This is why the United States is doomed

AP/Charles Dharapak

Eric Cantor and John Boehner

The Hill reports the House Republican response to Friday morning's distressing jobs report.

House Republicans pinned the blame for Friday's disappointing jobs report squarely on the White House, saying the Obama administration's "over-taxing, over-regulating and over-spending" has stifled economic growth.

"One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy," Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.

How many blatant untruths can a Republican speaker of the House stuff into one sentence? Quite a few!

1) President Obama has cut taxes. His stimulus bill included tax cuts for 95 percent of all American working families. He signed off on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while throwing in a new payroll tax cut for good measure.

2) Over-regulating? Set aside, if you can, the fact that under-regulation clearly played a significant role in creating the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Let's just take a look at the two sectors of the economy that we might expect to have been affected by the two biggest signature pieces of legislation signed into law by Obama -- the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bank reform act. According to this morning's jobs report, the healthcare sector has averaged 24,000 news jobs a month over the past year -- and accounted for almost a third of May's overall 54,000 gain. Meanwhile, Wall Street had its fourth most profitable year ever in 2010. If that's over-regulation, we need more of it!

3) Private economic forecasters, the kind of profit-minded companies that make their money by analyzing economic trends for business clients, generally agree that without Obama's stimulus spending, unemployment would be higher.

We could raise other issues. We could ask: What changed between May and the previous six months in which job growth was relatively strong? But that would require examining actual facts about what is going on the world, like Japan's recession or high gas prices or declining government spending, particularly at the state level.

I know, I know, it's not worth getting agitated when Washington politicians of either party spout blatant misrepresentations of reality. But as we accelerate towards a debt ceiling budget deal that is virtually guaranteed to accelerate negative economic trends, it does matter what House Republicans say, because it gives us a pretty darn good idea of what they're going do.

via salon.com

The Republicans lie through their teeth at every turn and nobody in DC or the MSM (except for maybe Krugman, Maddow and friends) calls them on it. In the meantime, corporations can give money directly to politicians (didn't this used to be called bribery?) and the rest of us don't count. This is no longer my America.

What’s This “We” Shit? You Gotta Mouse in Your Pocket?

« Working Girl

What’s This “We” Shit? You Gotta Mouse in Your Pocket?

by John Cole

Tyler Durden at Zerohedge has a post up noting that we need to create 250k jobs a month for the next 66 months just to get back to 2007 levels, and this causes Doug Mataconis to ask:

Now, tell me, how are we going to do that? Because I don’t see how it happens.

What’s this we shit? The libertarian/conservative plan is quite clear- cut taxes, deregulate, drill, ban abortion, attack unions, gut social spending and win the pr war for the Ryan plan to end Medicare, block every administration appointee and job creation plan, and free market Jeebus will do the rest while they blame the economy on Obama and Democrats. Let’s not forget who wanted employment to be much, much worse when they opposed the stimulus and did everything they could to make sure GM and Chrysler died.

So how are “we” going to create all these jobs? Simple, you guys aren’t going to even try. Hell, by playing with default, they are actively trying to make things worse.

We’re in dire straights here, folks, but Michael Moore is fat and Paul Krugman is shrill and a Democrat is President, so there just isn’t much the GOP and libertarians are willing to do about the situation.

June 3, 2011 3:35 pm Posted in: Domestic Affairs, Glibertarianism, I Can't Believe We're Losing to These People  41 Comments

via balloon-juice.com

Barack Obama, the carbon president | Bill McKibben

via guardian.co.uk

Carbon sequestration starts with leaving it in the ground. Too bad that won't happen. While Brazil shrinks one of the biggest carbon dioxide sponges on the planet in the form of its rainforest, the U.S. digs up ever more coal and turns it into carbon dioxide.

Edwards Indicted

« Kevorkian Dead

You can’t raise a Cain back up when he’s in defeat »

Edwards Indicted

by John Cole

On multiple charges:

ABC11 has learned that a federal grand jury has indicted former North Carolina senator and presidential candidate John Edwards.

The case of United States of America v. Johnny Reid Edwards contains six counts, including conspiracy, four counts of illegal campaign contributions and one count of false statements.

Combine the naked ambition of Edwards with his caddy ways, and a society that is really kind of crazy about sex, and you get this. His wife and kids deserved better.

June 3, 2011 11:18 am Posted in: Assholes  64 Comments

via balloon-juice.com

Sarah Palin’s History Lesson: Paul Revere Warned The British | ThinkProgress

via thinkprogress.org

At least she didn't use the word "thingy" to describe the event.

Spear Phishing Uses Friendly Faces to Spread E-Mail Fraud

But what if the e-mail appears to come from a colleague down the hall? And all he asks is that you add some personal information to a company database?

This is spear phishing, a rapidly proliferating form of fraud that comes with a familiar face: messages that seem to be from co-workers, friends or family members, customized to trick you into letting your guard down online. And it has turned into a major problem, according to technology companies and computer security experts.

On Wednesday, Google disclosed that it had discovered and disrupted an effort to use such pinpoint tactics to steal hundreds of Gmail passwords and monitor the accounts of prominent people, including senior government officials. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that the F.B.I. would investigate Google’s assertion that the campaign originated in China.

Such tactics were also used in an attack on a company called RSA Security, which security experts say may have given hackers the tools to carry out a serious intrusion last month at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor.

The security specialists say these efforts are a far cry from more standard phishing attempts, which involve spraying the Internet with millions of e-mails that appear to be from, say, Citibank in the hope of snaring a few unfortunate Citibank customers. Spear phishing entails sending highly targeted pitches that can look authentic because they appear to come from a trusted source and contain plausible messages.

As such, the specialists say, the overtures are becoming very difficult for recipients to detect.

“It’s a really nasty tactic because it’s so personalized,” said Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer of the British company BT Group. “It’s an e-mail from your mother saying she needs your Social Security number for the will she’s doing.”

Mr. Schneier said the attacks are more like a traditional con game than a technically sophisticated intrusion. “This is hacking the person,” he said. “It’s not hacking the computer.”

Symantec, the computer security firm, said it intercepted around 85 targeted attacks a day in March, including efforts to steal personal information through phishing or with links to nefarious software that could ultimately expose corporate files. The only month with more attacks was March 2009, when there was a surge that coincided with a G20 summit meeting.

Symantec said the most common targets were government agencies and senior managers and executives; the phishing of such big game is commonly referred to as “whaling.” Manufacturing firms were the targets of 15.9 percent of the attacks, compared with 8 percent for the financial sector and 6.1 percent for technology companies, Symantec said. Hackers taking aim at corporations are often seeking new product designs and may focus on engineers at a defense contractor, for example, to get data they can sell on the black market.

Enrique Salem, Symantec’s chief executive, gave the example of an e-mail sent to the head of a company that appears to be from the Internal Revenue Service. The message raises questions about the tax implications of an acquisition, and the chief executive passes the message to others inside the company. Someone opens the attachment, giving the attacker access to the company’s internal network.

“It’s about getting you to do something to compromise the system,” Mr. Salem said.

In the case of the Gmail attacks, Google said they appeared to originate from Jinan, China, and were aimed at users like Chinese political activists, military personnel, journalists and South Korean officials.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the government had no involvement in any such attacks, and that it “consistently opposes any criminal activities that damage the Internet and computer networks including hacking, and cracks down on these activities according to law.”

It is not clear how the attackers obtained the Gmail addresses they used, although they could have been found inside other compromised accounts, including corporate or government accounts whose addresses are often easier to guess.

The attackers may have hoped to find some work-related e-mail in their victims’ personal Gmail accounts.

Mila Parkour, an independent security researcher who helped alert Google to the attacks, said she was tipped off to the campaign when one of the victims let her examine some suspicious messages.

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John Markoff contributed reporting.

via nytimes.com

Whatcha gonna cut?

via digbysblog.blogspot.com

Digby: "One wonders how much more powerful the story would be if someone mentioned that this could be avoided with lower unemployment, ending useless wars and raising taxes on multimillionaires back to the level they were when Bill Clinton was president. But baby steps are good."

Jon Stewart slams CNN for their coverage of Anthony Weiner: CNN handled this with their trademark "I just don't need to know."

via crooksandliars.com

Once again, the "fake" news show on the comedy channel does an admirable job of reporting the actual facts, while the "real" news channels do nothing but repeat hearsay and innuendo (if not making shit up entirely). If it weren't for certain blogs and The Comedy Channel, there might not be any factual reporting available to the U.S. public.

You Got That Right, Buddy

Rep. Nadler: Bush-Era DOJers running "Willie Horton Campaign" Against Obama Justice Department.

You'd think these hucksters would have been discredited by the US Attorney firing scandal, which centered on most of the same folks and was tied to efforts to curtail minority voting. But apparently not.

via feedproxy.google.com

Tim Pawlenty Says He Would Back Paul Ryan's Medicare Plan - ABC News (blog)

via news.google.com

So, do you really need to know anything more about the man?

Plutocrats And Their Republican Party Have Always Wanted To Just Make Things Better

Plutocrats And Their Republican Party Have Always Wanted To Just Make Things Better

Yesterday we talked a little about how Republican state governments have taken such harmful and extreme positions-- particularly in states like Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, Arizona and Michigan-- that voters are expressing, and acting on, very high levels of buyer's remorse. Others haven't woken up yet; even Skeletor (R-FL) still has almost 30% of his state's voters behind him. Perhaps these people recall when conservatives were even worse and think that in retrospect it's not that bad... at least not yet.

The last time the GOP and an overly-entitled plutocracy they serve, a plutocracy, like ours, that hasn't been slapped down in a very, very long time-- thank you Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama-- the conservatives went a lot further towards forcing their dark, dystopian vision on the nation. I was just reading the part in Glen Yeadon's book Nazi Hydra In America where he talks about how Hitler learned all about eugenics from American conservatives, just as he had cribbed so much of his virulent anti-Semitism from Henry Ford.

By the turn of the century, women were still barred from voting. Racial hatred was the norm. Native Americans had been segregated on reservations Blacks and Asians were considered second class citizens and undesirables. Vigilantes often dispensed what passed for justice at the end of a hangman’s rope. From 1889 until 1918, 3,224 people were lynched. More often than not, the victim was black although 702 of the victims were white. Moreover, the hangings were carried out for trivial reasons such as staring at a white girl, offensive language, or other such minor infractions.

Eugenics would soon become a cure all for society’s problems. Criminal analysis would move racial hatred and criminal behavior into the realm of heredity and eugenic cleaning. Disease and physical afflictions, such as tuberculosis and epilepsy, were also considered hereditary disorders.

...In mid July 1911, the special committee met in Manhattan and systematically plotted a campaign to purge the blood of American people of the deteriorating influence of these undesirable anti-social classes. Ten classes of the socially unfit were identified. The classes were as follows in the rank given by the committee: feeble minded, pauper, alcoholics, criminals including petty criminals, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak, those predisposed to certain diseases, the deformed, and finally the blind and deaf. Not only did the ABA target the individuals afflicted, but also targeted their extended families as well. The group agreed that sterilization of the extended families was desirable.

The eugenic committee had endorsed a very ambitious plan. The plan prioritized the sterilization of those receiving custodial care, including those in poor houses, insane asylums, prisons, and any others under state care. This group contained approximately one million people. The plan called for the further sterilization of borderline cases of some seven million people deemed by the ABA to be totally unfit to become useful parents or citizens. The estimated eleven million people targeted for the first wave was more than ten percent of the population. After the first wave was completed, the plan called for the sterilization of the extended families of those deemed unfit.

Moreover, the committee sought to bypass the court system in ordering the sterilization. They attempted to define the sterilization as a police function. ... About the same time, Dr. Harry Clay Sharp was castrating inmates at the Indiana Reformatory to cure convicts of masturbation. Again, the procedure was conducted outside of the law. In 1899 Sharp read an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The article, written by Dr Albert Ochsner advocated the sterilization of all convicts with vasectomies. After reading the article, Sharp performed the procedure on scores of inmates without anesthetics.

By 1906, Sharp claimed to have performed 206 vasectomies, even though the procedure was still not legal. While Sharp was very influential in the passage of Indiana’s sterilization law, he was by no means alone. Reverend Oscar McCulloch, the pastor of the Indianapolis’s Plymouth Congregational Church, was a leading reformer and advocate of public charity while harboring a deep hate for the poor. Indiana law specified a compulsory servitude for its paupers. They could be farmed out to the highest bidder. MuCulloch performed his own genealogical survey of Indiana’s wandering tribe of paupers called the Tribe of Ishmael. MuCulloch’s survey of the Tribe of Ishmael quickly became a centerpiece of eugenics studies. MuCulloch preached to his congregation that the paupers were parasites and preordained to be nothing more. ... Washington State passed a bill mandating sterilization of habitual criminals and rapists. Connecticut passed a law allowing the medical staff to examine patients of two asylums for the feebleminded and their family trees to determine if the patients should be sterilized. California enacted a bill that allowed castration or sterilization of convicts and residents of the state home for the feebleminded.

In the next two years, additional states passed eugenic sterilization laws. Iowa passed perhaps the most inclusive law, allowing the sterilization of criminals, idiots, feebleminded, imbeciles, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, and moral or sexual perverts. Nevada, New Jersey and New York were among the states to pass sterilization laws.

The same parasitic families that are bankrolling the Republican Party today, bankrolled the rise of Hitler and bankrolled the attempted coup d'etat against FDR, bankrolled the takeover of the American media and... the American eugenics movement. They never get punished and they just get more monstrous with each generation. Today they've brought us Scott Walker, Rick Snyder, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Rick Scott...

Labels: eugenics, fascism, the nature of conservatism

posted by DownWithTyranny @ 6:00 AM
0 comments  |  Reddit

via downwithtyranny.blogspot.com

Parasitic families in the U.S. have been funding extreme right wing conservatives here and abroad for centuries. They have yet to be punished for their treasonous actions and plutocratic methods.