Those who would give up essential liberty to give corporations more ‘freedom’ deserve aren’t that interested in freedom

Three months after Senator Rand Paul’s super-important, epoch-changing 13-hour drone filibuster, more than 90% of House Republicans voted to continue the policy of indefinite detention and to keep the Guantanamo Bay prison open.

But a small group of Republicans actually joined the vast majority of Democrats to oppose these obvious affronts to civil liberties. And that’s at least little progress. Paul is picking his spots to dissent from his party’s orthodoxy. For instance, he’s warning against intervening in Syria as Senator John McCain is trying to arm any rebels he can find.…

Austerity is supposed to be dead but Tuesday night the Senate voted to cut $4.1 billion from the “Heat and Eat” programs that supplement food assistance for seniors and those with disabilities.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) offered legislation last month that would block any cuts to the SNAP program. It was soundly defeated after Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), chair of the Agriculture Committee, opposed it — unfortunately.

The Nation’s George Zornick points out that food assistance not only provides essential nutrition for the most vulnerable, it also is the most effective form of stimulus the government can offer:

For the last three decades Republicans have bet on a proposition that has mostly paid off: Poor people don’t vote.

As a result, they’ve championed an unprecedented transfer of wealth from workers to those who possess capital. And though they’ve lost 5 out of the 6 popular votes in presidential elections, they were able to use dark money and a terrible economy to recently win a majority in the House of Representatives and a record number of elected offices across the United States.

In 2014, the GOP is making an unprecedented gamble by denying millions and millions of Americans health care that their states are going to pay for anyway.…

How Bush’s brain used the financial crisis Bush left us with and shady tax laws to engineer a decade of dominance for right wing extremists in swing states.

There’s nothing that highlights the insanity of the IRS scandal than Karl Rove’s crocodile tears about the IRS even daring to investigate his humble little 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS.

“The group Rove helped found has massively outspent other 501(c)(4)s on political expenditures in the last two national election cycles, while fielding a tiny staff and offering no discernible social-welfare purpose,” writes The Daily Beast‘s Robert Macguire.

Rove’s cynical manipulation of the dark money system allowed him to spend millions and millions of dollars throughout 2009 and 2010 blaming President Obama for the economic misery of the financial crisis that George W.…

Class War – n. the only war George W. Bush ever won

Why are only the rich getting richer? Why — as Maryland’s governor Martin O’Malley asks — hasn’t the middle class had a raise in 13 years? Why are corporate profits at an all-time high but wages at an all-time low as a share of GDP?

We can blame globalization and rapid development of information technology. But two new studies confirm what you’ve probably already knew: Conservative policies are rapidly shrinking the middle class and engineering a massive transfer of wealth the richest Americans.

A new study “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective“, confirms a thesis that tax expert and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston has been advancing since 2003, “Under current government rules, an ever-greater share of economic resources must flow to the top over time because those rules subtly redistribute upwards.”

This is why the rich have gotten richer in Japan, France and Germany but nowhere close to as rich as the wealthy in America and Britain.…

Either we break up the big banks or the big banks break us

Attorney General Eric Holder made actual some news this week amid the GOP’s scandal frenzy: he told the House Judiciary committee that big banks are not too big too jail. He was willing to criminally prosecute the nation’s largest banks, though he hasn’t done so since the financial crisis.

“Let me be very, very, very clear… banks are not too big to jail,” Holder added.

This is a small relief because the fact remains that the big banks are bigger than ever, much bigger than they were when they were able to prevent the decent reforms that followed the financial crisis to take the the crucial step of breaking up the big banks.…