Last week Paul Ryan said that his fondness for the philosophy of Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” You have to give these wild and crazy Republicans credit for at least one thing: they have cojones the size of the elephants which are the mascots for the party.

The urban myth quote came after a career of Ayn Rand idolatry special even for right-wing Republicans: giving the book to his interns, speaking at Ayn Rand tributes, doing videos about her, saying her philosophy inspired him to get involved in politics. This was no youthful fling, but a lifelong love affair — until last week , apparently. I’ve always wondered what politicians are thinking when they say something like this that is so obviously easy to check and refute. Do they really think people are that stupid? Maybe they just think that with the kind of money they can raise, and the Fox News-style, right-wing media to help support them, they can just obliterate the truth with bluster and deafening bombast.

If we create a country that treats everyone with fairness, that invests in all of our citizens, and that is governed “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” we really will be a city on a hill that the people of the world look up to, respect, and want to be like.

 

So why is Ryan, who is on the short list for Romney’s VP candidate, so eager to erase his (very recent) past obsession with Ayn Rand, whom so many other right wingers adore as well? Because her writing really is so blatantly offensive to anyone not besotted with her. She preached not only the virtue of selfishness, but that any compassion and generosity was a moral wrong because it helped those who were weakening society. She despised not only the poor but even people with disabilities as leeches draining strength from society. She actually hated the Christianity Ryan and every other Republican is obligated by their base to claim they believe in because Jesus taught that the poor were to be cared for, making her views dangerous for Republican politicians to adhere to as much as they love all that pro-selfishness talk.

Ayn Rand vs. Jesus Christ: Choose only one

This is the ultimate irony in American political life right now, the conservatives who swear on a stack of Bibles that they worship Jesus Christ when they really bow down to the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the golden idol of the free market to be placed at the center of all other things. They preach of an American exceptionalism blessed by a Christian God, and call for America to be a shining city on a hill which can be an example to the entire world. Yet their exceptionalism isn’t based on our country being moral the way Jesus would have understood it, but moral the way Rand and the Social Darwinists of the 1880s and ’90s would have understood it: whoever gets rich deserves to be, and whoever is poor is a leech on society. Their vision of America is shining because of the gold the wealthy among us possess, not because our society as a whole is built on morality.

John Winthrop, the Puritan leader whose “city on a hill” quote inspired generations of Americans ever since to see our country as a model for other nations, did not understand America as a place built on greed and individualism, but a place built on community and looking out for each other. His other most famous quote went like this:

“For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as His own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth then formerly we have been acquainted with.”

If that doesn’t sound much like Rand’s philosophy, it is because it is pretty much the exact opposite of it …  

Read the Rest:http://www.alternet.org/story/155239/ayn_rand_or_jesus_christ_conservatives_can%27t_have_it_both_ways?akid=8725.162193.-v99Nd&rd=1&t=5

Military veterans are the big losers in the rollback of a Wisconsin law that had allowed women, minorities and other protected groups to sue in state court over employment discrimination, say leaders of a statewide veterans group.

The change was designed by Republicans to help Wisconsin businesses avoid costs of frivolous lawsuits, but it has been derided by Democrats as part of a GOP “war on women.” Republicans say women still have the right to sue in federal court.

Lost in the debate are little-known limits on the rights of veterans to sue in federal court, said Michael Gourlie, a member of the Wisconsin Association of Concerned Veterans Organizations executive board and Wisconsin’s Council on Veterans Programs, which advises the state Department of Veterans Affairs.

“This leaves one less incentive for war-weary employers of reservists and National Guard members — who have absorbed multiple combat deployments over the last 10 years — to hire and retain these patriots,” said Gourlie, an Army and Wisconsin National Guard veteran who served in Afghanistan before retiring as a lieutenant colonel. “Veterans were viewed, unfortunately, as collateral damage by small business, the Legislature and the governor in order to get that law through.”

The federal law allows veterans to sue for back pay, but not for punitive damages or other types of compensatory damages, said Michael Volpe, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor veterans services office.

Most other groups with legal protection against discrimination can sue in federal court for punitive damages, which are meant to deter businesses from future wrongdoing, and for compensatory damages, which are awarded for things like emotional pain.

The author of the Wisconsin bill, state Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, said he didn’t know about the federal limits on veterans, but it wouldn’t have changed his mind, because fewer lawsuits will mean more jobs for everyone, including soldiers returning from war.

“Employers facing punitive damages in court is a bad thing for jobs, and veterans want jobs,” Grothman said. “We’re going back to the way it was two years ago and nobody thought two years ago that is was horrible to be a veteran.”

The Legislature amended the 2009 Wisconsin Fair Employment Law, removing the legal right to sue for up to $300,000 in damages in state court.

Victims of employment discrimination still can seek reinstatement and back pay through the state Department of Workforce Development.

“This has been viewed as a women’s pay issue, but it affects a broad range of classes,” said Jeffrey Hines, president of the Wisconsin Employment Lawyers Association. “It’s a huge kick in the teeth to the people who serve our country.”

Hines said veterans who are mistreated after returning home from stressful deployments are very vulnerable to the kinds of emotional pain and suffering that compensatory damages are meant to address.

Effect on vets unforeseen

Nobody seemed to realize how the law would affect veterans until after it passed. A Feb. 28 memo from a senior staff attorney at the Wisconsin Legislative Council spelled out the limited options for veterans in federal courts.

Gourlie said he sent the memo to Gov. Scott Walker, but Walker signed the rollback bill into law on April 6.

Gourlie later received a letter from the governor saying that the change “simply removed the duplicative and unnecessarily costly process of seeking punitive and compensatory damages in state court.”

“All individuals in Wisconsin will be treated the same as they have been for decades,” Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said Thursday in an email. “(Changes in the law do) not single out any group of individuals.”

Werwie said no other veterans groups objected to the law.

Gourlie said most weren’t aware of it until it was too late. He said he was disappointed the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs took no position on the change, even though Secretary John Scocos is personally suing the department in state court, alleging employment discrimination based on his military service.

The department’s board fired him in 2009. Walker gave him back his job in August. The lawsuit is pending.

Department spokeswoman Carla Vigue said Scocos wouldn’t comment. Vigue said the department took no position on the bill because it had “no practical impact on veterans.”

Read the Rest: Law revised by GOP limits suits by veterans.

Yesterday for most of the day I felt pretty much like I’d been kicked in the gut, owing to a combination of not enough sleep, the DNC’s milquetoast support for the recall, the DNR’s noxious inaction in the Sewergate horror, Walker talking about his jobs record using Kathy Nicholaus’s new new math, and the effing poll numbers. I just couldn’t shake the visceral feeling of dread that kept creeping over me. Every time I opened my mouth, I sounded like Eeyore when he lost his tail:

Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?”—and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.

Yes, that. Eeyore’s gloom prevents him from seeing anything clearly. Having ascertained that he has, in fact, lost his tail, Eeyore attributes monumental significance to it.

“That Accounts for a Good Deal,” said Eeyore gloomily. “It Explains Everything. No Wonder.”

This is also the problem with polls, especially when coupled with too little sleep. They’re just somebody’s idea of what maybe might be occurring at a given moment before an election, give or take a few thousands. Even well-conducted polls amount to a more or less educated guess. Who knows what will influence fence-sitting voters? When they themselves don’t really know just what they’re going to do, the people making predictions are blowing a certain amount of smoke.

And that smoke can cloud your vision. Those who appear to be ahead, even by a negligible margin, rejoice, while an impending sense of doom spreads over those who appear to be behind, even by a sliver. Any change from an earlier poll, however minuscule, may be taken as a trend. The effect of the poll is to say, more or less, that the race is over, it’s a done deal, and here are the results. But it’s not over. A lot can happen in just a few weeks, and the results are as yet undetermined.

Regarding the illustrious Marquette poll for May, some regard it as valid, and others caution us not to start counting the Republican chickens, recognizing that the unprecedented nature of this election means that all bets are off. The polls are trying to predict politics as usual. The parties are doing their best to maintain politics as usual. But given all that we’ve done to organize and mobilize and make this election happen, this is anything but politics as usual.

We do know that the race is likely to be close, so every small thing we do has the potential to significantly affect the outcome. We’ve no time to tromp about looking for the donkey’s tail. We have invested too much of ourselves in this race to take the spin and drivel of polls and right-wing media to heart.

We have already accomplished so much more than anyone would have thought possible just a year and a half ago. Now is the time for courage, good humor, plenty of sleep, action, and solidarity. We are fighting for justice, truth, freedom—all the biggies. We are on the side of the angels. Embrace the blue donkey, tail and all, and repeat after me: We can win this! …

Read the Rest: Polls Shmolls: We Can Win This! | blue cheddar.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/19/1093010/-Standing-With-Walker

“You live in the world like everyone else. You don’t need to be an expert to discuss these things. If these problems in society are to get better, it is not enough that a few experts discuss these things. Every individual has to change, and the only way to do this is for ordinary people to have greater awareness of the bigger problems, and understanding of what creates the problem, and a desire to change things person by person. So, as a member of society you are as qualified as anyone else. And the only way to change is through education. So if we raise certain questions as we discuss things, they you can read, research, learn about these things. Find your own examples. This is up to each of us. That is our responsibility.”

– H.H. Dalai Lama

On last night’s (5/18) Real Time, Bill Maher interviewed Dan Rather about his thoughts on opinion journalism (“I think it has its place” but “it’s not my kind of journalism”), Rather’s Bush-going-AWOL story, which famously got him fired, and media consolidation. His thoughts on that:

“Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal or a progressive, a Democrat or a Republican, everybody can be and should be concerned about this: the constant consolidation of media, particularly national distribution of media, with a few companies — no more than six, my count is four — now control more than 80 percent of the true national distribution of news. These large corporations, they have things they need from the power structure in Washington, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, and of course the people in Washington have things they want the news to be reported. To put it bluntly, very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears, and reads than most people know.”

6-Minute Video: ttp://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/931606/on_bill_maher_show%2C_dan_rather_slams_corporate_media%3A_%22to_put_it_bluntly%2C_big_business_is_in_bed_with_big_government%22?page=entire

Why do conservatives hate freedom? The question may be startling. After all, don’t conservatives claim they are protecting liberty in America against liberal statism, which they compare to communism or fascism? But the conservative idea of “freedom” is a very peculiar one, which excludes virtually every kind of liberty that ordinary Americans take for granted.

I distinguish conservatives from libertarians, who, on issues of personal liberty, tend to side with liberals. Since World War II, mainstream conservatives have opposed every expansion of personal liberty in the United States.

During the civil rights era, the leading conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, and the leading conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., along with most of their followers opposed federal laws banning racial discrimination. To their credit, they later admitted they had been mistaken; indeed, both Buckley and Goldwater supported gay rights late in their careers. But at the time that conservative support for a color-blind society might have made a difference, the leaders of American conservatism sided with the Southern segregationists. They claimed they did so, not because of racial prejudice, but because they feared federal tyranny — a weaselly stance that, in practice, made them side with white supremacist tyranny at the state level. If they had truly believed in their own propaganda about federalism, conservatives could have opposed federal civil rights legislation while campaigning for civil rights laws at the state level. They didn’t.

What would America look like, if conservatives had won their battles against American liberty in the last half-century?  

The civil rights revolution was followed by the sexual revolution. Here again, conservatives, as distinct from libertarians, were on the side of government repression. The mainstream conservative movement opposed the legalization of contraceptives and abortion. In this case, unlike in the case of civil rights, the American right did not even pretend to have constitutional reasons for opposing Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (which struck down state bans on the use of contraception, including by married couples) or Roe v. Wade  in 1973 (which struck down state bans on most abortion). The mainstream right simply argued that conservative Christian beliefs about sexual morality should be incorporated into law. In other words, the very conservatives warning us about the dangers of “mobocracy” when it came to the welfare state had no objection to using the power of government to force their fellow citizens to live their private lives according to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas or the Book of Leviticus, as interpreted by semi-literate Southern Protestant preachers.

The conservative campaign against gay rights is equally impossible to justify, in terms of America’s Founding philosophy of natural rights. Unable to come up with any Lockean liberal reason why citizens of a democratic republic should be discriminated against, on the basis of their sexual orientations, conservatives are forced to cite the Bible or thousands of years of tradition. The whole point of the American Founding, however, was to establish a regime that was not based, like the pre-modern monarchies of  Europe, on revealed religion or ancient custom …

Read the Rest: http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/155443/Why_Do_Conservatives_Hate_Freedom%3F/

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has stake a claim that hte city’s teachers don’t work long enough hours. But a new study from the University of Illinois says Chicago teachers actually work 58 hours a week, 800 hours a year over what the contract requires.

ATHENS (The Borowitz Report) – After struggling for months with an intractable financial crisis, Greece announced today that it would cease to exist as a sovereign nation and would instead reboot itself as a social network.

The new entity, FetaBook, is expected to raise much-needed billions in an upcoming IPO.

The social network formerly known as Greece announced that it would cancel its upcoming elections and instead install a CEO, a 24-year-old hacker from suburban Athens named Ciro Mavromatidis.

Speaking from the newly opened offices of FetaBook, Mr. Mavromatidis explained how the social network would be attractive to the investment community in ways that Greece was not.

“We’re keeping all the aspects of Greece that made it a cool brand – the ruins, the Olympics, the olives,” he said.  “We’re just losing the things that were a drag on the Greek economy: namely, the Greeks.”

He said under the new plan, all Greeks would cease to be citizens of Greece and would instead become friends of FetaBook: “They won’t receive any government benefits anymore, but they’ll be able to grow all the imaginary food they want.”

Mr. Mavromatidis said that by converting from a nation to a social network, FetaBook will enjoy other cost savings as well.

“We Greeks waste billions of dollars a year smashing plates after meals,” he said.  “Now that’s going to be done by an app.”

Usually TED talks are known for insightful explorations of topics ranging from science to the arts; psychology to social science. They are beautifully done presentations by some of the most eloquent teachers you can imagine.

So imagine the disappointment of TED fans far and wide when it came out the organization had banned a 7-minute talk by venture capitalist  Nick Hanauer pointing out the obvious economic reality that the rich don’t create jobs, a secure working middle class produces jobs by purchasing goods and services. Through the purchasing power of a healthy middle class there is an economic “feedback loop” between businesses and consumers that benefits all citizens.

Despite his great wealth, Hanuer notes he owns “three cars, not 3,000”. Despite their great – and rapidly growing – stranglehold on concentrated wealth and the economy, the wealthy simply can’t purchase enough to create and fuel an economy. And if people don’t have money in their back pocket they can’t buy the products of companies venture capitalists want to fund.

Simple, obvious logic. Truth in the reality-based world.

That’s why congress and the White House don’t get it.

TED banned the video but a copy has gotten loose. Just like Newt Gingrich’s video shiv “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” burst the hot air balloon about Romney’s supposed economic brilliance and got vacuumed off the web the moment the Newtster endorsed the blandest presidential candidate since Calvin Coolidge, the same will probably happen with this videO.

Thanks to reader Jack for sending this into the Daily Call.

So watch it now before they scoop it up and post to your Facebook page and forward it to folks in your address book.

7-minute Banned Video of Truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bBx2Y5HhplI

Sign on to the Video Calling on TED to Post the Hanauer Video

TED, the celebrated nonprofit devoted to “ideas worth spreading” prides itself on its ability to promote bold ideas. However, it turns out that one idea is too bold for TED right now. TED has decided to break precedent and refuse to release a frank TED talk by multi-millionaire Nick Hanauer on how to really fix the economy: taxing the rich.

Join us in telling TED: Stop censoring ideas, especially ones about rescuing our economy and making America better — or lose credibility as an open space for bold ideas.

WTF, TED? You’re about freedom of knowledge – not about censoring ideas. Silencing this talk is a much more political act than posting it would have been.

Don’t break our hearts, TED. Free the speech. It’s time to do the right thing, and allow the viewers to decide.

Thanks for all you do to make this movement real.

Sincerely,

The Other 98% Team

In an effort to prevent a replay of the last election, which saw a conservative electorate sweep a record number of Republicans into office, state Democrats are targeting voters who favored their party’s candidates in 2008 but sat out the election in 2010, the year Republican Gov. Scott Walker won office.

“We are proactively targeting these voters,” says Phil Walzak, a spokesman for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who faces Walker in a political rematch in the June 5 recall election. “These voters included more women and more middle-aged voters, people under 55. In 2008, they were more involved, more animated.”

Walzak wouldn’t provide further details on the targeted voter group, but he said getting them to again head to the polls is key.

Recent polls conducted by Public Policy Polling, Rasmussen and the Marquette Law School have all shown Barrett trailing Walker by five or six percentage points. Walker defeated Barrett by 124,638 votes in 2010, 52 to 46 percent.

When asked why 2008 voters would have sat out the last election, Walzak speculated the “divisive” tea party movement that strongly colored the 2010 election was to blame.

The most recent Marquette Law School poll, released Wednesday, contained several other indicators favorable to Republicans when it comes to turning out their base June 5. Consider:

* Republicans who say they are “absolutely certain” to vote on June 5 number 91 percent, while “absolutely certain” Democrats and independents each number 83 percent.

* 62 percent of Republicans say they have tried to persuade someone to vote for or against a candidate, compared to 54 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of independents who have tried persuasion.

* In the five Marquette polls conducted this year, the number of self-identified Democrats was two percentage points higher than Republicans in January and eight points higher in February, but began declining in March, to six points that month, three points in April and just one point this month.

Pollster Charles Franklin, a visiting professor at Marquette Law School, says this shift in the balance of Republican and Democratic partisanship over the past several months among registered voters is an indication of Republican mobilization.

“The GOP is getting more fired up toward the end (of the recall election season),” Franklin says. “That matches the high voter turnout we saw for Walker in the GOP primary last week.”

In the Republican primary May 8, Walker received 626,538 votes, while in the Democratic primary, 665,436 people combined voted for one of the four true Democratic candidates. That means fewer than 40,000 more people turned out to vote in the competitive Democratic primary than for Walker in what was arguably a run-away election for him.

“There is no question there is enthusiasm on the Republican side,” Walzak said. “But we think the electorate will be different this election and different than the surveys.”

Ciara Matthews, a Walker campaign spokesperson, says an “overwhelming majority” of voters elected Walker in 2010 to address the state’s long-running budget crisis. She added that Walker ran on a promise of closing the $3.6 billion budget deficit without raising taxes, laying off public employees or making cuts to essential services.

“Governor Walker has kept those promises, and we are confident that because the positive effects of his reforms continue to create more jobs and keep more money in the pockets of taxpayers, voters will reaffirm the decision they made a year ago,” Matthews said in a statement Thursday.

Walzak added that while polling samples have favored Republicans, Walker continues to garner no more than 50 percent support, despite spending roughly $21 million on advertising since the start of the year.

“That’s a real red flag for Republicans,” Walzak asserts.

Read the Rest: Capitol Report: Democrats targeting 2008 voters who sat out 2010 elections.

MADISON – After Governor Scott Walker’s Department of Revenue developed a new set of highly questionable and misleading economic numbers for Wisconsin, Sen. Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse) released the following statement:
“Governor Walker is clearly looking at Wisconsin’s record job loss and unemployment numbers through rose-colored glasses. I don’t know if the Governor thinks that voters in our state have been asleep for the past year but the thousands of families struggling through these tough times will not be fooled by this latest political stunt.
“Despite numerous attempts to rewrite history and spin the facts, Gov. Walker’s record speaks for itself. After one year of his failed policies, there are 5,741 fewer Wisconsin-based businesses than when he took office. Numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that under Gov. Walker’s administration, Wisconsin had the worst economic record in the nation and lost more jobs than any other state. If Wisconsin had simply kept pace with the national economic growth trends, we would have gained 49,800 jobs. Instead, under Gov. Walker’s watch, we’ve lost 14,200 jobs.“The misguided policies from Republican leaders this session to attack worker rights, cut public education funding, and slash worker training programs have had a devastating impact on our ability to encourage economic development and create jobs. Families and businesses in our state continue to struggle and we need to take urgent steps to improve our economy and move our state forward. Gov. Walker’s attempts to rewrite history only distract from the important challenges that we face.”

Sources for facts stated in Sen. Shilling’s statement:

No vote can be taken for granted, and we need boots on the ground in order to end Scott Walker’s ideological civil war and reunite our state. We need to fill an additional 8,486 volunteer shifts this weekend.

Can I count on you to volunteer at our local office in La Crosse? http://www.barrettforwisconsin.com/volunteer

We can’t match Scott Walker in out-of-state money, but we will beat him with our determination, willpower, and a grassroots effort powered by people like you.

Come on down to our local office in La Crosse and join your neighbors for a shift or two this weekend.

Thank you for your support,

Tom Barrett

P.S. Our local field office is located at:

The La Crosse Democratic Party
116 5th Ave. South, La Crosse WI 54601
608-769-5286