One of the GOP's greatest new (and most cynical) propaganda successes is the invention of the absurd, misleading, inaccurate phrase "job creators" as a euphemism for corporations, or rich people, or their wealthy patrons, or whoever it refers to in reality.

But those corporations don't "create jobs." People do. When they have money to spend on things, they do. Surely, even fake "conservatives" are familiar with "Supply and Demand." It's just not politically convenient or expedient for them to mention that phrase out loud right now. People who don't have jobs don't tend to buy much. If they have jobs, those people become job creators because they buy stuff.

That the rich, corporate fat cats who now run the country (instead of "we, the people" as was formally the case --- in theory) are not "job creators" is underscored plainly by these two recent news items:

1) Despite nearly unprecedented unemployment numbers, profits for U.S. corporations were at an all-time record high in 2010. Fancy that. And they are now on pace to break that record in 2011.

2) Despite profits for U.S. corporations at record highs, for the American people, the real "job creators," food stamp usage is now also at an all-time record high...

See any problems there? And contradictions between items 1 and 2?

"Job creators" my ass.

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Please don't say we didn't try to warn you. We even caught a bit of flak from folks on the "Left" and were quoted by Brit Hume on Fox "News" for our comments at the time.

Back on April 1, 2007 --- in what wasn't an April Fools Day joke, unfortunately --- The BRAD BLOG highlighted pretty much everything you needed to know about Barack Obama. In the middle of a tense debate over a military spending bill passed by Democrats and threatened with a veto by George W. Bush since it included a requirement for the President to set timelines for a withdraw from Iraq, Obama told AP that even if Bush vetoed the bill, Senate Democrats would simply send back another bill that didn't include the timeline requirement.

In short, he sold out his own caucus by showing their hand and thus paved the way for Bush to call their bluff with a veto without consequence. That's exactly what Bush did.

As we reported at the time...

Yes, President Obama has been forced to deal with an unprecedented extremist GOP willing to use terrorists tactics to get their way, creating phony "hostage crises" time and again --- in the latest episode putting a gun to the head of the world economy. But negotiating with terrorists only ensures the likelihood of the bad guys taking another hostage in the future, which the Republicans have repeatedly done, and will continue to do. Capitulating to them, as he has now done time and again, is inexcusable.

Following whatever the resolve may be of this phony debt "crisis" created by the Republicans, the FY 2012 budget debate will very quickly begin and we're likely to see the very same tactics and Republican victory resolution played out all over again. (Bookmark this post for use in October, when the FY '12 year begins and the GOP will be staging another hostage crisis.)

What was clear to us as long ago as 2007 was that Obama was the worst. negotiator. ever. His time in office to date has done nothing to assuage us of that initial assessment, as he has negotiated with himself and capitulated to terror tactics again and again, acceding to virtually every demand of the hostage takers by the end.

From giving away the store with un-stimulating tax cuts in a much-smaller-than-needed stimulus package, to giving up away the public option (much less single payer) right off the bat in the health care reform bill, to capitulating on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich earlier this year, and now accepting a "bargain" which tosses out everything he had formerly promised to be a "bottom line" for any debt ceiling deal, the President has done almost precisely as he projected he would 4 years ago when we pointed it out, so that we could "get a sense of how the next president will make decisions."

If you didn't notice then, please don't blame us. We tried to tell you.

On the wonky details of the President's latest capitulation...For one of the best critiques that we've seen to date, on the dangers posed to jobs and the economy by the current Dems-give-all-GOP-gives-nothing "deal," please see Krugman, who charges "The President Surrenders." He offers an argument that his "deal" will make things much worse, rather than better, both economically and politically. He says that "we're witnessing here...a catastrophe on multiple levels"...

Matthew Vadum will lie about anything he needs to in order to collect his wingnut welfare paychecks apparently. American values such as democracy be damned. It's partisan politics (and paychecks) at all costs.

Vadum has, of late, taken over from the disgraced Bush/Cheney general counsel turned fake "voting rights advocate" Thor Hearne of the fake "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR), and the disgraced liar John Fund of the Wall Street Journal as the moment's GOP master of media misinformation meant to confuse the public about polling place Photo ID restriction laws passed by the GOP in statehouses around the country over the past few months in order to suppress the legal Democratic-leaning vote in advance of 2012.

Like Hearne and Fund before him, he's very good at his job. He's very aggressive. And there is little he is unwilling to blatantly, if cleverly, lie about to fool his gullible constituency.

Vadum's latest misinformative article, as published by Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller and, predictably, echoed around the intellectually dishonest and incurious wingnut blogosphere last week, picks up where his recently published propaganda book about ACORN leaves off.

That book, which he was kind enough to send us a copy of recently, is pitched on its cover and its publicity sheet as an exposé uncovering the truth behind the former four-decade old community organization who he describes as "Ballot Box Stuffers," "Urban Terrorists," and "Gangsters."

That his silly book fails to detail even a single ballot box "stuffed" by ACORN is little surprise. There exists no actual evidence, after all, of any illegal vote ever having been cast by any voter who was improperly registered by an ACORN worker. But this is all politics as usual to partisans like Vadum. So preposterous propaganda meant to directly undermine American democracy is merely all in a days work for dudes like him.

The same disingenuous "voter fraud" sleight-of-hand used in his book is once again recycled in his latest "news" article. Like his book, the article is meant to do little more than dishonestly reinforce support for reprehensible voter suppression laws that offer an advantage to Republicans at the ballot box. As Vadum knows, it's far easier for Republicans to "win" elections by keeping their opposition from being able to cast their legal votes --- and certainly easier than risking jail time by gaming electronic voting systems --- than it would be to actually garner popular support for their actual agenda. That's the game for which Vadum gets paid.

He's a rather silly man, and its child's play, naturally, to demonstrate, using his own words --- as we've been doing similarly for years with now-disgraced 'voter fraud' fraudsters like Hearne and Fund --- how Vadum knowingly lies to his constituency. But we guess it's necessary to do it one more time here with Vadum, if only to place it on the Internet record to help those who don't know about him or his pernicious scam, and how it's meant to mislead otherwise good folks with clever "voter fraud" rhetoric that represents the problem as something far different than what it actually is....

Guest editorial by Evan Kutner of distributorcap NY

It took 30 years and 204 days, but on Tuesday August 2, 2011 the fruits of the Reagan Tree of Life will finally have reached its peak when the over-ripened, low-hanging, worm-filled Reagapples will begin to pound the ground, not with sweetened blossoms, but with a dead thud. 30 years and 204 days of belittling and ignoring the American education system, calling ketchup a vegetable, telling us trees cause pollution, cutting taxes to create trickled-down imaginary jobs (OK there are a few more maids and gardeners) and teaching Americans that they could have everything they want and it will cost nothing - the Teadras educated Republican party is willing to take the ultimate bet and tell the piper (or croupier) this time to shove it.

The US Congress has spent the better part of the past month arguing over whether the credit limit on the Visa card should be raised in order to pay their bills --- bills they have committed and signed to pay. If this game of cold-war brinkmanship wasn't so dangerous on so many levels --- it would actually be comical to watch. Watching the children of the right storm out of meetings (Eric Cantor --- who probably has the distinction of having had the most spit balls thrown at him during 7th grade lunch) and then say no, no, no as the opposition capitulates to nearly every one of their demands is nothing short of having MacBeth playing in a Kabuki Theater.

The 80 or so teabaggers, who sandbagged their way into Congress last November promising to stop those eternal welfare queens from driving Cadillacs and finally ridding the country of the leeches who live off their hard-earned (over) taxed dollars, are about to allow the real grand experiment to go forward --- let the US default on its payments for the first time in history --- and default by choice. You know the world's strongest economy is going to look like it is managed even worse than Greece...

They voted for it, before they voted against it. But that was the 7 times they voted to raise the debt ceiling when it was their "President" in the White House.

As ThinkProgress notes in their blog item accompanying the following video compilation of Republicans arguing on the House floor in 2002 and 2004 to raise the debt limit in a clean bill with no spending cuts, "no less than 98 currently serving House GOP members" voted in favor of doing exactly that --- back then --- in order to pay the bills for spending they'd previously approved.

But that was then, with a Republican in the White House, before they decided to create a fake "crisis" in order to terrorize the nation's economy in a shameful attempt to return to power. Hypocrisy on parade...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

Anti-war sentiments today are strikingly similar to what they had been in March 1968 when Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) challenged fellow Democrat and incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. In March 1968 only 41% of Americans said "no" when asked whether we made a mistake in sending troops to Vietnam. Today six out of every ten Americans surveyed (70% of Democrats) favor an immediate end to the war in Afghanistan. Another 59% oppose our involvement in Libya.

While opposition to war is similar, the "democracy deficit" --- what Prof. Noam Chomsky refers to in Failed States as the significant gap between the policy positions of the electorate and their elected representatives --- is much wider today than it had been in 1968.

Medicare, the centerpiece of President Johnson's Great Society, like Social Security, the centerpiece of FDR's New Deal, remains immensely popular with the American people. As revealed by a recent Washington Post poll, 78% of Americans oppose cutting Medicare. 72% favor raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 and only 17% oppose raising taxes on those making more than $250,000.

Yet, the political elites of both major parties, operating, as they did during the Wall Street bailout of 2008, under a contrived crisis mode, are advancing alternative deficit reduction proposals that will, in the words of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (see video below) "do just the opposite of what the American people want."

While third parties are an option, today we sorely need an option that was available in 1968: a Eugene McCarthy...

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In a double-length smackdown last night, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show were as good as we've ever seen them, on the Fox "News"/Rightwing's professional ability to live in self-denial and delusion, even while consistently and hypocritically playing the victim card.

It was a collection of rather extraordinary collection of Fox clips, culminating in what Stewart aptly describes as, "some of the most free-range, organically-grown, disingenuous, ideologically-marinated, un-self-awareness I've ever seen in the wild."

Here's the must-watch segment, as broken in to two parts for some reason (they ran consecutively on the show)...

On my Pacifica Radio show today on KPFK in Los Angeles, I discussed yesterday's report at The BRAD BLOG concerning the woman who was forced to jump ridiculous hoops while trying to help her son get Photo ID at the Wisconsin DMV in the wake of the new GOP voter suppression law there which institutes polling place Photo ID restrictions before legal voters are allowed to cast their legal vote.

By the way, I spoke to the woman today --- who'd like to be identified only as Nicole --- and she made clear that her video was not secretly taped (as, for example, James O'Keefe's ACORN hoax tapes were). Her video camera was on the table and in plain sight the whole time, she told me.

As seen (and heard) in her video tape, during the process of trying to get the Photo ID for free at the DMV, as allowed by the new statute, the son's bank statements were rifled through, and questioned as to whether they showed enough "activity" on them. Also, they were almost charged $28 for the "free" ID, which brought up questions as to why the WI DMV policy is to charge applicants, unless they know to "request" the ID for no charge.

I also took the opportunity during the show to offer a bit more background context, including a 1980 sound clip from Paul Weyrich, one of the "conservative" movement godfathers, during which he calls for fewer people to be allowed to vote. "Quite candidly," he said to the convention of Baptist ministers where Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell also spoke, "our leverage in elections goes up when the voting populace goes down."

That's what all of this is about. He says it quite plainly in the video tape.

Weyrich went on to found the non-profit American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC), the group of Rightwingers said to be responsible for writing the polling place Photo ID restriction laws being passed by Republicans now in state after state. I also share some hard stats on who will actually be affected by these laws (and who will not.) And, for good measure, I tossed in some Stephen Colbert speaking about Photo ID and "voter fraud" as well.

Enjoy!

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 28 mins]...

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Prepping for tonight's Malloy Show, so very quickly, this from Wednesday night's Colbert Report. Can't tell you how nice it is, after so many years, that I'm no longer one of the very few yelling and screaming about this shit...

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I'd like to take the opportunity, before we get closer to the 2012 election cycle and things change for the worse in the Buckeye State (and as I prepare to step off the grid, and into the mountains for the bulk of the week), to laud Ohio's new Republican Sec. of State Jon Husted for his willingness to stand up for voters by bucking his party and standing against the polling place Photo ID restrictions the GOP is working to implement in his state.

Husted made his opposition plain in a statement late last month, after attempting to work with the General Assembly in order to craft an acceptable election reform bill [emphasis added]:

As The BRAD BLOG has had to explain far too many times over the years --- as based on empirical academic studies and even hard data from George W. Bush's own Dept. of Justice --- legislation implimented in order to restrict access to the polling place as based, ostensibly, on assertions of the incredibly rare crime of voter impersonation at the polls, is meant to do nothing more than suppress voters --- specifically, minority, urban, elderly, and student (read: Democratic-leaning) ones.

Some 18% of the country's legal electorate in this country do not possess the type of IDs required by these laws, and are likely to be disenfranchised or forced to pay a poll tax in order to exercise their legal right to vote, even though polling place impersonation is almost as rare as unicorns and leprechauns.

To that end, while I suspect we may end up taking various issue with Husted's positions or rulings in the future on related matters as the 2012 Presidential election looms in the always contentious state of Ohio, we'd just like to go on record for the moment here, to congratulate him for his intellectually honest stand on behalf of the voters of his state on this particular issue.

Thank you, sir.

P.S. Here's a slightly --- but only slightly --- more cynical take on the above.