Republicans Don't Want You to Vote

New Republican Law Makes it Harder to Vote for Elderly, Students, Poor---You Know, People Democrats Value

By Sam Wilcox
In Aug. 8, 2011 The Tennessean

As an 18-year-old, college-bound student, I am excited to exercise my right to vote for the first time. I never dreamed that our state legislature would make it harder for everyone to exercise this right. Questioning how the new voter ID law will affect thousands of Tennesseans, I decided to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

In Monday’s Tennessean, the state Department of Safety and Homeland Security promised faster service lines and a system to handle the influx of new requests. I decided to go on a fact-finding mission to the driver’s license centers to see if that was the case.

We Could Create Good Jobs Now

By Michael Winship, AlterNet
Posted on August 20, 2011, Printed on August 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/653469/how_washington_could_create_jobs_right_now

I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer.

Buffett Knows Best

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

By WARREN E. BUFFETT

In New York Times, Aug. 15, 2011

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.

This is Today's Singular Issue; and It Is at the Bottom of Every Single Issue

Whose Side are They On? Could not be more clear than this.....

What Would Jesus Do? With These Fake, 'Christian Capitalists?'

Posted at 02:02 PM ET, 08/12/2011

From Jesus’ socialism

to capitalistic Christianity

By Gregory Paul
for WashingtonPost.com/onfaith

A truly strange thing has happened to American Christianity. A set of profound contradictions have developed within modern conservative Christianity, big and telling inconsistencies that have long slipped under the radar of public knowledge, and are only now beginning to be explicitly noted by critics of the religious and economic right.

Here is what is peculiar. Many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, have come to believe and proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christian capitalists are ardent followers of Ayn Rand, who was one of - and many of whose followers are -- the most hard-line anti-Christian atheist/s you can get.

Jobs, Not Cuts, Tennesseans Demand

Photo by Kenneth Townsend    Main Street, Franklin, TN   Aug. 10, 2011

Protesters Rally at Blackburn's Office

By Bonnie Burch  The Tennessean
Aug. 11, 2011

A small but vocal group of protestors
asked Rep. Marsha Blackburn to sign a
“Contract for the American Dream”
Wednesday and focus on job creation.

Carrying signs, waving American flags and
chanting, the gathering stood on the
sidewalk in front of Blackburn’s Franklin
office.

“Honk for Good Jobs” read one sign. And
several East Main Street drivers obliged.
“We’re here because we’re very unhappy
with the way our country is going,” said
Marianne Bentley of Nashville.

Members distributed “Contract for the
American Dream” leaflets to passersby.
The 10-point contract encouraged
investing in the country’s infrastructure and
public education while ending wars,
keeping Social Security sound and offering
Medicare to all citizens.

“Tax Reform Now,” “GOP: Don’t Destroy
the Economy" and "Jobs, Not Cuts" read
some of the protestors’ signs.

Although the group was granted an
audience with Blackburn’s staff members,
she was not in the office during the rally.
Her staff told the group that they would
pass on their concerns to the U.S.
congresswoman.

The new American Dream Movement,
which was inspired by protests in
Wisconsin, sponsored the rally along with
another held around the same time in front
of Rep. Scott Desjarlais office in Columbia.

Link to The Tennessean:  http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110810/WILLIAMSON/308110024/Protesters-rally-outside-Blackburn-s-Franklin-office

Sound and Fury Misses What Matters

The Hijacked Crisis

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times, Aug. 11, 2011

Has market turmoil left you feeling afraid? Well, it should. Clearly, the economic crisis that began in 2008 is by no means over.

But there’s another emotion you should feel: anger. For what we’re seeing now is what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it.

For more than a year and a half — ever since President Obama chose to make deficits, not jobs, the central focus of the 2010 State of the Union address — we’ve had a public conversation that has been dominated by budget concerns, while almost ignoring unemployment. The supposedly urgent need to reduce deficits has so dominated the discourse that on Monday, in the midst of a market panic, Mr. Obama devoted most of his remarks to the deficit rather than to the clear and present danger of renewed recession.

Obama's Narrative Is Puzzling Calculations, Opportunity Squandered

What Happened to Obama?

By DREW WESTEN
In New York Times Aug. 6, 2011

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

It was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.

Willful Ignorance Pushes U.S. to the Brink with 'Disneyfied' Story

The Tea Party version of the American Revolution is not just fundamentalist. It is also Disneyfied, sentimentalised, and whitewashed

By Sarah Churchwell

www.Independent.co.uk/opinion

Here's a monumental historical irony: a moment in the origins of the United States that every American schoolchild learns to view with pride, the Boston Tea Party, has now become a symbol of our (inter)national shame. In one sense, it is difficult to know what to say in response to the utter irrationality of the Tea Party's self-destructive decision to sabotage the American political process – and thus its own country's economy, and the global economy.


Last week, while the US government was locked in stalemate and risked defaulting on its national debt for the first time in its history (and thus also defying the Constitution that Tea Partiers supposedly hold sacred, which declares in the 14th Amendment that it is illegal for Congress to default), Michele Bachmann instructed her followers not to listen to those who attempted to "scare" them with untruths that the US would default if it didn't raise the debt ceiling. When, of course, that is precisely what it would have done. But the Tea Party has never let facts get in the way of its belief system, and now that belief system is genuinely threatening the wellbeing of the nation they claim to love.

Angry, Screwed Americans Protest at Corker's West End Office

Same Tune, New Verse: Americans Get the Shaft While Congress Protects Its Corporate Sponsors---that Log 'Profits' Off-Shore, Pay No U.S. Taxes, Export Jobs and Buy Congress Stooges

From The Tennessean Online, Click to See

With chants like ‘millionaires and billionaires pay your fair share,’ a protest organized by a political action group outside of senators' local offices claimed the debt deal negatively affects the middle class and poor.

“It’s broken - government no longer represents the people,’’ protester Michael Custer, 47, of Madison said. “When government no longer represents the people, it is illegitimate.’’