Green Eagle

Here's a very nice chart from Digby.  She uses it to make a very worthwhile point, but I want to use it for another purpose: I added the red line to point this out:  The growth of corporate profits since World War II has been very consistent.  But look at the George W. Bush era.  Here we find a massive surge of corporate profits, i.e. money going to the top of the economic scale, followed by a total collapse.  Obama, the "Communist" did little more than restore enough rationality to our economy to allow corporate growth to get back on its historic track.  Once again, Republican slavishness to the rich massively disrupted our economy, at which point the Republicans took to the hills and left Democrats to clean up the mess, which they dutifully did.  That's the historical pattern in this country, and if the Republicans go the way of the Whigs, in the end it will be because of this.  They will not protect us from economic disaster if it stands...

I talked about this within a day of the Supreme Court Citizens' United decision, and here it is.  You would have to be oblivious to think it was not going to happen, although as usual, that's exactly what the mainstream press amounts to, when it comes to threats emanating from the "job creators."  From Lee Fang at The Nation, this all too predictable story: "Saudi-Led Oil Lobby Group Financed 2012 Dark Money Attack Ads The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government. Last year, API gave nearly half a million to...dark money groups running political a...

Oh yes, to listen to the idiots on the right and most of the mainstream press, there is tremendous scientific controversy about the reality of man made global warming.  Well, here, thanks to what I am sure was a very painful slog through all 13,950 (!) peer reviewed scientific papers on the subject that were published between 1991 and 2012, is a wonderful graphic presentation of that "controversy." Yes, a grand total of one sixth of one percent of the papers questioned the facts on global warming.  If the recent Presidential election had been that lopsided, Mitt Romney would have gotten about 204,000 votes out of 120 million cast.  Which, in fact, is about what he would have gotten, if the mainstream press told the truth about the lies Republicans tell about subjects like global warming, and the price we will all have to pay if this pandering to energy companies isn't stopped. Thanks to Desmog Blog, and James Lawrence Powell for carrying out a difficult task that w...

Articles We Won't Be Reading: Matt C. Abbot, Renew America:  "Noted priest weighs in on Israeli-Palestinian conflict" Boy, I bet that guy has a lot of helpful suggestions.  Maybe he thinks things would be better in Palestine if they had a lot more child rape- give those youngsters something to do in their spare time.  Well, at least you can go on to the rest of Wingnut Wrapup today, secure in the knowledge that nothing you read below could possibly be more worthless than Matt's article. Tim Dunkin, Renew America:  " It would appear that my predictions for election night were quite a bit off. I know that at this point, I'm supposed to write out a big mea culpa for being off so badly...But I'm not going to.  This is because I don't think I was wrong." Of course not, Tim.  You were right, right, right!  It's the universe that was wrong. Jen Schroder, Renew America:  "Peaceful warning to U.S. government & guide to petitions to secede by...

That sure was one short democracy. From the New York Times: "With a constitutional assembly on the brink of collapse and protesters battling the police in the streets over the slow pace of change, President Mohamed Morsi issued a decree on Thursday granting himself broad powers above any court as the guardian of Egypt’s revolution, and used his new authority to order the retrial of Hosni Mubarak.  Mr. Morsi, an Islamist and Egypt’s first elected president, portrayed his decree as an attempt to fulfill popular demands for justice and protect the transition to a constitutional democracy. But the unexpected breadth of the powers he seized raised immediate fears that he might become a new strongman. Seldom in history has a postrevolutionary leader amassed so much personal power only to relinquish it swiftly. “An absolute presidential tyranny,” Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of the dissolved Parliament and prominent political scientist, wrote in an online commentary. “Egypt is facing...

John McCain's current pack of rage over the nonexistent Benghazi scandal: "I am somewhat surprised and frustrated to read reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was responsible for removing references to Al-Qaeda from the unclassified talking points about the Benghazi attack that Ambassador Susan Rice and other officials used in the early days after September 11, 2012. I participated in hours of hearings in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week regarding the events in Benghazi, where senior intelligence officials were asked this very question, and all of them – including the Director of National Intelligence himself – told us that they did not know who made the changes. Now we have to read the answers to our questions in the media. There are many other questions that remain unanswered. But this latest episode is another reason why many of us are so frustrated with, and suspicious of, the actions of this Administration whe...

In their willingness to pander to the most uneducated, stupid and vicious of their few remaining followers: "LANSING - Today Lansing Republicans held a hearing on House Bills 5684 and 5685 in the Tax Policy Committee, which would give a tax credit for unborn fetuses past 12 weeks of gestation...Lansing Republicans eliminated a state tax credit for parents with children last year" These are not just ideologues or craven liars (they are that, of course,) but truly evil people who will stoop to anything to serve their rich masters and preserve their place of power, no matter how much damage it does to others.  The single comfort we can take as we are forced to watch this sickening display is that, if the recent election is any sign, there is no prospect any time soon that they can actually regain power with this strategy.  Unfortunately, that does not mean that they cannot do horrible damage to millions before they are finally consigned to the dustbin of history.