we the people instead of cutting spending on the military-industrial complex, which benefits those 'fiscal conservative's' districts. We spend money on useless programs and obsolete equipment to order to make work for otherwise unemployed people. If we put a stop to needless spending in this area we would see very different patterns of where people decide to live. Think of Florida, for example. The 'free market' would not provide enough jobs to support even half the population without military/ NASA spending I'd wager. What a waste.

Where Income Tax Money Is Spent « Charts and Graphs - Imgur

That Gun Don't Make You No Hero, Mister

2011-01-12T19:17:00.002-05:00

This is what I've been saying to those that would listen. People in the crowd the day of the assassination attempt with guns would have been a much worse scenario than we already had. Thank goodness this guy who did turn out to have a gun kept his head but it was darn close, frighteningly close. And there was a guy walking around with the safety off and his finger on or near the trigger, turning a corner. Ay. Yi. Yi. There's a great cartoon that goes with this. here

"If I'd gone down there sooner, maybe I could have shot him myself," Mr. Zamudio, age 24, said in a phone interview Sunday night.

... By the time Mr. Zamudio was in close range, others had wrestled the suspect to the ground. Mr. Zamudio helped hold him down.

And young Mr. Zamudio deserves all due credit for his assistance during the chaos. But what the WSJ leaves out in their story Bystander Says Carrying Gun Prompted Him to Help (yes, that's the real title) is this part, via Slate and Digby:

But before we embrace Zamudio's brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let's hear the whole story. "I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!'

" But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.

Zamudio agreed: I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.

When Zamudio was asked what kind of weapons training he'd had, he answered: "My father raised me around guns … so I'm really comfortable with them. But I've never been in the military or had any professional training. I just reacted."

The Arizona Daily Star, based on its interview with Zamudio, adds two details to the story. First, upon seeing the man with the gun, Zamudio "grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall" before realizing he wasn't the shooter. And second, one reason why Zamudio didn't pull out his own weapon was that "he didn't want to be confused as a second gunman."

This is a much more dangerous picture than has generally been reported. Zamudio had released his safety and was poised to fire when he saw what he thought was the killer still holding his weapon. Zamudio had a split second to decide whether to shoot. He was sufficiently convinced of the killer's identity to shove the man into a wall. But Zamudio didn't use his gun. That's how close he came to killing an innocent man. He was, as he acknowledges, "very lucky."

Daniel Hernandez, who kept Giffords from bleeding to death, didn't have a gun. Neither did 61-year old Patricia Maisch, who kept the shooter from reloading, or Roger Sulzgeber, the man who helped Zamudio hold him down.

Guns aren't magic. Guns don't make heroes. Heroism does.

Two Years Worth Of RW Outrage

2011-01-12T10:29:00.001-05:00

This is from a commenter at Frum Forum.

June 26, 2008—The case of District of Columbia v. Heller is decided by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling. The opinion not only endorses the National Rifle Association’s “individual right” interpretation of the Second Amendment; it also affirms that one of the purposes of the right is to “assure the existence of a “citizens’ militia” as a safeguard against tyranny.” The NRA’s amicus brief in the case had argued that “the Second Amendment refers to the utility of an armed population in preventing government tyranny.”

July 27, 2008—Jim Adkisson shoots and kills two people at a progressive church in Knoxville, Tennessee, wounding two. Adkisson calls it “a symbolic killing” because he really “wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book,” but was unable to gain access to them.

September 18, 2008—Dick Heller, the plaintiff from the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, provides testimony to the D.C. Council regarding firearm-related legislation. Heller’s written, submitted testimony states, in part: “‘We the people,’ armed, are TRULY what the Writers of the Constitution intended for us to be in Art. 1, Sec. 8, para. 15, and that is the CITIZEN MILITIA. If suicide terrorists DO attact our city, ARMED CITIZENS could be the First to counter these hostilities in our individual neighborhoods.”

September 22, 2008—The National Rifle Association launches its GunBanObama website, which predicts that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, “if elected…would be the most anti-gun president in American history.” The website is part of a $15 million NRA campaign to discredit Obama.

December 9, 2008—FBI teams investigating the murder of white supremacist James Cumming, 29, a resident of Belfast, Maine, find supplies for a crude radiological dispersal dervice and other explosives in his home. Cumming’s wife, who shot him to death after being abused by him repeatedly, explains, “His intentions were to construct a dirty bomb and take it to Washington to kill President Obama. He was planning to hide it in the undercarriage of our moter home.”

February 5, 2009—FOX commentator Glenn Beck hosts an hour-long special on Fox called “We Surround Them,” a “grassroots effort to wake up our Nation’s leaders and let them know what many, if not most, Americans truly believe in and stand for.”

February 20, 2009—FOX commentator Glenn Beck hosts a program that games a 2014 civil war scenario called “The Bubba Effect.” It involves citizen militias in the South and West taking up arms against the U.S. government.

March 3, 2009— FOX commentator Glenn Beck interviews NRA celebrity spokesman Chuck Norris. During the interview, Beck states that, “Somebody asked me this morning, they said, ‘you really believe that there’s going to be trouble in the future?’ And I said, ‘if this country starts to spiral out of control and, you know, and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country … Americans will, they just, they won’t stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up.’ And they said, ‘where’s that going to come from?’ And I said, ‘Texas, it’s going to come from Texas.’”

March 9, 2009—NRA celebrity spokesman Chuck Norris writes in an editorial published at WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”

March 11, 2009—NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre speaks at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference and announces that “Our Founding Fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.”

March 21-22, 2009—Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) states that she wants residents of her state to be “armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people—we the people—are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country.”

April 4, 2009—Neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski shoots and kills three police officers responding to a 911 call to his home in Pittsburgh. His friend Edward Perkovic tells reporters that Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on its way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Perkovic also commented that Poplawski carried out the shooting because “if anyone tried to take his firearms, he was gonna’ stand by what his forefathers told him to do.”

April 7, 2009—The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis releases an assessment of right wing extremism in the United States. The Department notes that “the economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.” Recalling the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, the Department speculates, “The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.”

April 15, 2009—Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, is arrested by FBI agents after he openly states on Twitter that he is going to turn the upcoming Oklahoma City “Tea Party” into a bloodbath. Two months earlier, Hayden had written online, “The only thing that is keeping the New World Order from destroying this nation is the presence of over 100,000,000 guns in civilian hands. When guns are outlawed, only criminals will have guns. Since we are already criminals in the eyes of the New World Order, and they intend to enslave us all, and to kill those of us who will NOT submit to their slavery, I say to IGNORE gun “laws” and keep your guns (AND ammo) handy.”

April 19, 2009—The Oath Keepers, an anti-government group made up of current and former law enforcement and military personnel, holds its first “muster” in Lexington, Massachusetts, the site of the opening shots of the Revolutionary War. The groups’ members pledge to disobey ten different orders that they deem “unconstitutional” and “immoral,” the first of which reads, “We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.”

April 25, 2009—Joshua Cartwright, 28, a member of the Florida National Guard, shoots and kills two Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputies attempting to arrest him on a domestic abuse charge. Cartwright is killed in an enusing gun battle with police. Cartwright’s wife reports that he was “severely disturbed” that Barack Obama had been elected president. Okaloosa County Sheriff Edward Spooner states that Cartrwight was “interested in militia groups and weapons training.”

May 2009—Data released by the U.S. Marshals Service indicates that threats to the nation’s judges and prosecutors have more than doubled in the past six years, from 592 in 2003 to 1,278 in 2008. Federal officials blame a number of parties, including the “sovereign citizen” movement—an unorganized grouping of tax protesters, white supremacists, and others who don’t respect federal authority.

May 21-22, 2009—We The People Chairman Bob Schultz hosts a gathering of 30 “freedom keepers” in Jekyll Island, Georgia. The meeting plays “a key role in launching the current resurgence of militias and the larger anti-government ‘Patriot’ movement.” One of the participants, former Texas militia leader Jon Roland, claims the federal government has “been engaging in warlike activity against the American people.”

May 31, 2009—Scott P. Roeder shoots and kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The FBI lists Roeder as a member of the Montana Freemen, a radical anti-government group. In April 1996, he had been pulled over in Topeka, Kansas, for driving with a homemade license plate. Police found a military-style rifle, ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder, and two 9-volt batteries in his car.

June 3, 2009—Hal Turner, a New Jersey resident and white supremacist blogger/radio host, is arrested on charges of inciting injury after calling for the deaths of two Connecticut state legislators on his blog because they sponsored a bill that would have transferred financial power in Roman Catholic parishes from priests and bishops to lay members. “While filing a lawsuit is quaint and the ‘decent’ way to handle things,” he wrote, “we at TRN (Turner Radio Network) believe that being decent to a group of tyrannical scumbags is the wrong approach. It’s too soft. Thankfully, the Founding Fathers gave us the tools necessary to resolve tyranny: The Second Amendment. TRN advocates Catholics in Connecticut take up arms and put down this tyranny by force … If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they’re going to get uppity with us about this, I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down, too.”

June 10, 2009—James W. von Brunn, a convicted felon and a “hardcore Neo-Nazi,” walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and shoots and kills a security guard. Von Brunn believed that Western civilization was going to be replaced with a “ONE WORLD ILLUMINATI GOVERNMENT” that would “confiscate private weapons” in order to accomplish its goals.

June 24, 2009—Hal Turner, a New Jersey resident and white supremacist blogger/radio host, is arrested again after calling for the murder of three Republican-appointed jurists on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals who had issued a June 2 decision upholding handgun restrictions in Chicago. Writing on his blog, Turner says, “Let me be the first to say this plainly: these judges deserve to be killed,” and includes photographs, phone numbers, work addresses, and room numbers of the judges, as well as a map of Chicago’s federal courthouse which points out its “anti-truck bomb” pylons.

July 13, 2009—Gilbert Ortez, Jr. kills a police deputy in Chambers County, Texas, with an assault rifle. Police were responding to reports that Ortez or his wife had fired shots at utility workers in the area. Police searching Ortez’s mobile home after a 10-hour standoff find more than 100 explosive devices; Nazi drawings and extremist literature; and several additional firearms.

July 15, 2009—Katherine Crabill, a Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in the state’s 99th District makes headlines by calling on Americans to resist the course President Obama has set for the country. Appearing at a “Tea Party” rally, Crabill quotes a 1775 speech by Patrick Henry and then states, “We have a chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box. But that’s the beauty of our Second Amendment right. I am glad for all of us who enjoy the use of firearms for hunting. But make no mistake. That was not the intent of the Founding Fathers. Our Second Amendment right was to guard against tyranny.” This thought is reinforced on Crabill’s campaign website, where she states the Second Amendment “was clearly intended for self defense as well as, and more specifically, to keep the government on notice of an armed citizenry.”

July 31, 2009—On WWJB-AM in Hernando County, Florida, talk radio host Bob Haa takes a call from a listener who mentions ammunition, target practice, and Barack Obama. Haa tells him not to waste his ammunition on targets, to save it for the administration. Haa is later visited by an agent for the Secret Service.

August 3, 2009—After being blamed for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, FOX commentator Glenn Beck cautions his listeners that “just one lunatic like Timothy McVeigh could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for.”

August 11, 2009—William Kostric is filmed openly carrying a handgun outside of President Obama’s health care reform town hall meeting in New Hampshire. Kostric holds a sign that reads, “IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY!” a reference to the following Thomas Jefferson quote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

August 17, 2009—Chris Broughton openly carries a handgun and AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle to a health care rally in Phoenix, Arizona. Simultaneously, President Obama addresses a VFW Convention across the street. In a video recorded that day, Broughton states, “What do you think we did in the revolution, in the American Revolution? The British weren’t stealing money from us for health care. They weren’t taxing us the way they are now back then. And what did we do? We forcefully kicked them out of our country, and we will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote.”

August 25, 2009—During a GOP barbecue in Twin Falls, Idaho, an audience member asks Rex Rammell, a candidate in the 2010 Idaho Republican Primary, a question about “Obama tags” during a discussion about state-issued tags for wolf hunting. Rammell responds, “The Obama tags? We’d buy some of those.” In a subsequent press release, he adds, “Anyone who understands the law knows I was just joking, because Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue hunting tags in Washington, D.C.”

August 26, 2009—At a secessionist rally on the state capitol steps in Austin, Texas, gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina states that, “We are aware that stepping off into secession may in fact be a bloody war. We are aware. We understand that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

September 9, 2009—With President Barack Obama at the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress on the subject of health care reform, Joshua Bowman, 28, of Falls Church, Virginia, attempts to drive his Honda Civic into a secure area near the building. U.S. Capitol Police stop him and, searching his vehicle, find a rifle, a shotgun, and 500 rounds of ammunition. He is arrested on weapons charges.

September 25-26, 2009—Kitty Werthmann, a speaker at the “How to Take Back America” Conference in St. Louis, tells her audience, “If we had our guns [during the time of the Nazis’ reign in Germany], we would have fought a bloody battle. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. Take back America. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism. And that’s what we are having here right now, which is bordering on Marxism.”

September 28, 2009—Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), the Chairman of the Second Amendment Task Force in the U.S. House of Representatives, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a “domestic enemy of the Constitution” at a health care reform town hall meeting.

September 29, 2009—An editorial at the Newsmax website calls for a military coup to oust President Obama.

September 30, 2009—The Michelangelo Signorile Show, a talk radio program on Sirus, takes a call from “Jim” from Oklahoma, who claims that he and 200 others are meeting weekly to stage a coup against President Obama. Jim says they want to restore their “a right to bear arms” and bring the country back to where it was 400 years ago, before slavery was abolished.

October 18-19, 2009—Reports emerge that the Secret Service has received an unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama. Ronald Kessler’s account of presidential security, In the President’s Secret Service, states that there has been a 400% increase in such threats in comparison with Obama’s predecessor. Another source of these reports is an August 5, 2009 study by the Congressional Research Service which finds: “The [Secret] Service’s protection mission has increased and become more ‘urgent’ due to the increase in terrorist threats and the expanded arsenal of weapons that terrorists could use in an assassination attempt or attacks on facilities.”

October 21, 2009—John Brek, a 55 year-old Newark Airport security guard, is arrested for making terroristic threats against President Obama. Authorities find 43 firearms while searching his home, including a stolen rifle. Brek, a National Rifle Association member, is also found to be in possession of illegal hollow point bullets.

November 2009—Billboard is erected on I-70 in Lafayette County, Missouri, that promotes “a citizens guide to REVOLUTION.” It urges Missourians to “LIVE FREE OR DIE” and “PREPARE FOR WAR” with a corrupt government. The billboard is highlighted at the Lafayette County Republicans website.

November 11-22, 2009—More than 100 delegates from across the country attend a “Continental Congress” hosted by We The People. Attendees include Neo-Confederate secessionists, “Common Law Court” enthusiasts, adherents of the “Sovereign Citizens” movement, militia backers, and other radicals. Planned at an earlier May meeting in Jekyll Island, the Congress issues a document entitled the “Articles of Freedom” which declares that the federal government “now threatens our Life, Liberty and Property through usurpations of the Constitution.”

December 23, 2009—Warren “Gator” Taylor takes three people hostage at a federal post office in Wytheville, Virginia. He is armed with four guns, including a .40-caliber Glock pistol, despite a criminal record that includes convictions for lewd and lascivious beheavior with a 13 year-old and attempted second-degree murder (Taylor shot his ex-wife three times in a parking lot in 1993). Taylor fires at least three rounds before the stand-off ends, including one at the station’s fleeing postmaster. One of Taylor’s hostages reports that he was angry about taxes and “the government taking over the right to bear arms.”

January 2010—A group of nearly 200 “extremely concerned citizens” in Ravalli County, Montana, demand that local elected officials fill out a “questionnaire” pledging to form a local militia, prohibit mandatory vaccinations, allow citizens to bear any type of firearms they choose (including fully automatic machine guns), and require federal government employees to get written approval before approaching “any Citizen” in the county. The questionnaire is organized in part by Celebrating Conservatism, a group with direct ties to the militia movement.

January 2, 2010—More than 300 people attend a rally in Alamogordo, New Mexico, organized by the local Otero Tea Party Patriots and Second Amendment Task Force. The purpose of the rally is to protest health care reform, and many of the rally’s participants openly carry handguns and/or rifles. One attendee states that his handgun is a “very open threat” to the “socialist communists” in the Obama Administration. “The government fears the people, and a disarmed people are slaves,” he says. “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun … They’re pushing us to our limits.”

January 12, 2010—Mark Campano of Cuyhaoga Falls, Ohio, pleads not guilty to charges of possessing destructive devices not registered with the federal government. Law enforcement are called to Campano’s apartment in November 2009 after he accidentally detonates a pipe bomb and loses parts of two fingers. They find 30 pipe bombs, 17 rifles and handguns, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the dwelling. Campano’s next-door neighbor states, “He was always trying to get me and another neighbor to listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos … He was some kind of radical, and he didn’t believe in the government.”

January 12, 2010—Charles Allan Dyer, 29, a former Marine with ties to Tea Parties and far-right-wing organizations like Oath Keepers, is arrested at his home on charges of raping a 7 year old-girl. Sheriff’s deputies find several firearms inside Dyer’s home and a Colt M-203 40mm grenade launcher, which was stolen from a military base in Fort Irwin, California, in 2006. Dyer had been an organizer of militia groups in Oklahoma and told one interviewer, “I’m going to use my training and become one of those domestic terrorists that you’re so afraid of from the [Department of Homeland Security (DHS)] reports.” In another video, Dyer states, “With DHS blatantly calling patriots, veterans, and constitutionalists a threat, all that I have to say is you’re damn right we’re a threat. We’re a threat to anyone that endangers our rights and the Constitution of this republic.”

February 9, 2010—Gregory Girard of Manchester, Massachusetts, is arrested for weapons charges after police find 20 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and explosive devices in his home. Girard’s wife says that her husband recently told her, “Don’t talk to people, shoot them instead.” In a January 30 post at a popular website affiliated with the Tea Party movement, Girard stated: “We have been in a state of war and state of emergency of some time for decades uninterupted … The entire body of these War Powers and ‘continuity of gov’t’ plans render our concept of a Constitutional Republic to be little more than thin veil of civility and justice layered over a monsterous, diabolic dictatorship that would break out of political cage but for Americans vigorously exercising their 2nd Amendment rights … As it stands today at start of 2010, there is never a time that our gov’t would find itself without some excuse, no matter how perverse, as the justification for unleashing their murderous ‘War Powers’ monster upon the public, in an attempt to subject us to tyranny.”

February 13, 2010—An unidentified speaker at an event organized by the Lewis and Clark Tea Party Patriots in Asotin County, Washington, tells the audience, “How many of you have watched the movie “Lonesome Dove”? What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? He got hung. And that’s what I want to do with [Democratic U.S. Senator] Patty Murray.”

February 18, 2010—Joseph Stack of Austin, Texas, flies a single-engine plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, killing one and wounding 13. In a suicide note, Stack lays out his grievances with the federal tax agency, stating, “The law ‘requires’ a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not ‘duress’ than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is … Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”

February 19, 2010—Johnny Logan, Jr. of Louisville, Kentucky, is arrested and charged with making threats against the president after his poem titled “The Sniper” is found on the website NaziSpace/NewSaxon.org by the U.S. Secret Service. The poem reads, in part: “As the tyrant enters his cross hairs the breath he takes is deep. His focus is square on the target as he begins to release. A patriot for his people he knows this shot will cost his life. But for his race and their existence it is a small sacrifice. The bullet that he has chambered is one of the purest pride. And the inspiration on the casing reads DIE negro DIE. He breathes out as he pulls the trigger releasing all his hate. And a smile appears upon his face as he seals that monkey’s fate. The bullet screams toward its mark bringing with it death. And where there was once a face there is nothing left. Two blood covered agents stare in horror and dismay. Looking down toward the ground where their president now lay.”

February 2010—Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pary, an active duty soldier at Fort Drum and member of Oath Keepers, tells a reporter that he and five fellow service members at the Army base are preparing to take on the U.S. government when it declares martial law, and will turn their guns on their fellow soldiers should it become necessary. “I know their tactics,” says Pray. “I know how they…work their convoys—if we attack this vehicle, what the others will do … If the government continues to ignore us, and forces us to engage, I’m willing to fight to the death.”

March 2010—The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) announces that 2009 saw a dramatic increase in the number of new anti-government “Patriot” groups in the United States. Specifically, the number of Patriot groups jumped from 149 (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) in 2009—a 244% jump.

March 2, 2010—FOX News commentator Bill O’Reilly, speaking about the McDonald v. Chicago case before the Supreme Court, declares that plaintiff Otis McDonald’s inability to own a handgun in Chicago amounts to “tyranny.” Predicting that four justices on the Court will side with the city of Chicago, O’Reilly states, “It’s interesting that in America today the far Left that wants the government to call the shots, not the folks. In the past, Right-Wing extremists like Hitler and Mussolini were in the forefront of state control. But with the exception of Burma, today’s totalitarians are primarily on the Left.”

March 4, 2010—John Patrick Bedell, a California resident, travels to Arlington, Virginia, and opens fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon. Bedell is armed with two semiautomatic firearms and “many [ammunition] magazines.” Bedell injures two officers before he is killed by return fire. Reports reveals Bedell to be a Truther who believed that the U.S. government had been taken over by a criminal organization in a 1963 coup. In an Internet posting, he writes, “This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control.”

March 19-22, 2010—During consideration of health care reform legislation by the U.S. House of Representatives, vandals attack Democratic offices in Pleasant Ridge, Ohio; Wichita, Kansas; Tuscon, Arizona; Niagra Falls, New York; and Rochester, New York. Mike Vanderboegh, the former leader of f the Alabama Constitutional Militia, takes credit for the violence after posting a blog on March 19 that states, “If we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democratic party headquarters across this country, we might just make up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.” Several Democratic members receive death threats, including Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), who is told snipers will “kill the children of the members who voted YES”; Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who receives a message saying, “You’re dead; we know where you live; we’ll get you”; and Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO), whose staffer is told by a caller, “Better hope I don’t run into you in a dark alley with a knife, a club or a gun.” House Minority Leader John Boehner, speaking about Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH), says he “may be a dead man.”

March 21, 2010—As the U.S. House of Representatives enters a final round of debate over a controversial health care reform bill, Conservative blogger Solomon “Solly” Forrell calls for the assassination of President Barack Obama on his Twitter account. In two separate postings, Forrel writes, “ASSASSINATION! America, we survived the #Assassinations of #Lincoln & #Kennedy. We’ll surely get over a bullet 2 #BarackObama’s head! … The next #American with a #Clear #Shot should drop #Obama like a bad habit.”

March 21, 2010—Russell Laing, 52, is charged with aggravated assault and making terroristic threats after a four-hour standoff with police at his home in McCandless, Pennsylvania. Officers were responding to a 911 call after Laing called a friend and said he couldn’t walk. When police responded to the call, Laing pointed an assault rifle at them and cocked the weapon. After Laing was arrested, officers recovered approximately 150 guns and 15,000 rounds of ammunition from Laing’s one-bedroom apartment. “I can’t explain it. In my 40 years, I’ve not seen that type of collection,” said McCandless Police Chief Gary Anderson.

March 23, 2010—After Mike Troxel of the Lynchburg Tea Party and Nigel Coleman of the Danville Tea Party post the home address of the brother of Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) and urge supporters to “drop by,” someone deliberately cuts a propane gas line at the house. Rep. Perriello is targeted by the Tea Party activists because of his vote in favor of health care reform. Perriello’s brother and his wife have four children under the age of eight.

March 24, 2010—After voting for health care reform legislation, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) receive faxes with drawings of nooses.

March 25, 2010—Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who voted for health care reform legislation, receives a package containing white powder and an angry letter telling him to “drop dead .”

March 26, 2010—Rep. Vic Snyder (D-AR), who voted for health care reform legislation, receives a letter stating, “It is apparent that it will take a few assassinations to stop Obamacare. Militia central has selected you for assassination. If we cannot stalk and find you in Washington, D.C., we will get you in Little Rock.”

March 26, 2010—NRA Board Member Ted Nugent makes the following comment on FOX News’ “Your World” program: “I’m the expert on the health care bill because I kill pigs and a just shot a monster big pig here in Texas and seeing as how this is a pig bill created by pig bureaucrats to help out American pigs … We gotta’ kill the pig.”

March 29, 2010—A Northeast Philadelphia man, Norman Leboon, is charged with threatening the life of Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA). Leboon, 38, is arrested by the FBI after posting a YouTube video in which he referred to Cantor’s family and threatened,”bulllets…will be placed in your heads.” Leboon made hundreds of YouTube videos with anti-government themes, and threatened others, including President Barack Obama, the Democratic Leadership in Congress, and the Pope. Leboon has a long history of mental illness, but was able to obtain a concealed handgun permit in Pennsylvania, which alarmed his family.

March 29, 2010—Nine members of the MIchigan-based “Hutaree” Christian militia are arrested and charged with seditious conspiracy and attempting to deploy weapons of mass destruction. The group had allegedly plotted to kill a law enforcement officer and then detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) during the officer’s funeral procession. The group targeted federal officials, members of the law enforcement “brotherhood” and other participants in the “New World Order.”

March 30, 2010—Dozens of sitting governors receive letters from an extremist anti-government group called the Guardians of the Free Republics. The letters demand that the governors leave office within three days or “they will be removed” from office. A page on the group’s website entitled “Rationale” reads, “For those who are concerned about opening the door to satanic forces, permit me to reassure you. The Guardian Elders deliberated with great sobriety the wisdom of sitting on our hands while the march to World War III continues.”

April 1, 2010—CNN commentator Erick Erickson, questioning the legality of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), makes the following comment on WMAC-AM radio: “We have become, or are becoming, enslaved by the government … I dare ‘em to try to come throw me in jail. I dare ‘em to. [I’ll] pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property.”

April 1-20, 2010—Walter Fitzpatrick, a member of American Grand Jury (AGJ), attempts to effect a citizen’s arrest on grand jury foreman Gary Pettway at the Monroe County courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee, and is arrested. Nineteen days later, on the day that Fitzpatrick is scheduled to face trial, Oath Keepers member Darren Huff is pulled over by Tennessee state troopers as he attempts to drive to the courthouse to arrest county officials he calls “domestic enemies of the United States engaged in treason.” Huff is armed with a Colt-45 handgun and an AK-47 assault rifle with 300-400 rounds of ammunition. He is indicted on federal charges of traveling in interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot and transporting in commerce a firearm in furtherance of a civil disorder.

April 6, 2010—Authorities charge Charles Alan Wilson of Selah, Washington, with threatening a federal official after Wilson makes several phone calls to the office of Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). Wilson, a concealed handgun permit holder in Washington, was angry about Sen. Murray’s vote for health care reform legislation and told her she had “a target on her back.” He also told Murray, “Since you are going to put my life at risk, and some bureaucrat is going to determine my health care, your life is at risk, dear … I hope somebody puts a…bullet between your…eyes.”

April 7, 2010—Gregory Lee Giusti, 48, of San Francisco, California, is arrested for making threatening phone calls to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Giusti allegedly called Pelosi dozens of times, recited her home address, and told her that if she wanted to see it again, she should drop her support for health care reform legislation. Giusti had a “history of mental health problems” and his mother indicated he was influenced by “Fox News and all of those that are really radical.”

April 7, 2010—Brody James Whitaker, 37, is apprehended and arrested on charges including two counts of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, aggravated fleeing, and attempting to elude. The charges stem from an incident on March 25, 2010 in which police attempted to pull Whitaker over for a traffic violation on I-75 in Sumter County, Florida. Whitaker led officers on a high-speed chase, fired shots at them from a 9mm handgun, and escaped capture. During his arraignment hearing, Whitaker questions the authority of the judge and states, “I am a sovereign. I am not an American citizen.”

April 10, 2010—At a “Second Amendment March” organized by the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, Martha Dean, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Attorney General in Connecticut, tells those in attendance, “If government is legitimate and truly is the voice of the people, it need never fear the people themselves when they’re armed. Only a government that uses secrecy and force to impose improper laws [to] which the people do not consent need fear the wrath of its law-abiding citizens at the ballot box or, ultimately, with arms … Our right of free speech and to back it up with arms if necessary if our government becomes tyrannical and unjust as King George’s was to the colonists are the most essential of the rights we as Americans have … I will oppose all efforts to create nonsensical distinctions that are nowhere supported by our constitutions between different types of firearms. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the government gets the effective firearms and the people the ineffective ones. Nowhere in our Constitution does it say that the government gets the modern firearms and the citizens only get the antiquated ones.”

April 13, 2010—Reports surface that state Sen. Randy Brogdon (R-OK) and Rep. Charles Key (R-OK) have met with Oklahoma Tea Party groups to discuss the formation of a new “volunteer militia” to defend against what they see as improprer federal infringements on state sovereignty. Brogdon states that the Founding Fathers “were not referring to a turkey shoot or a quail hunt. They really weren’t even talking about us having the ability to protect ourselves against each other. The Second Amendment deals directly with the right of an individual to keep and bear arms to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government.” One Tea Party leader involved in these meetings, J.W. Berry of the Tulsa-based OKforTea group, has called for the Militia to “launch a thousand guerrilla attacks on the plans that these people have to ruin us and our country.”

April 19, 2010—Pro-gun activists conduct two rallies in the Washington, D.C. area to demonstrate their opposition to an “oppressive, totalitarian government.” Among the featured speakers at the events are current and former militia leaders and others with ties to extreme, anti-government groups. The choice of date is significant, as April 19 marks the anniversary of the first shots being fired in the American Revolution at the Battle of Lexington/Concord, the fiery conclusion to the 1993 siege at Waco, and the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh. At the “Second Amendment March” in the District of Columbia, Larry Pratt, the Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, states, “We’re in a war. The other side knows they are at war, because they started it. They are coming for our freedom, for our money, for our kids, for our property. They are coming for everything because they are a bunch of Socialists.” Mike Vanderboegh, who made national headlines after taking credit for several instances of vandalism at Democratic offices following votes on health care reform legislation, is the featured speaker at a rally in Fort Hunt National Park in Virginia, where he tells attendees, “Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience … This is what the other side doesn’t understand! We are doing backing up! Done! Not one more inch.”

May 4, 2010—A questioner at a Heritage Foundation event asks speaker Rep. Eric Cantor the question, “In light of what Obama has done to leave us vulnerable, to cut defense spending, to make us vulnerable to outside enemies, and to slight our allies … What would he have to do differently to be defined as a domestic enemy?” After smiling and stating that “no one thinks that the president is a domestic enemy,” Cantor is booed by several members of the audience.

May 6, 2010—Dr. Christina Jeffrey, a Republican candidate in South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, posts a YouTube video where she holds an AK-47 assault rifle and tells viewers, “Why do we have the Second Amendment? The Second Amendment ensures all of our other rights … The Second Amendment was placed in the Constitution, plainly, to ensure that our limited government stayed limited and that we would be able to enforce those limitations if need be … We are a sovereign people. A sovereign people is an armed people.”

May 15, 2010—At the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, 2012 Republican presidential nominee hopeful Newt Gingrich tells the audience, “The Second Amendment is not in defense of hunting. It is not in defense of target shooting. It is not in defense of collecting. The Second Amendment is in defense of freedom from the State.” He goes on to make the following reference to Thomas Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” quote: “Anybody who’s historically honest has to admit [the Founding Fathers] understood the right to bear arms because they routinely carried arms. These were tough people in a tough time in a tough country doing tough things and the idea that they would allow some D.C. city government or some Washington federal bureaucrat to get between them and their Constitutional rights, they would have said in Jefferson’s terms was the legitimate justification for a political revolution in every generation which was what Jefferson thought was inevitable to clean out the corruption, the arrogance, and the obsolenscence that government would invariably have.”

May 15, 2010—Referring to a controversial new anti-immigration law in Arizona, FOX News personality Glenn Beck tells the 2010 NRA Convention, “Let’s talk a minute about a ‘well-regulated militia’ and why you might need one because the government isn’t doing their job. Let’s meet people in Texas, Arizona and California.”

May 20, 2010—Jerry Kane, Jr., 45, and his son Joseph Kane, 16, fatally shoot two Arkansas police officers with AK-47 assault rifles during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 40 in West Memphis. The Kanes are killed during an exchange of gunfire with police in a Walmart parking lot 90 minutes later. Jerry Kane, an Ohio resident and anti-government activist, had a long history with police and had recently spent three days in jail for driving with an expired license plate and no seat belt. Kane considered himself a “sovereign citizen” and ran a business that centered on debt-avoidance scams.

May 27, 2010—The Washington Times publishes an editorial claiming that a United Nations treaty seeking to curb the international, illicit trade in smalls arms “would necessarily lead to confication of personal firearms” in the United States. The editorial goes on to say, “Not all insurgencies are bad. As U.S. history shows, one way to get rid of a despotic regime is to rise up against it. That threat is why authoritarian regimes such as Syria, Cuba, Rwanda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone endorse gun control … Governments are a bigger threat to most people than their neighbors.”

May 30, 2010—Sharron Angle, a candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator in Nevada, tells the Reno Gazette-Journal that a recent increase in gun sales nationwide “tells me that the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways.” These comments echo ones made by Angle in January, when she told conservative radio show talk host Lars Larson, “You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take [U.S. Senator from Nevada] Harry Reid out.”

May 31, 2010—Oath Keeper Rex Nichols, a candidate for sheriff in Montana’s Lincoln County, makes reference to federal agents’ standoffs at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993 and promises to keep them out of the county if elected. “I am going to take my deputies and stand in the middle of the road and tell them to get the hell out,” says Nichols. “And if they want a war, they got it.”

June 2010—Rick Barber, a Tea Party candidate seeking the Republican nomination in Alabama’s Second Congressional District, runs a campaign ad in which he dicusses contemporary political issues with America’s Founding Fathers. After Barber states “I would impeach him” and rails about the “progressive income tax,” the Internal Revenue Service, and health care reform, a Founding Father replies, “Gather your armies.” Several Founding Fathers are depicted as being armed with pistols.

June 9, 2010—Addressing the Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress, FOX commentator Glenn Beck says, “Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government—I will stand against you. And so will millions of others.” Beck also compares American Progressives to Osama bin Laden and claims “they want to overthrow our entire system of government.”

June 27, 2010—Rick Barber, a Tea Party candidate seeking the Republican nomination in Alabama’s Second Congressional District, runs a campaign ad in which he compares taxation and “the tyrannical health care bill” to slavery and the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany. “We live in perilous times … We are all becoming slaves to our government,” Barber warns. The “army of voters” depicted in the ad includes individuals who are openly armed with guns. In a follow-up editorial in the Washington Post, Barber makes reference to “the possibility of evil conducted on a grand scale” and states, “Totalitarianism doesn’t come all at once … The road to serfdom is a long one, but I fear that we are well on the way.”

July 2, 2010—The Wyoming Department of Revenue suspends sales tax collections at the state’s gun shows because of “increasing animosity” toward field tax agents. Dan Noble, director of the department’s Excise Tax Division, cites one particular incident at a gun show that “crossed the line” and says, “We tend to have more trouble at gun shows than any place … I have 10 field reps throughout the state, and every one of them has experienced some animosity … I don’t want to put my people at risk.”

July 3, 2010—Joyce Kaufman, a conservative radio hosts on WFTL in Florida, tells a crowd of supporters at a Fort Lauderdale Tea Party event, “I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendments rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will. This is the standoff. When I say I’ll put my microphone down on November 2nd if we haven’t achieved substantial victory, I mean it. Because if at that point I’m going to up into the hills of Kentucky, I’m going to go out into the Midwest, I’m going to go up in the Vermont and New Hampshire outreaches and I’m going to gather together men and women who understand that some things are worth fighting for and some things are worth dying for.”

July 6, 2010—Herb Titus, a lawyer for Gun Owners of America, tells Religion Dispatches, “If you have a people that has basically been disarmed by the civil government, then there really isn’t any effectual means available to the people to restore law and liberty and that’s really the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms—is to defend yourself against a tyrant.” Titus goes on to cite the “totalitarian threat” posed by “Obamacare” and “what Sarah Palin said about the death panels.”

July 11, 2010—Supporters of Tea Party candidate Joe Miller openly carry assault rifles and handguns during a community parade in Eagle River and Chugiak, Alaska, while young children march alongside them. Miller, who is running against Senator Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary, was endorsed by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who described him as a “true Commonsense Constitutional Conservative.”

July 18, 2010—California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to “start a revolution” by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams’ mother says her son was angry at “Left-wing politicians” and upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these Left-wing agenda items.”

July 26, 2010—A proposed ordinance that would prohibit residents from firing air rifles and other low-powered weapons within 500 feet of a building (unless fired in a target range) is pulled from consideration in Exeter Township, Pennsylvania, after the Board of Supervisors receives a number of angry and threatening phone calls from gun owners. Citing a National Rifle Association “Action Alert” that claimed Exeter supervisors were “consider[ing] a broad and overreaching attack on our Second Amendment freedoms,” Exeter Township Police Chief Christopher Neidert says, “This was totally false information that was put out. The anger was building, and I was concerned that someone might actually get hurt.”

July 29, 2010—Jack Dailey, the founder of the Appleseed Project (which is dedicated to teaching every American how to fire a bullet through a man-size target out to 500 yards), explains that Americans should own an AR-15 assault rifle “because they want to tell us what to do. And we don’t want them to tell us what to do.” James Faire, an Appleseed trainer, states that, “the government has quite literally become tyrannical. It is fulfilling the principles outlined in The Communist Manifesto. It’s completely out of control from city to state to federal to international law. All predicate their existence on plundering the individual and his rights. The only thing to do now is to organize citizens into a militia to abolish this government.”

July 30, 2010—Camp Hill prison guard Raymond Peake, 64, is charged with robbery and the murder of Todd Getgen. Peake allegedly shot Getgen to death at a local shooting range and stole Getgen’s custom, silenced AR-15 rifle. Investigators follow Peake to a storage unit when they find three firearms: Getgen’s AR-15 rifle, a scoped Remington rifle that had been reported stolen from the range in May, and a second AR-15 rifle. Thomas Tuso is also arrested and charged with conspiracy, receiving stolen property and other crimes. Peake tells police that he and Tuso had been stealing guns “for the purpose of overthrowing the federal government.”

August 14, 2010—Former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack—who gained fame in anti-government circles by joining a mid-1990s lawsuit against the federal government over the Brady Bill requirement that state law enforcement agencies conduct background checks on gun purchasers—tells those in attendance at the American Policy Center’s 2010 Freedom Action Natonal Conference, “My dear friends, I pray for the day that the first sheriff in this country is the one to fire the shot heard ’round the world and take out some IRS agents!”

August 17, 2010—Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, opens fire on the Department of Public Safety in McKinney, Texas, and unsuccessfully attempts to ignite gasoline and ammonium nitrate in a trailer hitched to his truck. Sharp is armed with an assault rifle, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and a 12-gauge shotgun. He is killed after an exchange of gunfire with police arriving on the scene. Miraculously, no one else is hurt. Sharp’s roommate, Eric McClellan describes him as “a great guy” and states, “We’re Texans. We have a right to bear arms.”

August 19, 2010—Josiah Fornof, 30, of Pasco County, Florida, is arrested after threatening to “bear arms against” local law enforcement officers who were trying to serve him with a warrant. Authorities recover a letter that Fornof had tried to serve the deputies with, which reads, “I have the right to bear arms against such unlawful entities, up to and including the President of the United States, that are coming against me unlawfully, lethally, and genocidally.”

August 23, 2010—Thomas Pidgeon is arrested after he attempts to bring a fully loaded .45-caliber handgun into a Cook County courthouse. Pidegon was supposed to attend a foreclosure hearing that day. His home was to be sold to a lender in North Carolina after New York-based BNY Mellon filed an action against him in the county.

September 1, 2010—James Jay Lee, 43, takes hostages at the Discovery Communications building in Silver Spring, Maryland, while armed with two starter pistols and four improvised explosived devices. After pointing a gun at one of the hostages, he is shot and killed by police. Lee, a radical environmental activist, had previously issued 11 demands through a webpage that Discovery was to meet “immediately.” The demands involved the content of programming on the Discovery Channel. Lee had also declared on his MySpace page, “It’s time for REVOLUTION!!!”

September 13, 2010—Police stop Richard Scott McLeod, 48, for a traffic violation in Webberville, Michigan, and upon searching his vehicle, discover bumper stickers quoting Adolf Hitler, a picture of President Barack Obama, a loaded handgun, a bullet-proof vest, and bomb-making materials. McLeod is arrested and charged with illegally carrying a concealed weapon and unlawful possession of body armor. McLeod tells officers that he is a member of the Michigan Militia. The group denies any relationship with McLeod

September 16, 2010—Patricia Stoneking, the President of the Kansas State Rifle Association, tells Fox News, “People need to arm themselves, We have the right to put limits on our government, and that’s what [the Second Amendment] does.” Explaining why America’s Founding Fathers drafted the amendment, she says, “They knew government could become tyrannical. We have the right to defend ourselves from a rogue government.”

September 30, 2010—Kevin Terrell, a self-described “colonel” who founded a group of “freedom fighters” in Kentucky, predicts war with “the jackbooted thugs” of Washington within a year. Referring to the arrest of Hutaree militia members earlier in the year, Terrell says, “There was a lot of citizens out there in the bushes, locked and loaded. It’s only due to miracles I do not understand that civil war did not break out right there.”

September 30, 2010—Steve Kendley, a deputy sheriff running for sheriff in Lake County, Montana, threatens “a violent conflict” with federal agents if “they are doing something I believe is unconstitutional.”

October 15, 2010—Conservative radio show host Glenn Beck lays out a hypothetical scenario on the air where the government is considering taking his children because he refused to have them receive a mandatory flu vaccine. Beck tells his audience that his response to the government would be “Meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.”

October 21, 2010—Pastor Stephen Broden, the Republican candidate for U.S. Representative in Texas’ 30th Congressional District, tells WFAA-TV in Dallas that the violent overthrow of the government is an “option” that remains “on the table.” “Our nation was founded on violence,” states Broden. “I don’t think that we should ever remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms.”

October 22, 2010—Texas Department of Corrections officers searching for a missing person, Gill Clements, 69, are confronted by a neighbor while on Clements’ property in Henderson County. Howard Tod Granger, 46, points an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle at one of the officers, who recalls, “He told us to get off the property or he would kill us all.” Later that afternoon, officers return to Granger’s home with a search warrant and an armored vehicle filled with 13 SWAT members. Granger opens fire on the vehicle, discharging at least 30 rounds before authorities shoot and kill him. Police find guns and “many rounds of ammunition” in Granger’s house. They also find the body of Clements, buried in a shallow grave on Granger’s property.

November 3, 2010—James Patock, 66, of Pima County, Arizona, is arrested on the National Mall in the District of Columbia after law enforcement authorities find a .223 caliber rifle, a .243 caliber rifle barrel, a .22 caliber rifle, a .357 caliber pistol, several boxes of ammunition, and propane tanks wired to four car batteries in his truck and trailer. Patock former neighbor in Arizona reported that, “He hated the president. He hated everything. He said if he got a chance he would shoot the president.” Patock tells authorities he is a member of the National Rifle Association.

November 4, 2010—On his radio show, conservative host Glenn Beck fantasizes about President Obama being decapitated during a trip to India, saying, “If anybody thinks he was a Muslim over here, well God forbid, they think he was a Muslim over there because he left his religion for Christianity, death sentence, behead him.” Beck then tells his listeners that “God forbid” this should happen, as there would be a “New World Order” overnight in the United States.

November 4, 2010—Fox News host Bill O’Reilly fantasizes about killing a Washington Post reporter while on the air, saying, “Does sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank?” O’Reilly also tells co-host Megyn Kelly, “I think you and I should go and beat him up.”

November 9, 2010—U.S. Representative-Elect Allen West of Florida’s 22nd Congressional District hires conservative radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman as his Chief of Staff. On July 3, Kaufman told a crowd of Tea Party supporters, “I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendments rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will.”

November 9, 2010—Concealed handgun permit holder George Thomas Lee, 69, of Walhalla, South Carolina, is arrested on the town’s main street for disseminating and promoting obscenity by bearing signs “laden with expletives and taking aim at U.S. foreign policy, President Barack Obama, blacks in general, Jews and the nation of Israel.” Officers also seize literature from Lee that details “the most expedient means of killing law enforcement officers.” The November 9 arrest follows an October 19 arrest for assault after Lee kicked and swung his signs at a group of girls between the ages of 12 and 14.

November 10, 2010—Public schools in Broward County, Florida, go into lockdown after an email threat is received by WFTL 850 AM. The email is sent to conservative radio host Joyce Kaufman in response to remarks she made at a Tea Party event in July (“If ballots don’t work, bullets will”). The email expresses support for her view of the Second Amendment and says that to further “their cause…something big will happen at a government building in Broward County, maybe a post office maybe even a school.” A phone call is then received at the station, allegedly from the emailer’s wife, warning that he is preparing to go to a Pembroke Pines school and open fire.

November 23, 2010—Larry Pratt, the Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, writes an editorial in The Register Citizen in which he calls for state and county sheriffs to organize large, armed “posses” as “a check on the unconstitutional exercise of federal power.”

November 29, 2010—U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, circulates a PowerPoint presentation to his colleagues in which he compares the Obama administration to the Nazi regime in Germany and likens himself to Gen. George Patton, bragging, “Put anything in my scope and I will shoot it.”

December 3, 2010—At “Roe & Roeper’s Miracle on Indianapolis Blvd. Holiday Extravaganza” promoting “Toys 4 Tots” in Chicago, Illinois, actor R. Lee Emery (famous for his depiction of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in “Full Metal Jacket”) tells those in attendance, “The economy really sucks. Now I hate to point fingers at anybody, but the present administration probably has a lot to do with that. And the way I see it, they’re not gonna quit doing it until they bring this country to its knees. So I think we should all rise up and we should stop this administration from what they’re doing because they’re destroying this country. They’re driving us into bankruptcy so that they can impose socialism on us.”

January 6, 2011—John Troy Davis, 44, is arrested after threatening to set fire to the office of Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and shoot members of his staff. The threat comes when Davis calls Bennet’s office to complain about his Social Security benefits, telling a staffer that he is schizophrenic and “may go to terrorism.” “I’m just going to come down there and shoot you all,” he declares. Davis is charged with assault on a federal employee.

January 8, 2011—Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shoots U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 others at a “Congress in Your Corner” event at a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. He kills six, including federal judge John Roll, and wounds 14, including Giffords, who is shot in the head. Loughner has an extensive history of mental illness and substance abuse, yet is able to purchase two handguns and a high-capacity ammunition magazine legally at Sportsman’s Warehouse on November 30, 2010. In a YouTube video posted in December 2010, Loughner states, “You don’t have to accept the federalist laws … Nonetheless, read the United States of America’s Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.”

What Happened To Arizona?

2011-01-10T11:31:00.001-05:00

Oh my. This is a terrible, terrible situation. Arizona looks to be a hellhole. I can't see how they can ever repair the damage done by their failed economic policy. This is from Harper's Magazine. Original story here

Tea party in the Sonora:
For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona

By Ken Silverstein

In 1897, when the Territory of Arizona was seeking to demonstrate its fitness for statehood, the legislature solicited bids to design a new capitol building and grounds in Phoenix. The winning entry was that of James Riely Gordon, the architect behind a number of well-regarded public buildings in Texas and Maryland. He drew up ambitious plans: an expansive dome, a grand rotunda, stately wings for each house. But funding fell short, and so the legislative wings were scrapped, and a diminutive lead-alloy top was chosen in lieu of Gordon’s more elaborate dome. Worse, in the building’s interior, a mosaic of the state seal was bungled by the contractor, who forgot to include the images of cattle and citrus, two of Arizona’s “five C’s” (the others being climate, copper, and cotton).

Despite much talk over the years of an upgrade—including a proposal from none other than Frank Lloyd Wright, who envisioned the addition of fountains, gardens, and reflecting pools—all plans were rejected as too expensive. In the 1960s, two new buildings were finally erected on either side of the capitol, one for the house and one for the senate; but these structures, which resemble Soviet apartment blocks, only made matters worse. Nowadays, the capitol’s dingy, unshaded plaza is bare save for a few small rosebushes and some patches of dry grass. The buildings themselves have been plagued by plumbing problems and leaks, making the complex “wholly inadequate” to Arizona’s future needs, according to a task force charged with studying the matter.

The general unsightliness of the capitol makes it a fitting home for today’s Arizona legislature, which is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks. Collectively they have bankrupted the state through a combination of ideological fanaticism on the Republican right and acquiescence and timidity on the part of G.O.P. moderates and Democrats. Although dozens of states are facing budget crises, the situation in Arizona is arguably the nation’s worst, graver even than in California. A horrific budget deficit has been papered over with massive borrowing and accounting gimmickry, and the state may yet have to issue IOUs to employees and vendors. All-day kindergarten has been eliminated statewide, and some districts have adopted a four-day school week. Arizona’s state parks, despite bringing in 2 million visitors and $266 million annually, have lost 80 percent of their budget, with up to two thirds of the parks now in danger of closure. The legislature slashed the budget for the Department of Revenue, which required the agency to fire hundreds of state auditors and tax collectors; lawmakers boasted that these measures saved $25 million, but a top official in the department estimated that the state would miss out on $174 million in tax collections as a result.

Any way out of Arizona’s crisis will require raising taxes, a move that is tantamount to heresy for most lawmakers. For nearly a year, the legislature refused to approve the emergency sales-tax increase (of just one cent per dollar) proposed by Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican who had been elected as secretary of state but assumed the top job in 2009 when Janet Napolitano joined the Obama Administration. Eventually, lawmakers passed the buck to voters by authorizing a May 18 statewide ballot on the sales tax—which passed, after a $2.2 million marketing effort by education and business groups—but before doing so they enacted tax cuts that over four years will deprive the state of more money than the sales-tax increase is estimated to bring in. 

Instead, to raise cash, the legislature has pursued a series of wild sell-offs and budget cuts. It privatized the capitol building and leased it back from its new owner, an arrangement that brought in substantial revenue but over time will cost Arizona far more. The legislature has sold off numerous other state properties at bargain prices, and has put up future lottery revenues as collateral on a $450 million loan. Meanwhile, Arizona removed more than 300,000 adults from state health coverage and terminated one health-care program for 47,000 poor children. Funding was slashed at the agency that deals with reports of child abuse and neglect, and also at Children’s Rehabilitative Services, so that parents of children with cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, and a number of other conditions are now required to pay 100 percent of treatment costs. 

All totaled, the cuts amounted to roughly $1 billion, which came on top of a similar amount that had been slashed the previous year. These cuts, in combination with the sale of state assets (which raised more than $700 million) and the securitization of the lottery, plugged a massive hole in next year’s budget. But the deficit for 2011 is already projected to be at least $1 billion and possibly double that, on a total budget of only $9 billion. The situation will only worsen from there, as federal stimulus money dries up and the state runs out of short-term sources of cash. “Could we cut our way out of it mathematically?” Dennis Hoffman, an economist who has forecast revenue for Arizona governors since 1983, mused when I asked him about the crisis. “Anything is possible on paper, but for practical purposes it can’t be done, unless you want to start releasing prisoners, shutting down universities, and eliminating extracurricular activities in the schools. We’ve already had a $2 billion haircut over the past two years. Try another $2 billion and see what the state looks like.”

Arizona lawmakers have shown little enthusiasm for dealing seriously with the state’s insolvency. They have instead preferred to focus on matters that have little to do with the crisis. Lawmakers have turned racial profiling into official policy, through a new law that requires police to stop suspected illegal immigrants and demand to see their papers; anyone not carrying acceptable proof of citizenship can be arrested for trespassing and thrown in jail for up to six months. But this is just one bill in what has been a season of provocative legislating. Another new law bans the funding of any ethnic-studies programs in the public schools, while a third prohibits “intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.” Lawmakers declared February 8 the “Boy Scout Holiday,” took time out to discount fishing-license fees for Eagle Scouts, and approved a constitutional right to hunt.

In January, Senator Jack Harper, an immaculately combed zealot who speaks in the patter of an infomercial voiceover, submitted a bill that would allow faculty members to carry guns on university campuses, saying it was “one very small step in trying to eliminate gun-free zones, where there’s absolutely no one who could defend themselves if a terrorist incident happened.” The house passed a measure that would force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to state officials if he runs for re-election, as well as a bill that bars Arizona from entering into any program to regulate greenhouse gases without approval from the legislature. “There are only two ways to vote on this,” said Representative Ray Barnes of the latter initiative. “Yes, or face the east in the morning and worship the EPA because they own you.” 

As the national midterm elections approach in November, the Tea Party movement is supplying the Republican Party with most of its momentum. But this movement, and the strain of aggrieved libertarianism it espouses, cannot claim much representation in elected office. This disparity has led many on the left to dismiss Tea Partiers as a media phenomenon, and to speculate that their ideas could not possibly “stand up to the test” of real governance. But there is, in fact, one place where the results of Tea Party governance has already been tested: Arizona, where the Tea Party is arguably the ruling party. Less driven by issues of national security, on the one hand, or moral values on the other, Arizonan conservatives are largely obsessed with taxes and immigration—also the twin fixations of Tea Partiers, who, like Arizonans, are disproportionately white and older. So it comes as little surprise that top Republican elected officials in Arizona eagerly seek the Tea Party’s support and make time to speak at the group’s rallies. Should the Republicans succeed in retaking power nationwide over the next four years, the country might start to resemble the right-wing desert that Arizona has become. 

Arizonans are generally moderate. In-migration has brought a flood of independents and Democrats, who in 2008 won five of the state’s eight U.S. House seats. Although registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 36 percent to 33 percent, independents now stand at 30 percent and are rapidly gaining ground at the expense of both parties. And yet Arizona politics are disproportionately controlled by ultraconservatives. Only a handful of the state’s house districts are genuinely competitive between Democrats and Republicans, with the latter holding thirty-five of the sixty seats. Being a member of the legislature is not considered a prestige job—the office pays only $24,000 annually—and many lawmakers are small businessmen. The Republican primaries are dominated by hard-core conservatives who spurn moderates and back ideologues.  

Anti-government sentiment here is longstanding, and can be traced in part to the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons make up only around 6 percent of the state population, but they are enormously influential in Republican politics—and they don’t approve of borrowing money, whether it’s an individual or a state that’s doing the borrowing. Mormons tend to believe that the role of government is to let people fend for themselves. After the church created a nationwide Welfare Services Department, back in 1936, its Arizona branch displaced the government among church members as the provider of many social services, offering everything from job training to family counseling to educational programs.

Since the days of Barry Goldwater, an axiom of Arizona politics, particularly among Republicans, has been that tax cuts generate economic growth in all circumstances. Hence total state taxation has declined during fifteen of the past seventeen years; the individual income tax has taken the biggest hit, but sales, property, and corporate-income taxes have also come down substantially. The legislature has created tax exemptions for everything from country-club memberships to pedicures to food purchases by airlines (the latter at the behest of local airline lobbyists). None of this has produced the hoped-for effect. Although tax cuts “have lowered government revenues,” they “have not had any perceptible effect on the state’s economic growth,” concluded an Arizona State University business-school study, published last November, that examined the past three decades of fiscal policy.

Yet even as the state has teetered toward bankruptcy, political leaders have remained unwilling to acknowledge that taxes in Arizona are too low. Indeed, thirty-eight of Arizona’s ninety lawmakers, together with Governor Brewer, have signed the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” of Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform, a pledge that they will never vote for a tax increase. Democrats have played the game as well: in 2007, then-Governor Napolitano approved a 10 percent reduction in the income tax, which cost the state about $500 million. The combination of historic tax cuts with the recession has reduced government revenues from $9.5 billion in 2007 to $6.4 billion this year. That latter figure is roughly equal to the amount of money the state took in six years ago, even as the population—and the need for government spending on health care, education, and prisons, for example—has continued its rapid growth.

The anti-government attitude in Arizona is now reflexive, especially because of its entanglement with the issue of immigration. As one local resident, who didn’t want to be identified because she has a government job, told me: “People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn’t have it at all. People think it’s OK to cut spending, because ESL is about people who refuse to assimilate and health care pays for illegals.”

This confluence of nativism and anti-government sentiment makes Arizona fertile ground for an especially showy brand of symbolic politics. One day in February I sat in the audience during a session of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which meets in a wood-paneled room with a stained carpet, on the ground floor of the senate building. During the meeting, committee chairman Senator Russell Pearce—sponsor of the anti-immigrant bill and one of the most powerful politicians in the state—called on the federal government to put the National Guard on the border and “have rifles with bullets in ‘em.” Apropos of nothing, the balding, red-faced Senator Al Melvin brought up his pet topic of inmate labor, which he views as a solution to the state’s budget crisis. Jailbirds, burbled Melvin, should fill potholes, keep golf courses open, and refurbish public buildings. 

Soon the committee began to debate whether to post the Ten Commandments at the entrance to the old state capitol. A six-foot granite version located a few hundred feet away did not, it seemed, sufficiently convey the state’s piety. “George Washington, our first recognized president of this republic, said you cannot properly govern without the Bible and God, and I couldn’t agree more. And John Adams once made the statement that this republic is designed wholly for a moral and religious people and will survive under none other,” Pearce, the measure’s sponsor, told his colleagues. After a few minutes’ more debate, the measure passed, and the committee, having done the people’s business, adjourned for the day.

Besides its aging mining industry and its few remaining aerospace plants, Arizona doesn’t manufacture or even sell much of anything. Phoenix is a branch-office town, not a headquarters town, and much of the population works low-paying jobs at call centers and assembly plants. Yet over the past half-century, the population of Arizona has grown faster than that of any other state besides Nevada. Between 1950 and 2009, Phoenix swelled from 105,000 people to 1.5 million, making it the fifth largest city in the United States. The climate—one of those “five C’s”—has been a major attraction, especially for senior citizens. So have low taxes, weak business regulation, and (for a long time) cheap housing, especially when compared with neighboring California. The engine of economic growth in Arizona was growth itself—real estate in particular, but also a host of related industries: construction, hauling, landscaping, roofing, painting, remodeling, swimming-pool maintenance, architecture, plumbing, and on and on. 

Real estate prices rose wildly in Arizona during the past decade, pushed, as elsewhere in the country, by low interest rates, ARMs, and the reckless practices of such companies as Countrywide Financial and Goldman Sachs. When the market went bust, Arizona—along with Florida, Nevada, and California—crashed particularly hard. Last spring, Phoenix became the first major American city where home prices had fallen by half from their mid-decade market peak. Recent figures show that 61.5 percent of Phoenix mortgages are “underwater,” with commercial real estate in even worse shape. It is unlikely that a major office building will be erected in Phoenix in the next five years. Since its peak in 2006,  the state’s construction industry has lost roughly 113,000 jobs, a drop of almost 50 percent. The official unemployment rate is above 9 percent, but that figure nearly doubles when people who can’t find full-time work and people who have given up are factored in. The Arizona Department of Health Services estimates that as many as 260,000 Hispanics have left the state since late 2007, partly because of anti-immigrant laws and sentiment and partly because jobs dried up.

“Texas has oil and gas, and Nevada has gambling, so they generate money even during a recession—but Arizona needs growth to grow,” Grady Gammage Jr., a lawyer and real estate developer, told me at his office in Tempe, thirteen miles from downtown Phoenix. “We’re also not a low-problem state like Vermont. We’re a big border state with only a few private institutions to take care of social problems. We need government.”

Gammage walked me out to a balcony that faces Arizona State University’s Sun Devil Stadium. He pointed off to the left, toward two unfinished towers, barely visible in the distance. They had been started with financing from a company headed by Scott Coles, a leading local businessman; as the project was unraveling last year, Coles’s wife left him and he committed suicide. “Investors put $130 million into it,” Gammage said. “The penthouses had private pools and they were talking about selling them for between $5 million and $10 million apiece. Now they’ll be lucky to get $30 million for both buildings, and it would cost another $20 million to finish them. But the market’s gone and no one knows what to do. There’s talk of turning it into a hotel or student dormitories.” 

Drive around Greater Phoenix, and one sees a procession of commercial real estate projects in bankruptcy and for-rent signs plastered across strip mall windows. But to take in the full scale of the damage—and to understand why the state government is bankrupt—requires heading out to communities at the edge of recent development, communities that were growing at a breakneck pace up until the crash.

Few spots are worse off than Maricopa, forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix by car, a town that sprang from desert scrub in 2003 and within five years had a population of 45,000. On a sunny Sunday morning, John Guthrie, a thirty-five-year-old real estate agent, met me at the Carl’s Jr. in the town’s main shopping mall, off the John Wayne Parkway. He moved here from Orange County, California, in 2004, just as the real estate boom was gathering force, before there was a mall or nearly anything else in Maricopa. But by the end of that year, the real estate market in Maricopa was in a frenzy. Lotteries became normal in the most popular new developments; would-be buyers had to put up a deposit of $20,000 or more just for the right to bid. “Developers said we’d be getting a Home Depot and movie theaters and restaurants,” the soft-spoken Guthrie recalled. “Over twenty-five years they were saying there would be amusement parks and resorts.”

Guthrie crumpled up his sandwich wrapper, grabbed his soda, and ushered me to his car in the parking lot. In 2007, the market stalled out, and by early the following year it collapsed, he explained as we pulled out onto the road. “You could see it hit street by street,” he said. “One house would go into foreclosure and then it would just move down the street, and then hit the next block and then the next. There were a bunch of families who came out here who didn’t have assets, and when they started going upside-down by $150,000 there wasn’t much to do but walk away.” 

Guthrie handed me several documents as he drove. One showed that in Maricopa the “Distress Index”—the percentage of sales in which the property is bank-owned or in pre-foreclosure—was 76.8 percent. Guthrie looked increasingly shell-shocked as he laid all this out, and soon I found out why: he was upside-down on a home of his own by about $100,000.

In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows, we drove past numerous empty lots—builders as well as homeowners had gone under during the crash—and many “short sale” signs in front of houses. Soon we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure. “These houses have about 4,000 square feet and swimming pools,” he said. “They topped out at $600,000. Now you can get one for about $250,000. You’ve got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities. During the summer the air conditioning bill can be $500 a month. The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered out to before the crash.”

Politically, there was almost no fallout from the economic crisis. In the G.O.P. primary of 2008, when the impending disaster was already apparent, a number of Republican state legislators who opposed further tax cuts lost to fire-breathers on their right, all but eliminating the party’s “moderate” wing. In the state senate, Russell Pearce—who as a house member had already sponsored a number of anti-immigrant bills, including an employer-sanctions law—trounced his Republican opponent, an attorney who had handled immigration cases and who was backed by the Chamber of Commerce (which is highly conservative on most issues but splits on immigration because its members like cheap immigrant labor). Steve Pierce, a right-wing rancher, ousted Senator Tom O’Halleran, a pro-environment moderate who had helped broker a budget deal with Governor Napolitano. Al Melvin, who had never before held public office, won his primary race against Pete Hershberger, whom he tarred as not sufficiently “loyal” to the G.O.P. on issues of taxes, gun rights, and gay marriage.

Then there was Sylvia Allen, a real estate broker from the town of Snowflake, who, in 2008, was appointed by the local Republican Party to finish the term of a respected conservative who had died in office. Allen, who retained her seat in an election that fall, has since gained minor notoriety after calling for more uranium mining, saying in a speech that “this earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.” She also has complained that trees are “stealing Arizona’s water supply” and sponsored a new law that allows carriers of concealed weapons to forego safety training and the indignity of background checks.

A similar crew was elected to the house, including Frank Antenori. “I despise expansion of government into people’s lives,” he said on the campaign trail. “K–12 is meant to prepare kids to enter the world. . . . We need to spend less time teaching how to put condoms on cucumbers and more time on balancing a checkbook.” 

In 2010, the same paradoxical process seems to be at work: despite the disastrous policies of the right in Arizona, the state’s Republicans are threatening to move rightward still. This slide was clearly visible at the February campaign kickoff for J. D. Hayworth, who is hoping to beat Senator John McCain in the August G.O.P. primary. A former sports anchor and radio talk- show host, Hayworth served in Congress from 1995 to 2007, where he was best known for his cornball jokes—from the House floor he cracked that Democrats should “hire Freddy Krueger as the new liberal Democratic spokesman” and “set up a new political-action committee, the ‘Whine Producers.’ ” He also was embroiled in the scandal around the lobbyist Jack Abramoff: in 1997, Hayworth helped stop a proposal to tax Indian casinos and five years later helped prevent a change in the law that would have capped campaign contributions by Indian tribes. Between 1998 and 2005, Hayworth received $150,000 from Indian tribes and other groups connected to Abramoff. 

Conservatives have always been suspicious of McCain’s support for campaign-finance reform and his opposition (before he flip-flopped on the presidential campaign trail) to torture and to George W. Bush’s tax cuts. But what truly sank McCain’s standing in Arizona was his long-standing support for comprehensive immigration reform, a position he has now desperately abandoned as well—he came out in support of the state immigration bill during an interview with Bill O’Reilly, saying that “illegals . . . are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway”—though this switch has been of no avail in placating the Arizona right.

At Hayworth’s campaign kickoff, held in front of his new campaign headquarters in a Phoenix strip mall, a series of local conservatives stood beneath a banner proclaiming Hayworth the “Consistent Conservative,” thrilling the crowd with stories of Hayworth’s devotion to conservative causes and McCain’s betrayal of same. One of the most warmly received speakers was right-wing Senator Ron Gould. A big guy with a flattop haircut and a shit-kicker’s mustache, Gould prefaced his endorsement of Hayworth by calling himself “probably the most conservative legislator in the state,” and he closed with the words, “God bless America and may America bless God.” The crowd, mostly white retirees, picked up doughnut holes and coffee from a table draped with a yellow banner that featured a coiled rattlesnake and the words don’t tread on me. (That design dates to the Continental Congress in 1775 and has been widely adapted by Tea Party activists.) Vendors sold green buttons supporting the Tea Party; red buttons bearing the slogan proud member of the angry mob; and pink buttons that said, simply, sarahcuda. From speakers blared a soundtrack that included “Hound Dog,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” and the theme from Hawaii Five-O.

“Sheriff Joe is here!” a woman next to me exclaimed. She was referring to longtime Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for housing prisoners in tents and making them wear pink underwear, and for having his officers raid Latino neighborhoods to round up suspected illegal immigrants. Wearing a dark jacket, maroon shirt, and a tie pin shaped like a gold pistol, Arpaio took the stage to declare that McCain had been in Washington too long. “We have to give McCain a map to help him find his way back to Arizona,” he said to a big cheer. 

“Give him a map to Mexico,” someone shouted from the audience.

Now Hayworth took the microphone, and scanned the crowd. He was taller and tanner than anyone else on stage. “Like Ronald Reagan, I believe that government is not the solution to our problems, but too often it is part of the problem,” he said.

“If they do anything more for the poor I’m gonna be one of them,” yelled a well-dressed man from the audience.

Backed into an ideological corner on taxes, Arizona continues to cut indiscriminately. The three state universities have scrapped whole degree programs and may soon have to shutter entire campuses. Funding for GED programs and adult-education courses has been reduced to zero. Arizona has furloughed more than 15,000 state employees and has closed thirteen of eighteen highway rest stops. (This latter move provoked an outcry, especially among truckers; state authorities responded by asking roadside businesses to allow motorists to use bathrooms free of charge.) The budget for the Department of Water Resources—an important agency in the desert—has been cut from $23 million to $7 million during the past two years. “Demand for water exceeds supply, and we share what there is with six states,” Herb Guenther, the agency’s director, told me. “We have to protect what we have collectively while looking for new supplies, but everyone is fighting for resources. There’s a cliff coming, and we haven’t figured out how to fly. ‘No government’ is not the answer when it comes to water.” 

Lawmakers have siphoned off state funds allocated for specific purposes, pouring the money into the state’s general fund. The legislature seized $160,000 in voluntary contributions and mandatory fees from the agriculture industry that were supposed to be used for research and marketing. It swiped another $7 million from the Arizona Early Childhood Development and Health Board, whose revenue comes from a voter-approved tobacco tax. (Arizona’s supreme court ruled that the legislature had acted illegally and forced the return of the tobacco money; the state may eventually be ordered to give back tens of millions of dollars more from other “sweeps.”)

In addition to selling the state capitol, the legislature has examined auctioning off dozens of other properties—among them the house and senate buildings, the offices of the secretary of state and the treasurer, and most of the state’s prisons, including maximum-security units and death row. One of the major proponents of privatization is Representative John Kavanagh, an amiable oddball originally from Queens and a former Port Authority Police Department detective. “We haven’t cut taxes that much,” he told me during an interview at his legislative office, which is decorated with a variety of G.O.P.-related knickknacks, including a large pink plush elephant on a bookshelf. “Here’s the problem: we grew government during good times far beyond responsible levels, and instead of cutting, we’ve been relying on tricks and massive borrowing to sustain it. Now we’ve reached the end of the line. It’s going to require major cuts; you’re talking about government super-light.”

Kavanagh blithely opined that the benefits of all-day kindergarten “dissipate by third grade for all but poverty level” and that the state should offer Medicaid only to people at one-third of poverty-level income—which works out to less than $7,500 for a family of four—as opposed to the current practice of offering it to everyone at poverty level and below. “We can’t afford to be that generous anymore,” he said.

Despite passage of the sales tax in May, no one believes that Arizona’s financial crisis is over. But the state’s electoral system, which rewards extreme right-wing rhetoric, has allowed the political class to be as irresponsible and reckless as it likes. State residents seem content to cheer on the legislature for lowering their taxes—even as massive budget cuts pack their children into classrooms with more and more students, or force them to stand in line for a day to renew driver’s licenses at the gutted Department of Motor Vehicles. Arizonans will complain about their legislature—one recent poll showed that just 15 percent thought state lawmakers’ performance was “good”—but keep sending ever more radical Republicans to office. It is much like the Tea Party nationwide, which will, quite sensibly, demand political reform and protest the bank bailout, even as it backs hacks like Hayworth who represent the most corrupt wing of the G.O.P. 

Russell Pearce, basking in the triumph of his immigration-law victory, is hoping to become senate leader, and he likely will win that post. Representative Antenori—who distinguished himself in the house by opposing federal light-bulb efficiency standards (which he dismissed as “touchy-feely legislation”) and by proposing that welfare recipients be required to sign an affidavit swearing they do not smoke, drink, use drugs, or have more than basic cable—was recently appointed to a vacant senate seat. And as for Senator Sylvia Allen, the senator who once complained that trees were “stealing Arizona’s water supply,” she stands for reelection this year and, by all accounts, is almost certain to prevail.

The Death Of A President

2011-01-09T14:52:00.001-05:00

"In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .

In Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding–named by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party–Harding was accosted by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag. Why not just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?" - William Manchester, Death of a President.

We can’t say we weren’t warned about Arizona shooting tragedy - Chicago Sun-Times

2011-01-09T14:39:00.000-05:00

We can’t say we weren’t warned about Arizona shooting tragedy - Chicago Sun-Times

Insurrectionism Timeline - Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

2011-01-09T14:34:00.000-05:00

Insurrectionism Timeline - Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

A 98 year old woman in the UK wrote this to her bank

2011-01-07T13:50:00.001-05:00

This isn't really a true story but it sure rings true and makes me wish it were true. Someone did write it after a check bounced but for a column in a newspaper as sardonic humor.

This 98 year old pensioner was charged the £30 fee for being overdrawn on her bank account.

A 98 year old woman in the UK wrote this to her bank. The bank manager
thought it amusing enough to have it published in the Times.

Dear Sir,
I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to
pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three nanoseconds must have
elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my account of
the funds needed to honour it. I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly
deposit of my Pension, an arrangement, which, I admit, has been in place for
only thirty eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief
window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30 by way of
penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me
to rethink my errant financial ways. I noticed that whereas I personally
attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am
confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, pre-recorded, faceless entity
which your bank has become. From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal
with a flesh-and-blood person.

My mortgage and loan payments will therefore and hereafter no longer be
automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and
confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate. Be aware
that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such
an envelope. Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I
require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight
pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows
about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or
her medical history must be countersigned by a Solicitor, and the mandatory
details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and
liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof.

In due course, I will issue your employee with PIN number which he/she must
quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28
digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses
required of me to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As
they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Let me level the playing field even further. When you call me, press
buttons as follows:
1.. To make an appointment to see me.
2. To query a missing payment..
3. To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there.
4. To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.
5. To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature.
6. To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home.
7. To leave a message on my computer (a password to access my computer is
required. A password will be communicated to you at a later date to the
Authorized Contact.)
8. To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through to 8.
9. To make a general complaint or inquiry, the contact will then be put on
hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. While this
may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the
duration of the call.

Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an
establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement.
May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.
Your Humble Client

Book Details Prejudice in Health Care

2011-01-04T13:05:00.000-05:00

Book details prejudice in health care

Enlarge Photo y

Monday, January 3, 2011; 11:11 PM

Medicine
Looking for unbiased health care "Seeing Patients" (Harvard University Press, $27.95)
Augustus White, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, says there's a quick way to get the very best medical care in case of a heart attack: Be a white, straight, middle-class male. White's engaging new book, "Seeing Patients," is about unconscious bias in health care. The first half of the book is autobiographical. White recounts growing up African American in segregated Memphis, serving as a combat surgeon in Vietnam and becoming the first black department chief af the Harvard teaching hospitals. In the second half, White explains how individuals and health-care systems can recognize and overcome their unconscious prejudices.

Mzcellani

A Good Old TV Show

Spring Pasta Casserole

Michelle Bachman and My Last Straw

Record Highs And Lows

Obama’s Uncanny Gift For Mimicry.

“Poor Dear, There’s Nothing Between His Ears.”

Saint Ronnie

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan

Civil Wars - Barton Hollow

Paul Ryan's Record Of Deficit Spending

Keep The Debt In Perspective

Spending Statistics

Millionaires’ Gain and Middle-Class Pain

Paul Ryan's budget proposal does not balance the budget

Obama Versus Cheney

Zoo News

Primitive Conservatives and Decisive Liberals?

Hey, Serfs!

Where Income Tax Money Is Spent « Charts and Graphs - Imgur

That Gun Don't Make You No Hero, Mister

Two Years Worth Of RW Outrage

What Happened To Arizona?

Oh my. This is a terrible, terrible situation. Arizona looks to be a hellhole. I can't see how they can ever repair the damage done by their failed economic policy. This is from Harper's Magazine. Original story here

Tea party in the Sonora:For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona

The Death Of A President

We can’t say we weren’t warned about Arizona shooting tragedy - Chicago Sun-Times

Insurrectionism Timeline - Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

A 98 year old woman in the UK wrote this to her bank

This isn't really a true story but it sure rings true and makes me wish it were true. Someone did write it after a check bounced but for a column in a newspaper as sardonic humor.

This 98 year old pensioner was charged the £30 fee for being overdrawn on her bank account.

Book Details Prejudice in Health Care

Book details prejudice in health care

Tea party in the Sonora:
For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona