You will be hit with a lot of anti-Obama ads from large political Super PACs, think-tanks, and other astroturf grass rights groups that have been cooked up by the far Right over thirty-five years to control your vote. When you read the name, know who is behind it, and tell your friends and neighbors. It’s time that you look up the line to see the puppet masters pulling your strings. This is the first in a series of articles for t2P that put faces and the real political agenda behind these astroturf grass roots groups that are filling the airwaves, your mailboxes, and telephones with disinformation, propaganda, and scare tactics. There are so many that you need to know in depth that we can only dismantle the webs of a few at a time for you.  One group featured in this set, the Club for Growth, may have accepted a campaign donation from the official campaign of a prominent Republican Tea Party politician the legality of which is questionable and the ethics sub-basement amoral.

When you see Americans for Prosperty it’s really the Koch Brothers.[1] The “Americans” to which they refer are supposed to look like you, but they are, in fact, the clubby billionaires who are trying to protect their hefty tax breaks, bust unions, and end the social safety net as we know it.

The Kochs are big in the oil game too, so they would also like to deregulate the drilling, pipelines, and preserve the near-zero taxes that those handling oil enjoy. It’s more than a money thing. Daddy Koch was a John Bircher, the 50′s loony Right.  The boys are carrying out their father’s dream of having the government ripped down brick by brick from the inside.

AFP is an unprincipled principal backer of the Tea Party, and a festering web of astroturf groups designed to get the compliant and gullible to do their bidding. They backed Scott Walker and send in anti-union organizers and political spin apparatus to Wisconsin to try to stop the Walker recall campaign.

The New Yorker in 2010 noted that the Kochs are famous for “creating slippery organizations with generic-sounding names,” that “make it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington.” [2]

AFP’s budget surged from $7 million in 2007 to $40 million in 2010, an election year. [3] AFP funds a large number of the anti-Obama ads that you see on TV, often pushing the failed solar company Solyndra.[4] (Shhh… Solar is bad for the oil business.)

The Kochs and AFP are the Libertarian side of the GOP. When you see American Crossroads or CrossroadsGPS (Grassroots Policy Strategies), it’s actually Karl Rove, the Sith Lord of the NeoCons.

A Dean in the School of Dirty Tricks, Rove, who was the captain of the Political Titanic, er, the Bush-Cheney Administration. His  AC and CrossroadsGPS are 527 Super PACs, so they don’t have to report income sources,  but he has rounded up the wagons of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, Texas Oil, and some of the bigger players of the defense industry that was handsomely rewarded with two costly wars.  We also know that Public Storage’s B. Wayne Hughes and home builder and Texas car dealer magnate Bob Perry is a big contributor. American Financial Group is also a giver.

Rovians are fighting a two-front war: Try to unseat Barack Obama, and take back the GOP from Grover Norquist’s Teahadis funded by the Kochs and their Libertarian friends. Crossroads is trying to reclaim the party for the other Sect of the Selfish: The NeoCons, the Streeters, Big Oil and the Military-Defense Establishment that have ruled the Corporatocracy for more than 35 years.

GPS is aimed at the grass roots Teahadis, trying to round up the gullible herd back into NeoCon zombie corrals.  In the short-term, that may undermine presidential ambitions for the GOP while NeoCons fight to restore their control of state houses and the Congress.

Crossroads has unleashed one of its first $10M dollar ad buys in swing states that will saturate the airwaves with scary messaging about Obama, [6] but it will also run messaging for any anti-Teahadi candidates or Teahadis who can be wooed to the Corporate Dark Side and to shore up Congressional seats vulnerable to Democrats.

When you see Restore Our Future, the future that you’re restoring belongs to 90 multi-millionaires and billionaires who want Mitt Romney to do Wall Street’s bidding. You couldn’t fill the front-half of a 737 with the actual number of donors, but you could fill a bunch of private planes.

Nearly 90% of the funding for Mitt Romney’s Super PAC has been coming from the 90 über-wealthy people who gave to it. [7] The checks that launched the PAC last year were for a minimum of $10,000 and some went into the seven figures.

The NuSkin magnates Blake Roney and Steven Lund, both big Romney supporters in 2008, ironically have family trusts that share the same address with two shell organizations that gave $1M each to Romney. W Spann LLC was another shell company with a $1M gift.  In August it was discovered that the shell belonged to Ed Conard, the former Managing Director at Bain Capital, Romney’s old company. [8]  The only one who put his name on the $1M check was John Paulson, whom Politico.com describes as  ”a New York hedge fund billionaire who became famous for enriching himself by betting on the collapse of the housing industry.”[9]

I guess that “Prey on Voting Scum” or “Preserve Our Tax Breaks”  probably polled as a bit too elitist, but it’s a more apt name for the group.

When You See The Club for Growth Action, it’s really the Club for Growth,  Uline, the box company, Honeywell, which makes consumer products from thermostats to alarm systems to industrial controls.  Akamai Technologies, which runs the engines that has powered up major websites from Apple Computer’s to Verizon Wireless’.

You may remember our article on the junior league of the Dead Billionaire’s Club (DBC), the “Club for Growth.”  In itself, it’s a Who’s Who of Tier 2 Ayn Randians who don’t want their money going into taxes that pay for propping up the social safety net for the poor and middle class upon whom they prey.

This Libertarian political fungus has spawned its own Super PAC, which has spent more than $5M in ads [9] to promote pro-Tea Party candidates against Republicans that the group considers too conciliatory or moderate. (See: The Club for Growth is RINO Hunting Dick Lugar and… Marco Rubio?)

The Club’s SuperPAC is more transparent, but in being so some of the money that it collected raises a serious ethical and perhaps, legal question for Teahadi leader Jim Demint (R)(SC).

The legal gift: Demint for Senate, his PAC gave $500,000 to the Club for Growth.

His spokesperson, Matt Hoskins, told POLITICO that DeMint “strongly supports several of the candidates the Club for Growth is backing this year and this contribution will help the club push them on to victory.”

The Question Mark: “Team Demint” the official fundraising arm for Demint’s actual campaign for Senate,  gave another $700,000 to the Club’s Super PAC, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission and OpenSecrets.org. [11]

Why would a candidate for office take $1.2M of the money that the contributors donated for the purpose of his re-election, and put it into a slush fund for the Club use for other candidates?

Demint is in a “safe” seat.  The substantial money that he can raise can be used to fund the campaigns of more Teahadis to gridlock the government.

Why not just have the donors give to the PAC, which is more flexible?  The money collected for most Congressional campaigns comes from small and medium donors to the legal $5,000 per person max. Demint’s campaign redirected a huge chunk of small donor money given for his re-election.

Amazingly, a candidate can donate money from their election fundraising to other organizations legally, although t2P has launched an inquiry with the FEC and the Department of Justice to confirm what part of election law allows this with 527 Super PACs, as that part is unclear.

Usually incumbent candidates have given to party-run senatorial or house campaigns to re-elect their own. Demint’s gift to the Club’s Super PAC though, is a new wrinkle.

Demint, a born-again Teahadi, fiscally fat like a tick with DBC and Club money, bucked the GOP hierarchy in 2010 and backed Teahadis against moderate “RINO” Republicans in primaries.

His public endorsements of Teahadis rub much of the GOP hierarchy the wrong way. He vowed, therefore, not to make any endorsements in 2012.  Instead, he gave money to the Club to target moderate Republicans. Is that ethical?

If you’re Demint’s Senate colleague, Dick Lugar (R)(IN), you may not think so. The Club targeted his seat in the primaries, where he lost to Teahadi state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R)(IN).  While Demint’s gift may not have specifically been targeted against Lugar, it freed up hundreds of thousands of dollars of other donations to allow that attack to take place.

A few of his 2010 picks, like Florida’s freshman Senator, Marco Rubio, won, but many more lost, and cost Republican seats to Democrats.  In a recent article in The Hill, Democrats seem to think that Demint’s $1.2M gifts to the Club in 2012 will backfire.

Great. Now you have all of this buzzing around your noodle, what good is it?

Knowledge is power that can be shared.  Let your friends and neighbors, particularly those inclined to believing what they hear on the boob tube, know. Share this article, and the sourcing.

More important:  If you see ads from these groups, WRITE YOUR STATION MANAGER, and tell them you’ve turned off their programming where these ads appear.

There is no greater democracy that will put the fear of the Almighty (Nielsen) into media outlets than the off switch on your remote or your car radio.

My shiny two.

Seven days ago, a calm and collected President Barack Obama, sat down for an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts. An interview with the President, particularly during an election year, but this one became ground-breaking when Mr. Obama declared that it was personally important for him to affirm that same sex couples should be allowed to marry.[1]

In the immortal words of the one who jump-started this public affirmation, Mr. Vice President Joe Biden, this is a big f**king deal!

Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) said back in January that he would veto a same-sex marriage bill in his state.  Later, he said that it should be put to a vote:

“The fact of the matter is, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.” [2]

Following the shining lead of the intolerance and humiliation of having citizens vote on whether or not other other citizens can have civil rights, last Monday, North Carolina, a state not shy about its bigotry, voted 61% to 39% in favor of  Amendment 1, amending their state Constitution to clarify that marriage is between one man and one woman. [3]

LGTB people have been put in their place. Let freedom ring!

Although the President came to this revelation a little late for the North Carolina vote, it seems right in time with where things are going. It may have come to a shock for some, although if they have been following along the last four years I don’t see how. The Obama Administration, from repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) to the warming in the Justice Department to LGBT civil rights issues, has been leaning this way for a while now.

During his first three years, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. He championed the repeal of DADT, which he signed last December. He also signed the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act. [4]

President Obama has directed his justice to department to stop defending the Defense Against Marriage Act (DAMA) and has changed policy so that same sex couples would no longer risk being split up by deportation.

Many on the Right seem to think that he has done this solely for political gain. I beg to differ. To come out in support of something so irrationally hated by a subset of the American population in a difficult election year may be akin to political suicide.

He did it anyway.

Yes, Joe Biden’s momentary breeze of honesty in a television interview pushed the issue into the spotlight. The Obama campaign probably crunched a few numbers as well, and found out that the same people who don’t like him for his skin color are often the same people who don’t like LGBT differences either.  Not much of a net minus to speak your mind, save, perhaps, with the very religious elements of the black community.

The focus then turned to how the black community would take this type of “betrayal.”

As a member of that community, I, for one, am pleased that the President took the risk, and broadened his public viewpoint from the acceptance of civil unions to the broader right to marry.

This is a matter of civil rights.  LGBT citizens are excluded from participating in what every other American has the opportunity do. Marriage is both a Religious and legal term, used to define the same union. The legal side is what those seeking marriage equality are after; they want to be able to be carried on their partner’s insurance, they want power of attorney and rights to their loved ones in the hospital. They want to adopt children and raise them in loving homes, not to indoctrinate future gays of America.

Those who don’t live in a state of denial know that gay people live and work as part of the community every day. They drive trucks and play NFL football and go hunting along with the more stereotypical occupations which the LGBT community is tagged with.

The black community in general is somewhat religious, but we aren’t intolerant single issue voters either. To many of us, this is another step for equality, period. If I fail to fight injustice for one, I’ve failed to fight it for all…it’s that simple, despite Religion. There are those who disagree, many of whom said that they would not vote for the President now.  This is May, though.  When those black voters hopefully look at the Republican alternative, the anti-union, anti-minority, anti-women legislation promoted by the Tea Party Republicans swept into office around this nation;  the drum-beat by the Far Right punditry that social programs and food-stamps and Head Start are the cause of our deficit woes; the denial of George W. Bush, a couple of wars, and a Wall Street that ran amok, they may think better of staying home.

Jay-Z, (yes, that Jay-Z) recently came out in agreement of President Obama’s position, as did many of those who attended the President’s fundraiser hosted by George Clooney, where he raised $15 million to re-elect the President. Mr. Obama also had a recent fundraiser with Ricky Martin, where I’m sure he raised quite a bit of money.

It is interesting that the public will immediately discount what a celebrity says when it comes to politics, but will take the word of a fellow politician or commercials bought and paid for by corporations to serve their own interests.

That’s been a push by the Far Right, though, which is always a bit celebrity-light. The term “Liberal elite” was spun out of Right wing think-tanks and first popularized by Newt Gingrich to combat the power and influence that celebrities have with their fan base.

When it comes to the government, celebrities are just voters like me and you, with a few million extra to give to causes, and the ability to sway a few voters here and there.

GE doesn’t pay taxes at all, but George Clooney does. Exxon influences the vote, but Jay-Z actually votes. They are the one percent that people will still respect. Many of them didn’t come from money, so they know what it is like to live with a lot less, unlike some people, Mr. Romney.

Celebrities, particularly in regard to the LGBT partnership issue, are very acutely aware of their influence. Ellen DeGeneres has done more to normalize and de-homophobe America by being a positive face of daytime television. When the “Million Moms,” a facebook group of about 40,000 members, started a campaign to drive Ellen out of her contract as a new spokesperson for JC Penney, the company made a smart move and stood their ground:

Those who would teach their children to treat the LGBT community with disdain or with hatred are furthering bigotry and moving this nation backward.

The recent opinion of Bristol Palin in an Op-ed where she blasted the President for respecting what his daughters thought and refused to teach them bigotry. She said this with, I’m guessing, a straight face as she is a single never wed mother, and while I’m not criticizing her for that because some of the best people I know are single parents, her chutzpah on the topic is astounding. It’s almost as if she’s saying “don’t let bigotry die! Continue to remind your kids to hate!” [5]

President Obama’s campaign slogan is simply “Forward.” It is where he is headed, hoping that we as a nation will follow.  The elites that have been responsible for so much ill in this country, from slavery to the exploitation of working Americans, those who discriminate against any difference, and think that any community in America must be silent and subservient to exist, should not enjoy another day of power over our lives.

The 1% of the 1% and their agents like Grover Norquist have been selling “demon government,” but it is big business, not big government, that is the real Big Brother. The Norquist hucksters sell Big Government’s intrusion into your daily lives.  They want you spouting that the Big G government is “evil.” Government should be ripped to the bare bones. Boo. Hiss.

Our American government is the only thing that stands between their fascist 19th century capitalism and you.  The government is top cop, moral arbiter, and the only champion of the rights of the common man in a market-driven society.  In short, David, government is your Goliath that keeps the Koch Brothers, the DeVos, and the rest of the richer-than-rich from walking all over you even more than they do now.

Corporations may be “people” according to Citizens United, but they have no conscience.

By charter, a corporation’s only concern is the almighty bottom line. Profit and loss. Resources are to be consumed, turned into goods or services, and sold to consumers like you.

In their world, the hogs on the hog farm in the metal pens are not a whole lot different than the hogs in the households that sit glued to their Fox News snacking on the pork rinds.

The transformation of things from one state to another, their transportation, sale, delivery, consumption, and disposal, and the means to maximize those activities for profit are all that any business cares about.

Bottom line.

Some corps feign a little charity here and there, but it is a drop in the proverbial bucket to the bucket-loads of cash they strip out of your pocket.

When the Far Right drums its evils into our head we forget the most important thing: The government is us, and we are the government.

By way of your vote, however limited, you get a voice in the big picture of how a nation operates.  Big business needs to manipulate you into doing their will, because they still make the pretense that this is a government of, by and for the people.  To twist the government to their will, they need you to blindly vote their interest, and screw over your own.

Government sets limits on how businesses can exploit raw materials not arbitrarily, and, more importantly, how business can treat you as a consumer.

Who regulates the production of raw materials, and keeps industry from destroying the air, land or waterways?  The government. We all share the air, a river, and even the land that we live on.  Who gets more of it?  What prevents a company with the means to dam up a stream up-river from holding back the supply and making all the people down-river from paying a premium? Who sets standards for strip miners so the streams and rivers aren’t choked up with toxic sludge? Keeps companies from shredding old growth forests without proper forestry? Forces companies that pollute to pay up to fix their mess? Government.

Who provides protection from other governments and political movements that would harm American citizens?  National defense is the one government function that usually stays out of the Far Right’s hit-list, largely because the companies who make billions and billions off of the government can get the millions of people who rely on either the direct jobs that the military offers or on the host of supporting jobs, from building bombs to the guy who sells lunch to the family of the guy that builds bombs. It’s the one line of business that we’re not anxious to export to other countries, making it not only a cash cow, but a huge employment security center.  Want peace in our time?  Don’t count on it. It’s not good for the military-defense business.

Defense spending is excessive, but it hasn’t been all bad either. Innovations in defense have lead to spin-offs in technology that have fueled advances in metals, computers, aviation, and thousands of other applications that trickle down to civilian uses.

Government protects the quality of food and water supplies.  Don’t notice a ton of cases of water contamination?  From the local level, where city and county inspectors make sure that there aren’t rats and roaches running rampant in your ravioli and burger joint food, to the Food and Drug Administration which, imperfect as it may be, still provides the public safety from unproven drugs, safer, cleaner foods entering the food supply, and accountability for companies that try to sneak in potentially harmful additives to what you eat and drink.  A company selling acetaminophen can’t bring up cheap pills loaded with vermiculite and call them 100% Generic. Compare to Tylenol®.

Should the “nanny state” get involved with how much fat manufacturers put in ground beef, or how many calories are in a Twinkie?  Adding information to consumer packaging has allowed Americans to make smarter choices about what they consume, and, along with exercise and other good lifestyle choices, extend their lifespans.  That’s a big net plus for good government.  Had it been up to private companies, who have no moral imperative, you’d still have cigarette machines near schools, and they would put whatever trans fat was cheapest into your snack cakes.

Demon government provides infrastructure, from roads to retirement.  Roads, bridges, schools can be built and run for-profit, but that much additional burden on working Americans would take away the ability to pay for all kinds of discretionary spending.  Some larger social welfare issues, like safe bridges and the ability for the wealthiest nation’s senior citizens to lead healthy lives transcend profit motive.  The federal government can pool the resources of the greater nation.  A small town may never have the money to build a badly-needed bridge across a river, but with federal assistance, they can create pathways that move people and goods efficiently over long distances from coast-to-coast.

Private enterprise has been a frequent raider of employee retirement funds. Only a federal government which operates out of a moral imperative to protect its citizens, can “bank” money for things like Social Security and Medicare for the vast majority of Americans, and not have it subject to the whims of the market economy, or the greed of a few private entrepreneurs who want to get rich quick on the backs of workers’ lifetime savings.
The government provides the collective resources to do important “big things” without a direct profit motive, like set up early warning systems for tornados, or put a man on the moon. Neil Armstrong’s stroll on the lunar surface lead to legions of technological advances that are the bedrock of modern global communication systems.

Building bigger bombs is not a popular subject for most liberals, but the technology to theorize nuclear weaponry in “peacetime” that came from our nuclear reduction treaties with Russia has unleashed monster computing power that was initially employed to model nuclear weapon design, but now is used for everything from the production of your favorite action film to more environmentally sound packaging designs.

The government protects your life. Live in the forest? Who protects you when the trees burn?  Live in Tornado Alley?  Who comes to dig you out of the cellar when your house collapses over the door in a tornado? Do you really want to live in a place like South Fulton, Tennessee where they put emergency services out as a fee-extra? Can’t get private insurance for your single wide, so you get to watch your home burn to the ground, as they won’t “cover” a home without insurance.[1]

Government provides us a lot of security. Police. Fire. Ambulance. Air traffic control.  Customs. The Border Patrol. National Guard. Coast Guard.  TSA. FBI. CIA. NSA.

Griping about the government has become sport.

There are also times that the government watches out for people when they don’t always agree.  Americans have railed about seat belts, air bags, and helmets for motorcycles.  Decreased death rates and burdens on the whole system, though, are that “greater good” that we, as part of a community, give up a little of our individual liberty.  The Far Right always quotes the Framers about tyranny, blah, blah, blah. It says “We, the People,” not “We, the non-cohesive individuals out for themselves.”

The National Rifle Association (NRA) loves scaring its members with fears of their hunting rifles being taken away. They do it so assault weapons manufacturers can put highly lethal instruments of war into the hands of general consumers.  Government generally only objects because the handguns and assault rifles not used for hunting are generally aimed at law enforcement officials.

Big business, especially those of the Dead Billionaires Club (DBC) of pre-20th century capitalist families,  bristle at regulation.  The Kochs like to practice contango trading. Exxon Mobil would love to keep their windfall profits without paying a dime of tax.

“Little guy” Republican businessmen get their hackles up about “big brother” government. Who is the government to tell me that my sign is too big in front of my sub shop?  I can’t have a pool of pig shit the size of a small lake near the water supply of the nearby town?  The government makes us check three times to see that the canning line is clean, when once would do.  They won’t let us drill in that pristine wetland, even though we can get the oil out without too much disruption to the ecosystem.

Who is they? Never forget that the “they” is you and me. We hire people who become the big G government “they,” charged with keeping you and me safe. We elect leaders from our ranks who are charged with setting community standards for how our cities and towns will look that are what the people living there want, not necessarily what the guy trying to make a buck off of them want.

Companies and businessmen who don’t like the laws that restrict their activity lobby legislators and can take their case to court if they feel that they are being infringed upon without cause.  Oh, and our system of redress, the courts, civil and criminal, are part of demon government too.

More often, though, they try to co-opt the system, as they have been doing for decades, buying politicians and using organizations like ALEC to rewrite laws so companies like JP Morgan Chase can continue risky ventures and doing business without much scrutiny as to whether it serves the general good along with lining the pockets of a few.

Is there excess in government? Surely. Find any organization of humans, public or private, and you’ll find someone who is going to put together a boondoggle or two, from the Bridge to Nowhere to the $2B that JP Morgan Chase just lost on risky derivatives investing.

Republicans, pushed so hard to the Right by the funders of the party,  largely Grover Norquist’s Libertarian Teahadis, backed by DBC money, are part of the government that they have sworn to destroy from the inside.

What is the Libertarian-Republican idea of good government?  A government that minimally taxes the wealthy, protects corporations’ tax breaks, intrudes in the personal lives of its citizens to appease its religious base, and finds the majority of its economic savings in the wholesale slashing of agencies of the government which provide you, the citizen, with protection from corporate excess and greed. That’s also great news for them, as they would love to see most regulation ended.

Big business has spent decades demonizing the government. They hit you where you live. They crawl into your brain from every TV, newspaper, and radio.  They appeal to your greed, your lust, and most powerfully, your fears. They fill the airwaves with programming that sells cereal and gets you to vote against your own self interest.

American government has a lot less jolting messaging, because, by its charter, it serves the public interest.

The best idea for government is what President Obama has been espousing: Filling in those support roles that allow business to operate within broad limits that let the economy rise, create jobs and provide greater prosperity for all with proper protection for the common good.  Today the Far Right poses that as an “extreme” idea, when it was centrist just a few years ago during the W. era.  Today, by current Republican dogma, George W. Bush would be a fire-breathing liberal.

American government has a positive role in our lives, warts and all, on the whole. It’s time that Americans who say that we live in the greatest nation in the world start owning up to the bedrock of how we keep it that way.

My shiny two.

An elephant may never forget, but the elephants of the GOP are sure hoping that you will, well, overlook a few inconvenient truths in their march to bring back 19th century capitalism without a social safety net. Sadly, so does the media caught between the story and an epic pay day.

Their vested interest and power, without regard to consequence or the welfare of the nation, is only countered by you.

“One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

So says Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein, surprisingly without partisan rhetoric, in their new book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the Politics of Extremism.” Orenstein is actually a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, not known for its liberal leanings.

Political parties in this country have not been so polarized since the Civil War. Race again has a great deal to do with why the modern GOP’s intransigence is working, in spite of repeated polling that shows the majority of Americans, even registered Republicans, out of step with the Teahadis in Congress and state legislatures.

To win over the portion of the independent vote not already anti-Obama because they believe he’s a Kenyan Socialist (e.g. scary Black-Man-in-Chief), the GOP, aided by the mainstream media, are going to press for Americans to “forget.”

Hoping You Forget: Government can do important things that we need as a community.

Business doesn’t hum without best-of-class roads and bridges and schools. Unprofitable things in and of themselves that are investments in our infrastructure which for-profit entities should never operate. Bridges are not profitable. Feeding kids a breakfast so they get a minimal enough level of nutrition to learn is not profitable. Charity, beyond its usual strings, has never been able to meet the needs of Americans in need, particularly in times of crisis, like the Great Depression, or the Great Recession.

The corporatocracy that has dominated this country through most of its history lost its balance momentarily in 2008 when Wall Street came tumbling down and most corporate boardrooms went into survival mode.

The Internet came of age at the same time, spawning things like Twitter, populist media over which they had no control.

In walked Barack Obama preaching the notion, to an America that had watched the Middle Class shrink in one of the greatest times of plenty in American history, that government could do good things, big things, in balance and harmony with private enterprise.

Americans were so angry with that corporatocracy for robbing us blind while the billions that were touted to “trickle down” never actually did, that they rose above 331 years of generational fear and elected a black man to the White House. A man who preached moderation and non-partisanship.

President Obama’s push for non-partisanship was a bust, because, as Mann and Orenstein point out, the GOP has taken a winner-takes-all, no compromise approach to governance as long as he is in office.

Cede the black guy NO GROUND, even when many of the proposals that he floated were ones that Republicans themselves have made in recent years.

Remember: Government, like Wall Street, can swing towards excess, but, with adequate checks and balances, both are necessary and have their role.

Hoping You Forget: The Debt comes largely from two wars, and tax cuts for the rich and big business.

The majority of our mounting deficits come from tax breaks to the rich.

Obama has slowed the political and financial hemorrhaging of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they only account for 1.33 Trillion of our debt.

The proposals to balance the Federal budget on the backs of the poor and working people are just dead wrong, according to Think Progress, which released this infographic:

The GOP wants to take a hatchet to $381.5B of programs, without touching the $830B of tax cuts that are the single biggest form of public assistance in this country. Add in taxes on Big Oil that the GOP also voted down, and their windfall profits would be bringing in about $2.4B a year in revenues to offset the deficits.

Earlier this week, Republicans derailed a student loan bill to keep rates down on undergraduate education set to expire in a couple of months. [1] The vote was the 21st successful filibuster of a Democratic bill by the GOP in the Congressional session since January 2011. The bill was killed because the Democrats proposed funding the student loans in part with money from restoring taxes on the rich and Big Oil.  Many of the swing voters were, as you might guess, from oil states.

It’s not even arguable that the rich got richer over the last twenty years. The middle class has shrunk.  If we keep to Republican dogma, the rich will get richer and the rest of us?

Remember: The Republicans are not only out of step with the majority of Americans on tax fairness, but, with a combination of some government reform with additional revenue, we could decrease the deficit over $1T a year, and keep essential services for 28.75M people, not swimming pools for 200,000 people.

Hoping You Forget: The Recovery Worked

Look around: No soup kitchens. No bread lines. Unemployment isn’t good, but it’s not 21 million more people who would have been out of work had Mitt Romney’s plan to let the Big Three die rolled out.

From the construction of  bridges in Maine to road expansions in Florida we are spending money on public works projects, many of which are just rolling out now as they work their way through the years-long vetting and bidding processes that are supposed to eliminate waste.

The stock market is back to its robust highs, although there is nervousness about what Europe may bring in the coming months.  The jobs number slowly improves. Fewer people are falling into trouble with their mortgages, and home prices are rising in enough areas that they’re no longer pushing the value of a home under what is owed.

Remember: Things take a bit longer to fix than they do to break.

Hoping You Forget: President Obama is Not a Big G Government Liberal

If anything, his repeated attempts to seek consensus with the Hard Right, and his centrist policy, made it more difficult to govern.

What he has repeatedly proposed, though, his vision of limited government doing the support and infrastructure things that make American business soar, has been mainstream thinking from Ike to Obama.

Last summer, as we waded through the debt “crisis,” Mr. Obama put out on the table big, painful cuts near and dear to Democrats. Things that the Republicans had wanted for years, if not decades. They still walked away.

Remember: The GOP’s partisan gaming that has defied common sense and good governance.

Hoping You Forget: Republican Heel Dragging Damaged the Economy and Kept the Jobless Jobless.

Another arena where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner did everything that they could to prevent any kind of “win” for the President was jobs.

Even when that meant policy that hurt working Americans who vote for the Republicans, among others.

The GOP cried “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” but legislated against unions, and for their holy roller constituencies war on social issues, trying to curb LGBT rights and women’s rights.

Their stabs at fiscal reform have been the many so-called “Ryan” plans. They are Congressman Paul Ryan’s thinly veiled attempts to add even more tax breaks to the 1%’s bottom line, while sacking social safety net programs.

GOP mouthpieces claimed that the Ryan plans would create jobs, but even the Congressional Budget Office found that to be a head shaker.

Hoping You Forget: Using Economic Crises to Slash Payrolls While Telling Teahadis Tales.

GOP backers hoarded the capital put into the recovery. It never “trickled down” to middle class America.

The aid given to banks, aimed at restructuring loans and reducing the pain of the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression, was kept by the banks to pad out their bottom line, and allow their high-stakes, emperor-has-no-clothes “leveraging” games to continue.

CEOs of some of America’s biggest companies used the pretense of the economic crisis in many cases to lay people off.Among all the Fortune 1,000 companies, nearly four-hundred CEOs got bonuses in 2008, the bottom of the Great Recession. They took home $402 million in annual bonus pay, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm including bonuses for many for laying off workers who would have been paid with that money. [3]

Corporate America became not only tone-deaf, but heartless.

The key players who move the economy have hoarded money to this day, hoping that the prolongation of the misery index will force the political pendulum even harder Right, as the public has been indoctrinated to believe that Republicans solve all fiscal issues, in spite of the reality bitch-slap of the prosperity of the Clinton era and the freewheeling spending of the George W. Bush Administration.

Remember: There are a handful of people and companies with so much money that their actions shape the market. Identify them. Don’t fund their ambitions with your purchases.

Hoping You Forget: What War on Women? The latest spin out of both the Romney camp and the GOP hierarchy on Capital Hill is that the “war on women” is a Liberal myth.

Has the GOP been horribly misunderstood? Hardly. They want you to have an ultrasound fairy godmother, who waives her magic wand around your uterus and makes you watch. Their think tanks spin out policy positions for the Teahadis that weaken or eliminate equal pay legislation. No need for the red tape. Wall Street types say that we’re in a different time, not through any help from them, mind you. The government, they figure, doesn’t need to keep an eye on them. They can handle things like equal pay and equal rights on their own.

Doesn’t their track record on this just scream integrity?

Remember: Their constituencies want women in the home, not in the workplace, and subservient to men.

Hoping You Forget: The power of the media and the vested interest in maintaining profitable strife favors Republican intransigence: More than once you’ve heard someone in the media tell you that laws like Stand Your Ground are good business an industry like the gun industry. What they kind of neglect to mention is that they’re also good business for the media.

Conflict is the grist of selling soap these days, not responsible journalism that restores balance to to political system. Allowing extremism to fester unchecked, failing to be the real Fourth Estate and fully expose bad ideas and extreme ideology, is really good business for a reporter or pundit’s bosses, their media outlet, and the corporations that own most of that media.

Oh, and this: Most of our media is owned by the very people whom the media should be watching.

It’s also good business for the New Media as well. Every time you click on a campaign page and a “cookie” is registered that you visited, say Barack Obama’s page, that’s gold for everyone from the Huffington Post to Facebook to the New York Times who find that cookie on your computer and use it to deliver “targeted” advertising to you.

Campaign 2012 shapes up to be a $6B+ pay day for media of all kinds. From the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity anti-Obama ads to the pro-Obama, anti-Romney ads, the media wins as long as the race stays close. That shatters objective journalism, and most investigative journalism. It even skews the all-powerful polling number. All of it generates the money by manipulating the power.

Remember: You have control of your eyeballs. Stations that air advertisements that you don’t like deserve the channel changer. Write your station manager and tell them that you won’t watch their news or programming if they air the ads of the Kochs and others.

Hoping You Forget: You’ve already been told how you should feel about the political process. Haven’t you been paying attention?

The narrative mantras that get repeated in commercials and then carried like bubonic plague through the rats in the media maze, is that you are supposed to be angry at both parties. You’re supposed to be angry that the whole system doesn’t work. You’re supposed to throw up your hands in frustration and then vote against your self-interest, as you did in 2010 when that well-placed lie lead to the Teahadi takeover of Congress and a number of state houses in the mid-terms.

Yet their solutions, such as the Vote the Bums In movement of 2010, have been abject failures.

The political process is broken. Make no mistake about it. The solution is a hard one: Independent fiscal conservatives need to return to the Republican Party and take control away from Grover Norquist and the Teahadis, and the rest of us can’t reward the representatives of the richest Americans and American corporations with our votes.

Divided government only works when it’s reasonable divided government. Divided does not mean polarized. We can have our positions, and agree to disagree, but compromise has been the bedrock of American government for generations. It’s time we started doing more of it.

My shiny two.

Wide eyed and silent, a frightened looking George Zimmerman, arrested and charged for the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, was escorted into a Seminole County Courtroom for his first appearance. Finally, a little bit of proof that the system works for everyone, only a mere 45 days, dozens of protest rallies nationwide, and more than two million petition signatures later.

The system does work for nearly everyone; It just needs a little encouragement for some.

Now Zimmerman is out on bail, whisked away last night to an undisclosed location after clearing $150,000 bond. He will wear an ankle monitor, have a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and be prohibited from carrying firearms.   Is that enough, both for the circumstance and the outrage swirling around the alleged killer?

Special prosecutor Angela Corey, installed after the uproar that the local prosecutor would not press charges against Zimmerman,  held a press conference on the findings of her independent investigation last week.

She made a huge show of thanking everyone from law enforcement, of which prosecutors are a part, to Florida Governor Rick Scott for bringing her into the case.

Corey has a daunting high wire act before her.  She tiptoed into the political minefield that the Martin case has become trying not to set anything off in what was the first of sure to be many press conferences.

There was no explanation why her findings were at odds with the local prosecutor, who was going to drop the case. No explanation of why she felt that second degree murder was the best she could get.  The charge is, in part, due to the murky circumstances: Zimmerman was not ordered to stand down by the police, but asked to stay put by a 911 operator. The struggle, at least with the evidence thus far presented, had no clear eyewitness unanimity.  It is possible, with the manner in which the Stand Your Ground Law in Florida is written, that Zimmerman may actually be able to walk legally.

The nationwide clamor and calls for justice, as well as the threat of the Justice Department launching their own investigation set off the state-level investigation that took place over the last two months, put Florida governor Rick Scott on the hot seat.  He does not want to alienate either gun owners or the politically-generous National Rifle Association (NRA), which backed the bill’s passage.  To do nothing, though, invites in the Feds, and a case that could unseat Stand Your Ground in the more than a dozen states where it is law.

She held the press at arms length, stubbornly refusing to divulge any of the facts and details that led her to seek a second degree murder charge against Zimmerman, all the while masterfully assuring the public that she works for the victim.

Her office later released the probable cause affidavit which outlines the states case against Zimmerman. In this affidavit, the public learned some of what was initially turned up in the police investigation into this shooting.

Zimmerman was profiling Martin. He followed him after being told to stop by the 911 operator that was on the phone with him that day. Zimmerman is quoted as saying “these assholes always get away” and referring to the ominous “they” he called them “fucking punks”. As I told you in “Trayvon Martin: Justice Should Be Blind, not Racially Tone Deaf” at 2:26 in the 911 recording,  Zimmerman can clearly be heard getting out of the car. The wind picks up. He mutters under his breath, but audibly: “That fuckin’ coon.”

The affidavit goes on to say that Zimmerman then confronted Trayvon and it follows the narrative of Trayvon’s friend, who was apparently on the phone with him at that time.

This witness, who has not yet been identified to the public, told the police that Trayvon was describing what was happening and that he was scared because he was being followed through his complex by an unknown male and didn’t know why.

Trayvon attempted to run home, but was followed by Zimmerman who by this time had exited his vehicle despite the 911 operator’s instruction to stay put. He followed Trayvon because he didn’t want the person whom he had falsely assumed was going to commit a crime to get away before the police arrived.

Zimmerman confronted a frightened Trayvon  before  he was able to reach his home a short distance away.  A struggle ensued. Witnesses within earshot heard arguing, a scuffle, cries for help, a gun shot, then deafening silence.

Trayvon’s mother identified the blood curdling scream for help on the tape as that of her son.

When the police arrived at the scene, Zimmerman admitted to shooting Trayvon.  He invoked protection under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Zimmerman was taken into custody, questioned, and released the same night.

Forty-five days later, he stood to answer the charges for shooting the young, unarmed teenager who had done nothing wrong other than being a black teenager in a neighborhood that apparently doesn’t care for that kind of thing.

The facts that the affiants swore to in this probable cause affidavit are the same narrative that has been floating around in the media, which has been trying both the shooter, and, oddly enough, the victim in the court of public opinion.  Those on Zimmerman’s side, with some help from the propagandists at Fox News and the Right Wing radiosphere, decided that they would defame Martin and not even question the guilt of the alleged killer.

Right wing media claimed that Trayvon was a no-good gangster with tattoos who smoked weed and maybe sold a little, despite the fact that he was found that day doing nothing of the sort, nor does he have a criminal record with the area police, although he was cited by school police for tagging a locker with the graffiti “W.T.F”.

They played up the fact that Martin had been suspended from school in Miami because an empty plastic bag with traces of marijuana and a pipe were found in his school bag, triggering the suspension that brought him into the neighborhood where George Zimmerman lived.  White kids with traces of drugs are “troubled.” Black kids are bad.  They claimed that he had been caught with a screwdriver and some women’s jewelry when he was detained by school police for a graffiti charge at school.  Yet the school police’s records show no arrest for burglary, or Martin’s referral to the local police department for anything like that.

No drugs were found on his body. There were no weapons. The only thing that Trayvon Martin was armed with was a can of iced tea, a bag of Skittles and being black in a neighborhood which an overzealous Neighborhood Watch vigilante didn’t believe that he belonged.

In this country you are innocent until proven guilty.  At this moment, George Zimmerman is innocent. Most of the outrage was because neither Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee nor State Attorney Norman Wolfinger would hold him to account for his actions in a court of law.

The case has taken the nation to a place of no return on race and exactly who in the public should expect public safety to apply to themselves. There will have to be a more open dialogue about race and racial profiling.

The black community, along with Trayvon Martin, is getting their day in court.  We wanted to know that the system works both ways, that the law is applied equally to everyone. The law’s historic use to generate inequality between the races is a constant meme that runs through the history of Black America.

The justice system should work for us too.

From the Dredd Scott case of 1858 wherein a slave, Dredd Scott, unsuccessfully sued for his freedom after to being taken to a free state, to Brown v. Board of Education, wherein the walls of segregation began to slowly fall, the black community has sought relief from the courts. We have an odd trust in our legal system. We have faith that right will be right, even when we’re so often and unfairly wronged.

A second degree murder charge for Zimmerman is a step in the right direction.  Should this be defined as a “hate crime?” Even with the use of the term “That fuckin’ coon,” Corey did not apparently think so.

Prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, even if Zimmerman is ultimately found not guilty by a jury of his peers,  the first instinct of the local prosecutor was to sweep this travesty under the rug.  With the U.S. Attorney General’s Office watching in the wings, holding its power to investigate and prosecute racial hate crimes in any state, if the state fails, the federal government still may yet find justice for the family of Trayvon Martin.

Let the truth of the matter finally come to light and be judged by the appropriate legal system, not by the mob calling for justice, and let that justice be color blind.

Barack Obama is behind in the fundraising race. No sexy primaries, a tepid economy, and this time the big dollar donors aren’t in the middle of the worst financial crises of their lives. Keep the corporate takeover of government from completing their stacking of the deck in favor of the wealthy or the Libertarian Teahadis from ripping apart the government from inside the Congress like a bunch of bone-wielding chimps (With apologies to Chimps, who have more common sense and better manners than most Teahadis.). Share this and make sure that you give a little something to protect our Democracy at BarackObama.com  Remember: ONLY YOU…

Power. That’s the name of the game in Republican politics. Not principle. Not vision.  Who are the core players in that power game?  t2P has combed several lists of ‘key’ Republican players from the two opposing forces in the Radical Right, the Libertarians and the Neo Cons.  Our top ten list represents the people who, through political clout, money, or both, are seminal driving forces that corrupt Republican politics and push it to the extremist ends that it promotes today.

In a seemingly endless sea of Right-wing malefactors who have created part of the 35 year industry of political extremism that has driven millions of voters out of the GOP and made it a rich, but minority party, it would seem like a daunting task to pick a ten most wanted.

Our top ten, though, merit special attention because of the breadth of their influence, which is usually masked behind the web of astroturf grass roots movements, think tanks, and other brush that covers elephant tracks and dirty tricks.  It is good to know who is pulling the strings of power, and, in our “Justice” section that follows each, comes our suggestion as to how you can fight back against that power.

There was a big shift in this year’s list, as some of the usual crowd, like Right-radio-reactionary Rush Limbaugh, took a major tumble, opening space in the Ten Most Wanted.

They are:

No 10: Roger Ailes – Fox News’ CEO has dropped to No. 10 with a bullet on our list.  Ailes may be America’s leading propagandist, but his network, which has dominated the narrative lines of most political stories for decades, has been losing its iron-clad grip.

Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch is an opportunist. Ailes is pure old-school Neo-Con. A true-believer in the Wall Street to Military Industrial Complex side of the party.

Ailes has hired hundreds of minions to carry out the war against shadow “media elites” and never-identified “Leftists” that was well leveraged against the screaming pro-Bush patriotism of the post 9/11 era.  Ailes was able to build his “news” network into a powerful propagandist tool that has given lift to the Tea Party, marginalized the Occupy Wall Street movement, and put the Far Right’s spin on political news out there as the story to debate for the other networks.

Of late, though, the Super PAC has caused serious spin problems for the top that is Fox News.  Rick Santorum’s backing by Foster Friess has kept the coronation of Mitt Romney as the anti-Obama warrior off the calendar for weeks longer than planned.

Fox has also been unable to spin the Walker recall in Wisconsin, or do much damage control with conservative women after extreme anti-abortion legislation in Virginia, Alabama, Arizona and elsewhere began alienating independents and even harder Right women voters.

They’ve begun falling behind political narrative lines, instead of firing the gun that stampedes them in the Right direction.

Justice: Turn-off Fox News and boycott other Murdoch publications.  Let your local Fox TV affiliate know you’re turning them off until they find another network to provide their national news feeds.

No. 9: Frank Luntz – Luntz is the propaganda lyricist to Grover Norquist’s political orchestrations, a Sullivan to the master manipulator’s Gilbert.  Luntz, with degrees from University of Pennsylvania and Oxford, is the CEO of Luntz Research Companies, which offers “Strategic Consulting and Message Development,” messaging, focus groups, surveys and other research for political and corporate campaigns.

Effectively he is a professional mendast, who finds alternative phrasings that allow his Far Right clients to twist political sentiment through their own misunderstanding and emotional responses to his clever wordings.

• It’s not “global warming.” It’s “climate change” which sounds oh-so un-man-made. He advised the Bush administration to play up the “lack of scientific certainty” in the global warming debate, even though scientists were quite certain.
• To promote school vouchers that privatize the public school systems, he told his clients to call them ”opportunity scholarships” rather than vouchers, which poll as unpopular with most average independent voters.
• He told oil company clients that offshore oil drilling is better expressed as “deep-sea energy exploration.”
• Luntz was awarded the 2010 PolitiFact “Lie of the Year” award for his promotion of the phrase ‘government takeover’ to refer to healthcare reform, starting in the spring of 2009.
• He coined the term “death tax” to light a fire under average Americans about the reinstatement of an estate tax that really only affects the wealthiest 1%.
• Fighting reform of the abuses of Wall Street, Luntz urged opponents of financial legislative reform to say the legislation is filled with bank bailouts, lobbyist loopholes, and additional layers of complicated government bureaucracy.

“80 percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think,” Luntz said in an interview on the PBS show Frontline.

It’s much easier to manipulate people emotionally.  Luntz is the grand master of it, and a prime player in twisting positives into Right Wing negatives that scare voters into submission.  Language is power in politics, and Luntz, a master of language, is the GOP’s fountainhead of manipulation mots.

Justice:  Protest any appearance by Luntz as a guest expert on television shows.  Share his lies when they’re caught by passing along stories from Maddow, this publication and others who expose his misdirections. Don’t let fiction stand as fact.  Write companies like NBC, GE, Fedex, Frito Lay, Coca-Cola, GM, McDonalds, Kroger, MGM Mirage, Pepsi and the BBC and ask them to use other polling/consulting services.

No. 8: Sheldon Adelson, one of the new Super PAC men, moves up into the A list of the Right Wing’s most wanted by being the primary money man behind the Newt Gingrich campaign, but as the sixth richest man in the world, his deep pockets afford the NeoCon wing of the Republican Party lots of ad buys, robo calling, and more.

Free to put millions from his international casino business into the 2012 GOP primary contest, he kept pal Gingrich’s White House ambitions on artificial life support and almost sparked a real run for the Oval Office until Nasty Newt’s odious personality and high-negatives with independent voters sparked enough cat-calling from the GOP hierarchy, Fox News and the other Right-wing punditocracy to take him out at the knees.

Adelson is still a huge giver to the GOP, and their senatorial campaign, with an eye towards anyone on the hard Right that remains pro-Israel.

He owns the newspaper equivalent of Fox News in Israel,  Yisrael Hayom. It’s  a daily paper that is closely tied to the ultra-nationalist wing of the Likud party. He also is a big funder of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Justice: With casinos in Las Vegas, Macau and Singapore and his advanced age, there is not much that can be done to touch Adelson, but you can send the message loud and clear by booking properties other than the Venetian hotels or anything with a Sands logo.  Don’t stay there. Don’t gamble there. Don’t drink there. Don’t eat there. 

No. 7: Foster Friess – A long-time bush supporter, Friess, who made his millions in the successful Brandywine Fund, is an odd combo: A Christian conservative and a Libertarian. On social issues, he leans towards the government getting into your business, and on business issues he leans toward the government getting out of his business.

He emerged politically when he set up the Super PAC Red White & Blue Fund to back Rick Santorum. Friess donated $689,000 to Republican organizations and the Bush presidential campaigns over the last decade. He has contributed millions to far-Right political causes and candidates.

He made national news when he made an insensitive remark about birth control to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC:

Friess is a member of the secretive conservative Council for National Policy that coordinates objectives amongst the network of astroturf grass roots groups, think tanks, Super PACs and their wealthy funders.

He was acknowledged at the privately held Koch brothers seminar in June 2011 in Vail, Colorado for donating at least $1 million to Koch-related causes.

Friess gives to Private Sector Solutions, a network of leaders developing private sector solutions to augment, preempt or replace government services.

He has donated to LibForAll and other groups building a global counter-extremism network

He opposes national health reform through donations to the astroturf activist group Free Market Cure and other groups.

Friess backstops the DeVos family’s bid to dismantle public education through Alliance for School Choice, All Children Matter and others

He will also backstop the FairTax project, legislation to replace the current federal system of taxation with a tax on retail sales, which taxes the working man hard and lets Friess keep even more of his “hard earned” money.

He is a rich ideologue who holds the most extreme social, religious and economic views, and has the millions to try and influence others by way of the web of faux special interest groups that he funds.

Justice: Boycott the Brandywine fund personally and via any job related financing that uses a mutual fund. There’s plenty of them out there. Target the companies that do business with Friess and Brandywine for boycott of your dollars. Stop funding his campaign of Right-wing extremism.

No. 6: The Coors Family – The Coors family, heirs of Adolph Coors, are fronted by great grandson Pete, and grandsons Joseph and William Coors.

They are Dead Billionaires Club (DBC) charter members, with long ties to the radical Right.

The Coors funded the Castle Rock Foundation, with $39M in 1993. By 1997 that number was $67M.

They are anchor funders of far Right astroturf grass roots, think tanks, and other organizations with a decided Libertarian bent, including the democracy-killing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),  the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the secretive Council for National Policy, the Free Congress Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the uber-conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation,  and The Strategy To Privatize The Public Domain to name a few of the more than 40 organizations that use their millions to espouse the Far Right agenda.

Justice: Boycott Coors, Molson, Blue Moon, Keystone, Allbright, Arc, Caffreys Bitter, Grolsch and the Worthington beers.

No. 5: The DeVOS Family – Not as well known as their pyramidic family business, Amway, the company’s co-founder Richard DeVOS Sr., his children and grandchildren are all big funders of the Far Right.

The senior DeVos also served as Republican National Committee finance chair.

The DeVOS contributes to anti-government anchors like the American Enterprise Institute, judicial manipulation via the Right-wing Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, manipulation of the masses through the Heritage Foundation, the Michigan-centric far Right Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and some highly questionable interpretations of the Constitution via the National Constitution Center.

Extremely religious, Betsy DeVos is influential in school voucher funding that allows for school “choice” that brings religion in through the back door.  They also work with smaller fry like James Dobson to promote organizations like the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family.

Members of the family fund D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, FL. that produced an Ann Coulter documentary linking Darwinism with Hitler and the Holocaust which the Anti Defamation League of B’nai B’rith called “an outrageous and shoddy attempt by D. James Kennedy to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust.”

Justice: Don’t buy or sell Amway products. Boycott the NBA Orlando Magic, which DeVOS owns, both at home and when they play away. 

No. 4: Richard Mellon-Scaife – A scion of the early capitalist Robber Barons, Richard Mellon-Scaife is a $1.2B trust-funder with a publishing business that makes him the Charles Foster Kane of his day. Far worse than Rupert Murdoch, because, unlike the Australian opportunist, Mellon-Scaife is a true believer.

Like Ailes, Mellon-Scaife tries to corrupt the fourth estate with a hard-Right spin in his publications like the American Spectator, NewsMax.com, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Mellon-Scaife is a DBC Charter Member with his money in numerous hard-Right foundations that support more than thirty hard-Right special interest groups and think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute,  the judicial-bending Federalist Society, L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, Grover Norquist’s  National Taxpayers Union Foundation, and more.

He guides four foundations with more than $385M in assets with the sole purpose of remodeling the United States Government in his self-centered Libertarian world view. The Sarah Scaife Foundation had $244 million in fair market value in 2009. The Carthage Foundation had $24 million, the Alleghany Foundation held $47 million, and the  Scaife Family Foundation put $70 million to work for far Right causes and ideologies.

Justice: Pittsburghians find yourself another newspaper. Mellon-Scaife makes most of his money on oil and aluminum and investments. There are few other ways to touch him. 

No. 3: The Koch brothers – The Kochs are the most visible face of the Dead Billionaires Club. The owners of the largest privately held company in North America, Koch Enterprises, they move oil, own Georgia Pacific Lumber, and sell you Brawny paper towels.

Yes, the Kochs are big funders of a far-Right Libertarian overthrow of the Republican Party. They are core funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council, as closed to a “shadow government” as we’ve ever had.

Yes,  they host ultra-secret meetings to recruit and gather other billionaires and high-million millionaires to their cause of ripping down the federal government from the inside brick-by-brick.

Yes, they have justices Scalia and Thomas in their back pocket, and can call them out to secret meetings without consequence.

The thing, though, that has elevated their status on this list though, is their development of contango trading of oil.  Want to whip the Teahadis into a frenzy? How about $5.00 gas.  The cause of this has more to do with the fact that people like the Kochs can literally siphon off enough supply, parked in tanks and super tankers, to drive oil speculation through the roof.  Then they sell it off at big profits, and stick it to the little fish by short-selling, betting on the decline, that they create.

It’s illegal, unethical, and, with millions focused on keeping any kind of government watchdog agency from going after them, likely to continue making them even bigger billionaires for years to come.

The Kochs are big union busters as well, and the biggest backers of Scott Walker’s union busting efforts in Wisconsin.  Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is their biggest astroturf grass roots group, and should rightly be named Americans for the Koch Brothers’ Prosperity.  Their agenda largely serves the wealthiest of the wealthy, not the poor schmucks that they’ve convinced are aligned with their government-dismantling.

Justice: Protest against AFP wherever they go.  Never use a Brawny product. Buy lumber that isn’t Georgia Pacific (Ask if you have to).  Do whatever you can to reduce your oil consumption.  Of every gallon you purchase, a penny or two heads straight to the Kochs’ pocket.

No. 2: Karl Rove – The man W. nicknamed “Turdblossom” lives up to that moniker as one of our top elephant droppings.  Rove is the defacto leader of the Neo Conservative wing of the Republican Party. Politicians come and go, but Rove is a principal architect and crypt keeper of more than a generation of linkage between the money and power of Wall Street, big oil, the military industrial complex,  big agribusiness, and the pharma industries to the NeoCon politicians, astroturf groups, and think tanks that hold a handful of the reins of power.

He has grown the NeoCon tumor on the American body politic, part of the same malignancy that spawned a hard-Right judicially activist Supreme Court that delivered the malignancy that was George W. Bush, a pair of wars, radical reshaping of civil rights, a festering boil of Wall Street greed that exploded in 2008, and more.

George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Phil Gramm, Ronald Reagan, Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchinson have all been clients. Rove also generated the program at the state level for placing their Supreme Court justices that would then be tried at the federal level: Put partisan “activist” judges in place and then accuse the other side of doing it while you were doing it.

The fight for the soul of the Republican Party, or what’s left of it, is between the NeoCons and the Libertarians who both seek power for their own aims.

NeoCons are not as rabidly anti-government as the Libertarians.  A lot of the “pork” that has been handed down in oil depletion allowances and fat contracts for pricey state-of-the-art weapons systems many of which never work properly for years or decades, goes to these Right wing funders of NeoCon politics and policy.

If the GOP avoided hand-to-hand combat on the floor of their convention in Tampa, as Romney would have likely missed the first round “lock,” thank whatever back room deals that Rove and his minions engineered to head off Rick Santorum and his sugar daddy Foster Friess at the pass.

Rove’s dirty tricks started with his early “prank” of using a false identity to gain access to the campaign office of Democrat Alan J. Dixon, running for Treasurer of Illinois. Rove stole 1000 sheets of campaign letterhead, then printed fake rally fliers promising “free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing.”  It didn’t work, but the practice of underhanded dealing began.

He dropped out of college to run, ironically, for the head of the College Republicans in the Midwest in 1973.  He held a bloodless coup by producing another version of their bylaws from the one that Robert Edgeworth, the other candidate, was running under. Things became so heated that they held two seaparate elections, and both were named to helm the same organization, at the same time. While lawsuits proceeded, Edgeworth leaked a recording to the Washington Post where Rove admitted that he had been rooting through people’s garbage cans to get dirt on his opposition, in a mini-me mirror of the Watergate investigation that was going on in the same year.

Then RNC Chairman George H.W. Bush put Rove under the microscope, including having an FBI agent question him. Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, and alleged Watergate co-conspirator, who became the star witness for the prosecution, said: “[B]ased on my review of the files, it appears the Watergate prosecutors were interested in Rove’s activities in 1972, but because they had bigger fish to fry, they did not aggressively investigate him.”[2]

Rove also had his hand in politicizing the Department of Justice with the political firings of seven U.S. Attorneys for failing to engage in political prosecutions that he had wanted carried out, but, under the cover of Executive Privilege from his years in the White House, he dodged another political bullet.

What has moved Rove up the list to No. 2, though, is his development of American Crossroads in 2010, another shadowy 527 Super PAC, to take advantage of the Citizens United decision.   He has amassed a great war chest to try to stop President Obama’s re-election, and has been the sugar daddy of the muddled and middling Mitt Romney campaign in 2012.

Justice: Rove likes to hear the sound of his own voice. He accepts frequent speaking engagements. The activist forces of Occupy Wall Street have already engaged him at these events. That needs to continue.  Companies that fund Rove’s American Crossroads, like Public Storage, American Financial Group (AFG), and Perry Homes of Texas don’t need your business. 

No. 1: Grover Norquist – Not that Mr. Norquist reads our humble little publication, but he would probably delight in the fact that he’s No. 1.   He surpasses the more public Karl Rove in so many ways because he has elevated the power game on behalf of his elite Libertarian DBC clientele to Wagnerian heights.  Norquist has shanghaied the Republican Party out from under its NeoCon masters by spending more than 35 patient, long years building his government wrecking crew from the ground up.

We’ve profiled Norquist previously in “I Pledge Allegiance to Grover Norquist,” who is best known by the public for his infamous tax pledge, which requires all Republican incumbents who don’t want someone competing in their primary to sign on or be targeted as a RINO (Republican in Name Only).

Norquist, working with low-lifes like convicted felon Jack Abramamoff and boyish b.s. artist Ralph Reed has hand trained legions of extremist, highly dogmatic Libertarian political warriors. The Tea Party, and the extreme hard Right stands that career Republicans have taken in recent years to avoid extinction are all his handiwork.

The manipulation of the debt run up by the NeoCon side of the GOP into the phony “crisis” last summer, and the placement of Teahadi simpletons like monkey wrenches into the gears of government are all part of Mr. Norquist’s handiwork.

Norquist has been adept at co-opting the Religious Right out from under the NeoCons by letting them put their extremist agenda into legislation, rather than giving it lip service.  Why? It’s another happy monkey wrench thrown into the system to destroy government from within.  Rather than tackle climate legislation, or hunt down the Koch brothers’ contango operations, the government is left paralyzed by hot-button issues like abortion and women’s rights that distract from Norquist’s real putsch for deregulation of his business backers and Paul Ryanesque changes to the social safety net and the tax system.

The network of organizations that he helped launch and coordinates to this day are the agitators behind monkey wrench issues, everything from school prayer and “school choice” vouchers to the anti-union activism infecting state legislatures.

More important, as we mentioned in “The Rubber Stamp President,” Mr. Norquist is determined to turn the presidency into a figurehead role by making sure that, whomever is in office, if they do not do his hand-picked Congress’ bidding, they will be stymied at every turn.  Witness his success with President Obama over the last three years.

He was a driving force in the creation of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) a one stop shop for major corporations to come and have legislation written up, handed to a Republican congressman, and put through the pretense of the American political process to dismantle regulations or delay complying with environmental or societal responsibilities.

Norquist and his allies orchestrated the Teahadi Takeover of Congress in 2010, and dozens of state legislatures which began spinning out radical Right legislation that even further alienated common voters.

If you ever wonder why Republicans seem to turn against polling data showing them out of step with the will of the people, it is because the only will they answer to is that of Norquist and his wealthy masters.

Norquist is still the epicenter of political power in Washington, D.C., and does not show any signs of slipping up in any way that will dethrone him any time soon.  He is the point man of the Kochs and other extreme Libertarian political interests. His office is the place that both the powerful and the wannabees visit for an opportunity to plug in to his power generator that is the political equivalent of the Hoover Dam.

A brilliant tactician, he is as close to pure evil as we come politically in the United States. Left unchecked, he will destroy whatever level of social justice that he can eradicate, from Medicare to meals for poor children, and unleash unbridled 19th century capitalism, poor houses and all, on this country.

Justice: Unwinding Norquist may take as long, if not longer, than it took for him to insert his social and political carcinoma into government and the election process. The only way to really choke off Mr. Norquist’s ambitions is to get the money people to stop funding him.  Pay attention to the businesses of the Dead Billionaires Club and the Club for Growth.  Don’t buy product from them.  If you walk into a WALMART find a local discounter like a Western Beef.  Skip McDonalds and hit Five Guys.  If you hurt the funders where they live, and they know that’s where their money is bleeding from, the supply to Mr. Norquist and his allies in D.C. may, at last, dry up enough for him to blow away in the political winds.

My shiny two.

Runners up: James Dobson, the Huffines Brothers, Brent Bozell, Rush Limbaugh, JM Foundation, 

The Club for Growth, unimpressed with the GOP presidential pack are going RINO (Republican in Name Only) hunting. The same anti-union, anti-women, Tea Party backers are looking to bag big game in Congress because the name of the game isn’t the White House anymore. It is breaking down the heart of government: The Legislative Branch.

The term “RINO” was originally coined for Democrats who switched party affiliations, but the Club for Growth (The Club) the nasty junior league of the Dead Billionaires Club,  changed all that when they broadened it to include Republicans who don’t represent their far Right Libertarian views.  The Club pumped $8M to seat 26 of the 28 Teahadi candidates that they backed in the 2010 primary elections, a record year for any organization building more than a decade of very small quiet victories. [1]

“It’s a huge change from 10 years ago,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a nonprofit, Washington-based consumer advocacy group, told NPR. [2]

They are a significant financial engine driving the agenda of Grover Norquist, the defacto GOP boss who effectively controls the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), who envisions a Rubber Stamp Presidency:

“We’re not auditioning for fearless leader, ” Norquist told the American Conservative Union, “We don’t need a president to tell us which direction to go. We know which direction we know we want to go… We just need a president to sign this stuff.  We don’t need someone to think it up, or design it… The leadership for the modern conservative movement will be coming out of the House and Senate, so focus on electing the most conservative Republican who can win in each House seat,  and the most conservative Republican who can win in each Senate seat, and then pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become President of the United States.”

Which is why the Club isn’t putting much money into the 2012 presidential race.  It doesn’t really matter. It is a sentiment which most of the network of Teahadi organizations created over the last 35 years by the Club, the Dead Billionaires Club and others, support.

“We’re still going to have to have control of the levers of power in Congress to hold [the new Republican president] accountable,” Brendan Steinhauser, Director of State and Federal Programs for FreedomWorks, a DeVos/Scaife astroturf grass roots group of the  Dead Billionaires Club (DBC) that primes the pump of the  Tea Party movement told CNN, ”to send policy to [the new president's] desk that [he's] either going to have to sign or not. And so that’s where we think the real levers of power are.”

What matters, according to Norquist, who wields the dollars and power of the Libertarian largesse washed over the Tea Party candidates, is packing the House and the Senate with as many Turnipheads as possible who follow orders well.

While the media consumes hundreds of hours talking about every nuance of the Republican primary, the Club and the big-dollar players of the DBC, the Kochs, the DeVos, the Coors, et al., by way of a network of groups, including Americans for Prosperity (AFP), have been pouring millions into reshaping the Congress into a giant monkey wrench that will gridlock legislation for another four years and devolve the Federal government, no matter who takes the White House.

Indiana Republican Senator Dick Lugar, an Indiana political institution who has brought awful things like jobs, schools and road improvement dollars to his state, is being opposed by Richard Mourdock, a Club and NRA-backed Teahadi. Dick’s crime?

“He’s an old RINO Republican,” Jim Bratten, an Indiana coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, [told CNN], meaning he’s a Republican in name only. “He’s been there [in Washington] for over 36 years, but gradually he’s gotten closer and closer to the left, and he seems to want to compromise on things that are principle that you really can’t compromise on.” [3]

That means that he voted for sensible things like the recovery package and the Big Three auto bailout, both of which kept millions of people employed and in their homes, even with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  He also used wresting concessions out of the other guys to get things that his state needs funding for.

“Pork” is evil, the mantra of Teahadis, is another ignorance of government.  True, it buys off someone’s cooperation on a bill that they might otherwise not get on board with, but the ability for congressmen to get needed capital for state and local projects is gone now.

That not only adds to Grover’s glorious gridlock, but it means that any state highway project or other local need that requires federal funding  has to come through Congress as its own bill, unlikely, or be bundled with other congressmen’s various needs into an omnibus bill that adds in hundreds of millions in money that probably would never have been requested had a formal bill not been floated.  In short, it costs MORE, not less, Teahadis, for the government to do business without those “evil” riders.

Lugar gets a lifetime 63% on the Club’s “scorecard” for being too moderate, e.g. compromising with Democrats. [4]

He is not alone though.   The Club also hopes to replace Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, and the retiring congressman Dan Burton (R) of Indiana with the more radical David McIntosh.  They have ten other Teahadi candidates in Republican-gerrymandered post-census districts or opposing a few high-profile Democrats like Sherrod Brown.

Their handiwork is not appreciated by old-line Republicans.  Sen John McCain of Arizona complained that the Club tanked a majority in the Senate when it ran opposition to the re-election of Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee, resulting in a Democratic win that year.  The Club went after one of its politically like-minded, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in 2008, because he called them out as the “Club for Greed.”

They are not as well funded as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, which spent $21.55 million to elect Republicans in 2008, but they wield more power because they put the fear of the Almighty (Dollar) into moderate Republican incumbents.  Even if they don’t beat the Republican in the primary, Grover Norquist “owns” them by way of a threat of mounting another costly primary challenge the next time that they stand for election.   Even other Republicans whom they don’t contest come to heel for fear of being “hunted” by the Club.

The Club has spawned poor-cousin state-level imitators. The Peach Tea Super Pac has targeted Georgia congressmen and senators that did not vote for an anti-abortion law to the religious Right’s liking.  The Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire put out a “most wanted” list of Republicans not Republican enough for their liking.

Even Florida’s Teahadi Sentator, Marco Rubio, has been tagged as “RINO” by some for his endorsement of milquetoast Mitt, and his hiring of veteran S.C. political consultant Terry Sullivan, whom the Far Right sees as a RINO game warden. [5][6]

While all of this cannibalization of the party internally by the Far Right may seem appealing to Liberals happy to watch them rip the GOP apart, it is bad news for governance of any kind if compromise, essential to any well-oiled government, is not possible.

It has been a few months of relatively quiet heel dragging for the House and Senate Republicans. Their misadventures take a back seat to the presidential news.  What happens, though, no matter who becomes president, if the Teahadis are not driven out of Congress?

If these ignorant, politically malformed neophytes continue to tear through the halls of congress like drunken monkeys with sticks and clubs, the only people who win are the Club and Grover Norquist, who said: “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Voting for President Obama is important, but getting out the vote for the Democrats to oust Teahadis, and supporting Democratic candidates opposing Tea Party turnipheads voted in over the last elections is critical. It sends a huge message: ENOUGH.  People voted for gridlocked government in 2010. Now the voter has to fix their mistake and give those few remaining moderate Republicans some ability to stand up to the crushing weight of blackmail and blackballing by a handful of wealthy Libertarian financiers.

Until the Republican Party can free itself from the influence of the Club for Growth, the DBC, and their minion Grover Norquist, though, no Republican congressperson, no matter how “moderate” the individual, is free from that coercion and blackmail.  Only installing Democratic majority would break the Club’s grip, and give those who oppose them the ability to purge them from GOP politics, and send Grover Norquist and his minions packing.

Only when the RINO hunts end, is there a hope for balanced, divided government.

My shiny two.

The American primary system is a joke, the punch line for which came last week: Mitt Romney, his popularity sinking so fast that Celine Dion is writing a tune for the James Cameron version, kept pressing for his ‘inevitability’ so he can wind the primaries up and avoid more damage in the general election. Apparently 50 states don’t get a say, just the ones early enough to “count.”

Sorry, Mitt, but the whole point of a 50 state primary system is to compete in 50 states. To say to the states in the back 25 of the primary process that you want it over is to disenfranchise the members of your party in half of this nation, some of whom hate your guts and want Santorum or Ginrich or Paul.

This is the first presidential primary in decades that isn’t a Cuban beauty contest. The outcome wasn’t assured for the front-runner, with the mock rubber stamp of the primary system process.

The “done deal” of Reagan days where candidates were anointed in the Republican Party went out the window with the devolution of the party and the mass exodus of its fiscal conservative center into ‘independent’ status. As I’ve told you, the GOP these days barely reps 1 in 10 Americans.

The primary process in 2008 was ugly for John McCain, the last of the almost-heir apparents.  It has been downright brutal in 2012 for Romney to seal the deal.

The Fascist Fab Five of the Supreme Court gave us the ‘gift’ of Citizen’s United, where corporations are people too. It has backfired badly on the Republican primaries.

Endorsements from polar opposites, the Teahadi Senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, and the morally flexible George H.W. Bush, along with the least private meeting of private meetings with Newt Gingrich were supposed to seal the deal

Every week a Guam or a Puerto Rico has a Romney aide on top of the roof crowing ‘Inevitability! Inevitability!’  The Murdoch papers and Fix News try to program the masses for it.  Every week, though, Rick Santorum hits a state where he can reach the “real” red counties full of rednecks and religious zombies.  As we’ve shown you in Romney’s Rat Poison Victories, and other pieces on the earlier Republican primaries,  the Mittster’s “wins” usually come from Democratic strongholds not likely to be flipped by the flip-flopper in November.

No more back-room certainty exists. May he with the biggest Super PAC and the deepest pockets win!  It’s hard to make guys like Rick Santorum go away when a Foster Freiss can spend millions of his own through the Red, White and Blue Super PAC slush fund to keep Rancid Rick alive.

Both Romney and the GOP party hierarchy see the epic disaster in the making, so they have the spin cycle on full trying to force Santorum and Paul to hang it up.

Let’s decode the political feature in the Sunday New York Times: “In Wisconsin, Romney Nears Tipping Point.” The article states:

“A victory over Rick Santorum in Wisconsin on Tuesday would effectively close the first phase of the primary season, senior Republicans say. It would leave Mr. Romney with not only a commanding lead in the race for delegates, but also a claim to have fended off energetic challenges across a range of battleground states with a disciplined and well-financed campaign effort.”

• “[S]enior Republicans say.”  Sure they do.  Mr. Romney will not have the 1144 delegates that puts him absolutely in the driver’s seat, so Republican regulars are trying to rig Wisconsin public opinion, sadly with the New York Times assistance, as they don’t challenge the reasoning or make note of that salient fact.
• “[E]nergetic challenges“- That’s an understatement.  Rick Santorum may be political slime, but he has roundly beaten Mr. Romney in most major conservative stronghold counties in every state that they’ve contested that has hard-Right voters, Puerto Rico and Guam withstanding.
• “[A] disciplined and well-financed campaign effort.” – Romney has had far more organization on the ground far longer than any of the other candidates, and yet Santorum and Gingrich have torn it to shreds with a fraction of the wherewithal in state after state.  That’s a huge indictment of how poorly disciplined Mr. Romney’s well-financed efforts have been.

I am no fan of Citizens United (CU), but I do indulge in a spoonful or two of delicious irony now and again.  CU, interestingly,  has worked, just not in the way its authors intended. It has made much more of the primary voting process relevant.

How many times have we heard pundits in years past, particularly in “late” primary states, bemoan the uselessness of their elections when the money is stacked behind one candidate who wins handily in the early primary contests? This year, unless Romney can use the bully pulpit of the media to hound Santorum out of the race now, or Mr. Santorum somehow finally implodes himself, the doorway to a convention slugfest is almost guaranteed if all 50 states do as they’re supposed to and cast their ballot in the nation’s first “real” primary.

What CU has done, is shown clearly what a sham the whole time-consuming, expensive useless exercise in faux democracy that the primary system has always been.

Started in 1912 as a way of taking the nomination out of the back-room process, primaries were supposed to introduce more democracy to the selection process at the national conventions, which previously had all of the democratic flavor of a Vladimir Putin rally. Ballots to vote were still very restricted to party elites, though.

New Hampshire became significant in 1949 when they turned primaries into a more popular vote, pushing General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s fortunes up on the GOP side, while sending President Harry Truman to the showers in his search for a second term of his own. [1]

Since then, the primaries have rolled out to all 50 states and territories. For decades, only the first handful have mattered. Witness the spectacle of 2011 when states were jockeying like jocks wanting to take the head cheerleader to homecoming for those coveted primaries that “matter.”  Little did they know, with CU, that all of them do.

This is why Republicans, not accustomed to being out of control of their own party theatrics, face the very real threat of true democracy at a convention.  At Tampa, should Mr. Romney not make his magic 1144 number, and the convention goes to round two, where the delegates are no longer ‘bound,’ it could get very, very blood-Red in the convention center.

Romney’s dialogue with Gingrich was more to insure that he has the votes to bury Mr. Santorum in that second round. Delusional Dr. Paul is not likely to come out of his presidential ambition coma long enough, nor have enough delegates to make a difference.

The problem with the unbound delegates, though, is that they’re unbound to anyone.  As we’ve seen with the Teahadis in Congress, the Republican establishment, by way of Speaker John Boehner, has a real problem controlling their extremist flock. At this point, no one knows what calculus the party’s defacto leader, Grover Norquist, will apply to the convention.  He, not Mr. Romney or Mr. Santorum, is likely to be the primary power broker because he knows how to manipulate the mindless masses who will be on the floor better than any of them after three decades of perfecting the art.  Mr. Norquist is angling for a Rubber Stamp President.  Mr. Santorum is his best patsy, er, candidate.

What we need is a different system.

Candidates already criss-cross the country more than a year in advance of an election, glad-handing and building base. This notion that the candidates can’t get everywhere to meet with everyone prior to an election is absolute nonsense. Where a candidate doesn’t go, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, among others, do. We know every movement, gaffe and hiccup of every candidate globally these days.  The state-to-state primary process is a tradition, an anachronism.

The staggering cost of mounting campaigns in all of the primary contests point-by-point alone should be justification for moving to a real “Super Tuesday” where every state in the nation conducts its primary.

Start the primary season in October of the year prior for primaries. Finish that by the first Tuesday in March where everyone votes in their own party.  Then let the candidates start the slugfest to November with monthly debates between the two actual contenders.  Pass a new campaign law to limit everyone’s spending, including corporate ‘people.’  Keep the playing field as level as possible given the forces trying to perpetually tilt it one way or another.

Right now, that tilt is being aimed at Mr. Santorum. He speaks well to the far Right, and he has demonstrated a clear ability to get the support of the real Republican base. The GOP brass want it both ways: Stir up the fanatics, yet don’t do anything to upset the alienated independent any more. That can’t be, unless and until there is a candidate, say a future Romney or Gingrich, who has the scruples not to pander to Mr. Santorum’s base, but to bring back the abandoned moderate. Until then, though, Mr. Santorum has a much more realistic chance of at least a good floor fight for the nomination if the GOP machine doesn’t turn the screws down on him further.

We like to think that we have input into the process.  Everything from the Oscars to the upcoming Obama-[CANDIDATE HERE] slugfest, though, has the taint of the control of the 1% with the cash to steer it.

Wouldn’t it be nice, in what passes as one of the handful of real democracies in the world, if we could turn the process of selecting the most powerful leader of the free world into as close to a real expression of popular will as we can get, and show that being a billionaire, or having a billionaire sugar daddy pulling your strings, is not the quid pro quo gateway to power.

Let Mr. Santorum take his case to his people. Mr. Romney should win on his merits, not on the spin of a faceless GOP machine and the lap-dog media that aids and abets their steering of the political narrative.

My shiny two.

UPDATED – If a woman is being stalked, the stalker can be penalized just for doing that. A young black man walking in a predominantly white Florida neighborhood is not so lucky. When the law is on the side of the stalker, it perverts the very meaning of the word “justice” in our legal system.

February 26, 2012: 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was returning home from a convenience store in the rain in small town of Sanford, Florida, 30 minutes Northeast of Orlando.

Martin was talking on the phone to his girlfriend and carrying his purchases from the convenience store: A package of Skittles and a can of Iced Tea.

Wearing a hooded sweatshirt, appropriate for the day’s rainy weather, Martin stood under a nearby awning to get out of the rain.

What he didn’t know what that he was being watched with great interest by George Zimmerman, an overzealous Neighborhood Watch captain, from a nearby SUV.  Zimmerman contacted 911 and reported Trayvon as ‘suspicious.’

Here is the tape of the initial phone call that Zimmerman made to the 911 operator:

At this point Martin apparently noticed Zimmerman staring at him.  He moved out from the awning, and, from Zimmerman’s narration, it would seem that he at least wanted to see who was staring at him and why.

At 1:42 in the recording, Zimmerman says: “These assholes. They always get away.”

Get away from what?  No crime had been committed.  Martin’s only crime, thus far, was being black and in the vicinity of a paranoid racist zealot.

As Zimmerman gives the operator directions to get to the “clubhouse” where Martin is walking past, at 2:11 in the tape he suddenly says: “Shit. He’s running.”

The 911 operator asks which direction. Zimmerman tells him towards the back entrance to the neighborhood.

At 2:26 in the recording, Zimmerman can clearly be heard getting out of the car. The wind picks up. He mutters under his breath, but audibly: “That fuckin’ coon.”

The operator asks Zimmerman if he is following Trayvon.  Zimmerman says yes. The operator then says:

“Okay, we don’t need you to do that.”

Zimmerman acknowledges the instruction with: “Ok.”

What is clear is that Martin was afraid of this guy.   Zimmerman continued to follow him, in contravention of the 911 operator’s instructions. While the operator tries to get Zimmerman’s info, Zimmerman says “He ran” indicating that Martin was trying to get away.

Perhaps the one fatal mistake made by the 911 operator when he agreed to have the cops call Zimmerman back on his cell when they got there so he could tell them where he was, rather than have him meet the police at a designated spot that would have kept him from pursuing Martin.

The next few minutes are in dispute.  Zimmerman said that Trayvon approached him from behind and that there were words exchanged. Zimmerman claimed that Trayvon punched him in the nose and then began to beat him, knocking him to the ground and pounding the back of his head on the ground.

A male 911 caller calls police about a struggle. “They’re wrestling in the back of my porch.” He heard what he thought to be a gunshot.

A 13 year old witness claims to have seen Zimmerman on the ground with Trayvon straddling him. Another witness claims to have heard Zimmerman scream for help.

Another eyewitness looking out of their window had a different tale.  It was Zimmerman who straddled Trayvon while he lay on his back.

The Sanford police say that his story is corroborated by his bloodied nose, lacerations to the back of his head and grass stains on the back of his shirt. [1]  Unfortunately, their video doesn’t back up the tale. ABC News released exclusively the footage of Zimmerman being brought into the Sanford

When the police arrived a few minutes later, Trayvon had been fatally shot and Zimmerman claimed self-defense.

The Sanford police say that his story is corroborated by his bloodied nose, lacerations to the back of his head and grass stains on the back of his shirt. [2]  Unfortunately, their video doesn’t back up the tale. ABC News released exclusively the footage of Zimmerman being brought into the Sanford police station in handcuffs. In it there is no evidence of him being beaten and bloodied at all. He is also leaner and meaner than the lone picture of him from 2005 that has been shared in the news media. [3]

Zimmerman was questioned, but he was released because he invoked his right to self-defense under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law,” an expansion on the common law right to self defense.  To date, Zimmerman has not been arrested.

At common law, the right of self defense is innate:

“1 : The use of force to defend oneself;

2 : An affirmative defense (as to a murder charge) alleging that the defendant used force necessarily to protect himself or herself because of a reasonable belief that the other party intended to inflict great bodily harm or death.” [4]

What’s interesting and important to note, is the “reasonable person” standard in the common law version of self defense. This basically asks the question:  Would another person in your position have acted in the way you did?

Usually, there must be equal force applied.  If someone punches you in the nose, generally speaking, the person on the receiving end of the blow isn’t allowed to shoot their assailant in the chest at close range.

How much force is appropriate is usually the central point of discussion by both the prosecution and the defense in violent crime trials.

Every state in the union has some variation of law that provides for the justification for killing another when there is self defense claimed.  Usually the facts are put forth at a trial.  Sometimes, it is so obvious that the perpetrator isn’t arrested or detained, but the facts strongly and unequivocally support the story of the perpetrator.

Then Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed one of the first “Stand Your Ground” laws. It took effect October 1, 2005.  It was the first stab at re-writing self-defense codes using a National Rifle Association (NRA) boilerplate then pushed through twenty other states legislatures.

“This is a radical modern distortion of an old common-law doctrine,” notes Garrett Epps in the American Prospect. “The old ‘castle doctrine’ held that someone attacked in his or her own home had no “duty to retreat” before using deadly force to repel an attack.  The idea behind it was that a person confronted at home literally has no place to go and need not try to run away if facing an immediate threat of violence

The NRA, backed by its usual cadre of weapons manufacturers, was able to get Florida legislators to amend the Castle Doctrine into a legalization of vigilantism. The law’s key passage in question reads:

“A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

If the law is applied to the facts as stated by Mr. Zimmerman, and from the 911 recording, he should have been arrested.

The story has been gaining momentum as the outrage over it by people of all races and creeds builds. More than 2.1M people have signed a Change.org petition by Martin’s parents to have , a record for web activism on that site.

Zimmerman was stalking Martin. He was told to cease and desist. Martin was unarmed. Zimmerman was involved in an altercation, as cuts and bruises suggest, but the force used in response, deadly force, was excessive.  Prior to the confrontation, Martin was not proving himself to be harmful to others.

The law’s broad protection to assailants is not popular with many in the district and state attorneys’ offices.  State attorney Willie Meggs, who fought the law when it was proposed, told the New York Times: ‘The consequences of the law have been devastating around the state. It’s almost insane what we are having to deal with.”

Even the original author of the law, Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley, doesn’t believe that this defense is applicable to Zimmerman’s actions. [5]

Even if it is decided to prosecute Zimmerman, many crucial steps for evidentiary gathering at the scene were not done. Police seem to have been satisfied with Zimmerman’s account of the events and left it at that. Martin was taken to the morgue as a John Doe. His body was tested for drugs, but Zimmerman was never given a forensic once-over.

The Federal Government has begun an inquiry to see if the shooting falls under the Federal Hate Crimes law. The Florida Attorney General’s office, and the local AG are also investigating in the wake of the shooting becoming a national story that has drawn condemnation from pundits and average citizens of all races.

Seething, festering hatred and racism continues in our country. It is maddeningly silent, yet deafening at the same time.

If people of color expose this hatred, we are labeled rabble rousers and trouble makers, or worse. A friend of mine once pointed out to me that there isn’t another race that has the relationship with America that black people do.  I am inclined to believe that’s true.

The assumption by others is that blacks, who make up a 13.6% minority of a population of 308.7 million, are the majority of the problem. The belief is that we are lazy, criminal and inferior.

Black males, no matter what they do, will be considered threatening, criminal and inferior to the majority. White people can  claim that racists are not representative of white people in America. Black people are just race-baiting if we claim that it is true.

In February 2011 Public Policy Polling broke the news that 51% of likely GOP Primary voters were birthers, people who believe that President Barack Obama is a foreigner.  After much media attention, and the edges of public shaming of birther-stokers like Michelle Bachmann and Donald Trump, the lie was finally exposed, right?   The same organization polled likely voters in the South before major primaries and found:

• In Tennessee only 33% of GOP primary voters think Barack Obama was born in the United States, while 45% do not.
• In Georgia 40% of Republican primary voters think Obama was born in the United States, while 38% do not.
• In Ohio 42% of Republican primary voters think Obama was born in the United States, while 37% do not.

Mr. Obama brought the point home in a comment about the case. He said that if he had a son, he would “look like Trayvon,” showing empathy for the plight of black Americans who too often have to watch how they act, what they wear, and have to even moderate simple body motions.  The Right immediately reacted.

“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban,  or if he had been white, or if he had been Asian-American, or if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.” [4]

Gingrich, Santorum, and others tried to flip President Obama’s words of compassion, and of genuine self-identification with the real issue of how race and racism affect the day-to-day lives of real black Americans, into some kind of reverse racism. Which suggests that Gingrich is like a lot of white people who don’t “get” what the day-to-day for most black people, and particularly young black men, is like.

Perhaps he should have listened to guest Charles M. Blow, columnist for the New York Times, on “Real Time with Bill Maher” last Friday:

Maher: Remember, only a couple of months ago, remember when Jan Brewer, the Governor of Arizona, stuck her finger in the president’s face and said she felt “threatened.” And I thought: What must a young black kid feel?… If the President of the United States can [be threatening] on the tarmac of a public airport, what do I have to do to not be threatening?

Blow: This is a very interesting point, and a part of the column that I wrote last week, which is about the burden that young black men feel in this country.  And it is a very heavy weight on their shoulders, all the time, because you cannot behave like all of the rest of your friends. You have to watch… I mean it’s almost exhausting, you have to….

Maher: You can’t wear a hoodie!

Blow: Not only can you not wear a hoodie, you literally consciously are paying attention to the way you move your body. It is a physically exhausting exercise to know I can’t run, or make a sudden movement because now I see some cop and he’s standing on the corner and he’s looking this way.  Or I can’t put my hands in my waistband, as George Zimmerman says Trayvon Martin had has hands in his waistband, because that may signal that I have some sort of weapon. The kind of constant having to think about how you position your body so that no one takes advantage of that and views you as suspicious and maybe takes your life, or takes you to jail, is exhausting.

America doesn’t trust us and it seems as though they never will, particularly if the impulse to shoot first is backed up by a gun-industry-armed majority white population with multi-generational fear of blacks and other people of color who pass laws to make it easier for vigilantes like Zimmerman to claim self defense later after acting violently and often fatally on their fears.

The Hunger Games was a huge hit over this past weekend, raking in millions of dollars. I have not read the book, nor seen the movie. I did however see an article about how social media “blew-up” with hateful remarks about the race of the characters in the movie, despite the fact their physical appearance was described in the book. One poignant “Tweet” stated: “Ewww, Rue is black? I’m not watching.” [6]

Apparently, we have moved beyond race in this country, but only if we don’t say anything about it. The NRA and Grover Norquist’s American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) write up pro gun laws to put into the hands of Republican lawmakers on the payroll. The mere mention of bigotry, either in a law’s underlying meaning, or simply in its execution, are met with denial, resistance, and in some cases, outright hatred.

I don’t believe Zimmerman is guilty simply because of his color. He needs to be tried before making that determination. When the police arrive on a scene, and there is an unarmed teenager lying dead on the ground and a shooter with a bloody nose, there should at least be an arrest and a valid investigation.

If the tables were turned, you know that the police would arrest, investigate, and release if the facts warranted it.  This is where justice seems to be peeking at the skin color of the assailant from under her blindfold.

People have their right to private bigotry. If that’s what you want out of life, then go for it. The legal system and the political system do not.

Judicial and legislative branches of government do not have the luxury using cultural or ethnic biases to get by.  There are standards and rules that need to be followed that are designed to protect us all, including those of us whose skin color is a shade or three darker than white.

From all of the evidence that continues to come out, it still seems that if anyone had the right to stand his ground in this scenario, it was Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman.

If the local authorities will not do the right thing, and the GOP-dominated Florida government balks, then the Federal government should invoke its power to bring to trail the killer of Trayvon Martin.  Justice should be blind, not racially tone deaf.