Solar flare hits Koch brothers' group in Georgia

Georgia Public Safety Commissioners (L-R) Tim Echols, Doug Everett, Stan Wise, and Lauren "Bubba" McDonald, Jr.
Commissioner Chuck Eaton participated by phone.

 "Americans for Prosperity just lost," said the solar power activist, moments after the Georgia Public Service Commission, a group of five elected Republicans who regulate the state's utilities, voted 3-2, Thursday, to accept an amendment that would add 525 megawatts of solar power for the state's electricity customers over the next 20 years. "AFP Georgia," he added, "is going down."

American for Prosperity is a conservative community activist group funded by Charles and David Koch, whose Koch Industries is in the fossil fuel and power plant business, among other things. They also already have a rather large footprint in the Peach State, where their wholly owned subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, a paper and wood products company, is headquartered.

(The Kochs have also lobbied members of Congress not to tax polluters, and sign their "No Climate Tax Pledge.")

The AFP in Georgia was mobilized to take on what should have been a no-brainer in a solidly red state, resistant to new things - to say that solar was too unreliable, too expensive and costs people jobs. They also don't like it because it gets incentives from the Obama administration.

Tea Party Patriots pose during a break in the PSC proceedings.

But just because the big guys were behind it, it doesn't mean all of the state's conservative groups marched in lockstep with them. The Tea Party Patriots, one of the oldest TP organizations in the country, fell in with the solar industry, to form what original Tea Party co-founder, Debbie Dooley calls a "Green Tea Coalition."

"When this issue first came up," admits Tea Party Patriot, Ed Painter, who attended Thursday's PSC hearing, "I had the same reaction that most conservatives had on solar power, which is absolutely negative. It was uneconomical, uncompetitive crony capitalism." Painter said that this plan is different because it "is a free market plan, where in the end, the consumers stand to benefit greatly." Because of that, he said, "It changed my mind, not on how solar power is done in general, but on this project."

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Throwing stones at Goliath – the frustrating fight for the states

Lest you thought you could stop and revel in the leaf turning another few degrees leftward through the political arc, with November victories muting many of the worst DC ogres and trolls in their teabag hats, December comes with its season of deception, and reminds us all that the fight for a progressive America is not just what happens in a room with the president, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority Leader. We were all so busy admiring our woodcarving handiwork, we’ve forgotten that this is a country full of Tea Party termites, happy to lull us into a sense of accomplishment for what our efforts presented to the world, while state by state, they chew at the infrastructure of community interdependence that built our nation. If we are not more vigilant, we will be staring at a husk that turns to dust when flicked by an American flag rat tail, wielded by an uninformed, ignorant electorate.
What happened the past five days in the great state of Michigan is neither the opening salvo of our battle against our big-money foe, nor is it the last arrow in their quiver. It was exactly two years ago this week, when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), fresh off his election, announced he was going to seek to curtail collective bargaining for the public sector unions in the Badger State. Neither unions nor AWOL state senators were able to stop the Koch brothers’ acolyte, Walker. The support from Democrats, on the national level, was almost non-existent, as the unions sought to punish Walker for his about face, with a failed recall election.
What these two similar events demonstrate is that the sleeping giant of conservatism lives in the state legislatures...
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Obama defends gay unions while Republicans attack Lincoln's Union

"In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party...
"But ideology cannot be a substitute for a determination to think for yourself, for a willingness to study an issue objectively...
"Our political system is losing its ability to even explore alternatives. If fealty to these pledges continues to expand, legislators may pledge their way into irrelevance. Voters will be electing a slate of inflexible positions rather than a leader."
- Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), in his concession letter to the GOP voters of Indiana, after his loss, Tuesday, to Tea Party favorite Richard Mourdock in the Indiana Republican Senate Primary

Hyper-partisanship leads to hyperbole: we are in a civil war in America, for the soul of the Constitution. Those who grip tightly to the politics of division are enemies of the republic, and destroyers of our union.
If you grew up in the South, as I did, you know that for many of your neighbors, Lee may have surrendered the Confederacy, but so-called Southern Pride did not acquiesce - not in 1865 at Appomattox, and not in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act. The 1976 campaign of the "reformed" segregationist, George Wallace, for the Republican presidential nomination, showed Ronald Reagan that there was a strong anti-Kennedy/Johnson/Democrat undercurrent in the Old South, waiting to be resuscitated. So Reagan gave them a platform, and a party. His "Southern strategy" made the party of Lincoln's Union the voice of Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederacy, a viciously conservative chorus of racists, homeschoolers and homophobes - Bible thumpers who believe surrender to ignorance is the only way back into the Garden, as if critical thinking, by itself, is responsible for the Fall of Man.
If Mourdock becomes the Junior Senator from Indiana, Lugar warns in his letter, "his answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook." The Tea Party, then, wants more than just control over the three branches of our federal government - they want this to be a country that takes a stand, on principle, against everything from homosexuality to Islam.
Lugar's resounding defeat to an admitted political isolationist, and North Carolina's insistence on an amendment to the state constitution, taking away relationship rights from committed couples, is as powerful a barrage on the civil structure and protections of our federal government as the Confederacy firing at Fort Sumter, 151 years ago.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar and Committee member Barack Obama at a base where mobile launch missiles are being destroyed by the Nunn-Lugar program. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Into this structural distress of our Union, where extremism commands the media, drops Wednesday's revelation that Barack Obama, President of the United States, is personally, publicly supporting the right of gay and lesbian Americans to legally marry. "I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married," the president told ABC News' Robin Roberts, in a hastily arranged interview.
Reacting to Obama's declaration, presumptive GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, reiterated his belief that "States are able to make decisions with regards to domestic partnership benefits," and went on to describe the entire discussion as "a very tender and sensitive topic, as are many social issues."
Setting aside Romney's hesitation to assume an unequivocal position, civil rights are not a "social issue;" they are an issue based on the freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution. Indeed, the freedom to be who you are is an essential part of being an American. Because of our country's sordid history of slavery and Jim Crow, there is, perhaps understandably, the desire to think of bigotry and the struggle for civil rights as the sole realm of the African American experience. But this is a civil rights issue as well, because it punishes members of the LGBT community, taking away from them the right to commit their love to someone for the rest of their lives, with all the benefits of partnership available to married heterosexuals.
The over 30 states that have voted to ban gay marriage - either through law or an amendment to the state's constitution - are not endowing new rights to one-man-one-woman couples with their specific definition of marriage; they are disenfranchising committed couples from the economic and other partnership rights a legal, civil marriage allows. In North Carolina, that now includes committed heterosexual couples who choose not to marry.
In his ABC interview, President Obama acknowledged that although some are eager to engage our American penchant for supposedly Christian, moral superiority, "when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated...and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and, hopefully, the better I’ll be as president."
Despite that meaningful, moral justification for his decision, there are still many on the far right who feel Barack Obama is the ultimate anti-American, whose presidency puts "our future as a sovereign nation...at risk."
"[W]e shall not have any coarse (sic) but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November," writes Ponch McPhee, the editor of the March newsletter of the Republican Party of Greene County, Virginia, "This Republic cannot survive for 4 more years underneath this political socialist ideologue."
One hopes they heed the advice of Abraham Lincoln, who warned, in his first inaugural address:

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend it.'"

-PBG

Elections 2010: A Requiem for Reason

American reason should not be an oxymoron, and irrationality should not be the flame that powers our politics. We are smarter than that.

It is hard not to feel, that in a year where candidates use fictional beheadings, claim there is shariya law in American communities, and make hay about some stupid, bong-induced college prank, all in an effort to rile up people to vote for them, our ability to reason has gone into hibernation.

Imagine you are watching a magician perform on stage, and he has just "levitated" his lovely assistant. As she floats horizontally in front of him, her gown draping from her long legs toward the floor, the magician dramatically runs a hoop around her body, from head to foot and back again. He performs this maneuver because he wants to convince you that what you are witnessing is real, that the beautiful woman in front of him is actually floating. You know it cannot possibly be real, that this is some kind of trick, and still, you let your mind suspend reality for just a moment or two, and allow yourself to entertain the notion of, "But, what if it is?"

That moment of cognitive dissonance gives us a buzz. Serotonin, that lovely neurotransmitter, makes us feel we fit wonderfully and perfectly in this moment of universal time, validates us for who we are, what we are, and with whom we associate ourselves. There is no such thing as unsound judgment, because by allowing ourselves to suspend reality, we can believe that everything we think, feel and hear is actually happening. A woman is floating, ungrounded, in mid-air. Headless torsos are rotting in the Arizona desert. People in Dearborn, Michigan, are having their hands chopped off and being stoned to death. There is an anti-Christian cult of students at Baylor University that ties up young women and makes them bow to Aqua Buddha.

We believe these things because we want to, or don't in the case of the Aqua Buddha story. (The funny thing is, that even though Jack Conway's story about Rand Paul is the closest to a real event, it backfired because the Democrat's insistence that this was a legitimate campaign issue jumped the shark. Ahh, irony.)

That brings us to Saturday's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" on the National Mall, in Washington, DC.  There was a bittersweet air about the crowd, at once poking fun at this year's insane political discourse...

[caption id="attachment_409" align="alignleft" width="143" caption="Photo by Annie Parker"][/caption]

while at the same time, lamenting the power it had over a frighteningly large amount of the electorate.

The craziness of this election, as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert pointed out, played out under the shimmering lights and fog machine clouds of 24-hour cable news, all helping us get that cognitive dissonance rush, because like a magic show, in order for a medium like television to work, we have to believe - even if it's only for a moment - that everything we are witnessing is real.

For Stewart, reality is the give-and-take, community mentality that gets people from different backgrounds and beliefs through the Lincoln Tunnel. He's right that sometimes, the light at the end of the tunnel is not the Promised Land, but New Jersey. The thing is, the rational, sane way to look at life as part of our American community, is that the light at the end of the tunnel may never be what we want or expect or think we deserve. But it's the light in which we live.

Don't forget to vote, and make that light just a little brighter.

- PBG

This time, it really is Daddy Warbucks' war

"I love money, I love power, I love capitalism."

- "Daddy Warbucks," from the Broadway musical, Annie (1982)

It's not hyperbole, or the overused metaphor of the battle for electoral victory. It's a war for political power - a war fought with ammunition of bucks rather than bullets.

Ho hum, you say? A tiresome analogy?

Look at how much money Tea Party darlings Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell have raised recently: $14 million for Ms. "Second Amendment remedies," compared to only $2 million for her opponent, incumbent Sen. Harry Reid - and that amount is only $5 million short of what the Senate majority leader has raised since he began soliciting for this election cycle back in 2005; and Ms. "I'm not a witch" has raised, since the Delaware primary in mid-September, $3.8 million, twice as much as Democrat Chris Coons.

In this war, O'Donnell and Rand Paul, Angle and Marco Rubio are not political pioneers, but cannon fodder for the super rich backing up the Right's rear flank. People like the Koch brothers push these Kool-Aid® drinking greenhorns out on the front line, telling them they are leading the charge, "taking the country back," and meanwhile, the truly scary maniacs are hiding in the background.

In this war, Gen. Palin raises the  money and Col. Beck raises the hackles of weakened minds, and they are only two of a handful who can control the crazy corporals who are zealously rattling their sabers and flapping their gums on the front lines. It's not that they are smarter or less insane than their troops. They were just out there first.

With groups backed by relentless Republicans, like Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, spending buckets of money on ads against Congressional Democratic candidates that are either misleading or just plainly false, "campaign finance reform in this country is virtually dead," as columnist David Corn put it, Friday, "and that means any entity with a lot of money -- a corporation, a billionaire, a union -- can pour as much cash as it wants into an effort to rig the political system in its favor."

It is up to us, the real America, to not let money win the power it salivates for so greedily. This is our country, and - in this the Tea Partiers are right - we have lost control of it.  Vote, and remind those with riches that money doesn't vote. People do.

- PBG

Religion poll equates dense, Tea Party dunce demographic to Christian right

"On many important political and social issues, Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement also hold views similar to the views of Americans who identify with the Christian conservative movement..."

- Public Religion Research Institute, October 5, 2010

There may not be much of a surprise here, but a new poll published by the Public Religion Research Institute says that chances are, if you are White, non-Hispanic, call Fox News your "most trusted source of news about politics and current events," and prefer extreme Christian social values, you are supporting the Tea Party and its unhinged cabal of crazy candidates in this year's midterm election.

The biennial poll, conducted by the PRRI every two years since 2006, found that more than half (57%) of those in the ultra-conservative, Palin embracing, DeMint encouraged social conservatives in the Tea Party "consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement." I guess it could be worse, considering the survey also found that more than 8-in-10 of them call themselves Christians.

 

[caption id="attachment_358" align="alignright" width="477" caption="What would Jesus do? This sign from the October 2, 2010, One Nation demonstration on the National Mall, in Washington, DC, has an idea, one with which the Tea Party may not agree. (photo by Carole Keith)"][/caption]

 

To bring home the point that these are not just fiscally-conscious, socially accepting Libertarians, the poll, which PRRI calls the American Values Survey, points out that almost two-of-three Tea Partiers surveyed are against abortion "in all or most cases," and less than 20% support gay marriage. (I would have thought that number was much worse.)

They are also - no surprise here - overwhelmingly Republican, with basically three-of-four saying they always vote GOP, and more than eight-of-ten (83%) saying they will be supporting Republican candidates in November.

Daily Beast columnist and "Wingnuts" author John Avlon, in a March column, called it "Obama Derangement Syndrome—pathological hatred of the president posing as patriotism," and says this "demonizing of our president" has "infected the Republican Party."

The more appropriate and timeless quote may be the one from Jonathan Swift, which appears as the epigraph of the John Kennedy Toole classic, "A Confederacy of Dunces." Swift said:

"When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him."

-PBG

When the election fix is in, Congress is in a fix

"...the current system of privately financed campaigns for election to the House of Representatives has the capacity... to undermine democracy..."

- Fair Elections Now Act (H.R. 1826), Title I

Our electoral system has been stolen from the people who need it most by the people who care about us the least. The irony is that those who fight entitlements the loudest are the ones taking the most from our tax coffers. Corporate money interferes with democracy, beguiles Congress and suckles at the government breast with such unfettered access that the rest of the people are ignored like we are the runt of Mother Country's litter. It is an issue that is Right and Left, front and center.

Republican strategist Mark McKinnon called it a "broken trust," when he addressed the Coffee Party Convention in Louisville, Kentucky on last Saturday. "Congress now ranks sixteenth among public institutions when it comes to trust," he pointed out, "behind big business, and even the media." The people, he said, feel "unable to impact the process because money has taken over the process."

"It's a mad, mad merry-go-round, where Congress endlessly chases campaign cash, and voters can't even get a ticket for the ride."

On September 23, the Fair Elections Now Act came out of committee in the U.S. House. The bill sets up a matching funding system for Congressional campaigns, with fundraising limits based on the number of US Congressional districts in each state. Like presidential elections, Candidates can opt into this fund and run on a more competitive field, or they can opt-out, and collect from big donors. Regardless, under the terms of the bill, "Joint fundraising committees between candidates and parties would be prohibited," publicampaign.org says in its summary.

Unfortunately, Congress adjourned for the fall/mid-term election break before any action could be taken on the floor of the House. In fact, our elected representatives spend far more time raising money to get us to keep them in their jobs than they spend actually doing the work of the people - if by "people" you mean the corporate special interests.

David Donnelly, of the Public Campaign Action Fund, also appearing at the Coffee Party Convention, cited a Roll Call article that estimated that in September alone, Congress was in session only seven days, "but they would have held 415 fundraisers in our nation's capital."

[caption id="attachment_341" align="alignright" width="297" caption="David Donnelly addresses the Coffee Party Convention in Louisville, Kentucky at the end of September. (from livestream provided, via UStream, by 5 Steps Forward Media)"][/caption]

"That doesn't take into account the countless hours we know elected officials and candidates for office spend on the phone dialing-for-dollars," Donnelly added.

It's possible the bill may come to the floor of the House during the lame duck session following the election, especially if the fallout from the Citizens United decision has an obvious and profound influence on November 2. But it will only do that if we come together and call our Congressional leaders and make it happen. They may not know how serious we are, but they know we are here.

"Politicians' and elected officials' antennae are quivering right now," McKinnon said, "because they see what's happening with the Tea Party; they see what's happening here [with the Coffee Party]; they know that something's happening in America and they've got to do something about it."

-PBG

Tea bags and broomsticks

So it wasn't the trip to the altar she was expecting, nor the kind of sacrifice she wanted to make for love. I guess leaving blood on a Satanic altar is one way to lose your virginity. No wonder why the woman thinks lust is evil. To her, a penis is the same as a pitchfork.

But before we dismiss the crack-tea-pottery of Christine O'Donnell, let's keep in mind that the more a mama grizzly is cornered, the harder she scratches, especially when her cubbette is in trouble. She may be hiding behind Palin's skirts, but like Yosemite tourists behaving badly, the tea baggers will just keep leaving more food for the bears. The more resources they consume, the stronger they get; the harder they fight.

What killed Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware's Republican primary last week was low voter turnout. The caution expressed in this column after O'Donnell's den-mate, Rand Paul, won in Kentucky still holds true. We cannot say these people are unelectable, because they managed to get elected. So the only way we can get these folks out of politics is to vote them out, defensively. They may be clawing out only a small, conservative corner of the electorate, but they are noisy and get all the attention. Only the rational sanity of the majority of Americans showing up to vote can upstage the Tea Party spectacle.

So when Bill Maher reveals he has intercepted O'Donnell's owl-borne invitation to Hogwarts, we can laugh, but make sure you're guffawing all the way to the voting booth, that you're tittering as you present your voter ID, that you're snickering when you see Diebold across the voting screen, then just let your belly explode with laughter when you vote against these people. That way, when it's morning in America, it won't look as dark as the long, Alaskan winter night.

-PBG

The Perils of the Marginalizing of Rand Paul

Out of the Mainstream, into the Teapot

Let's start with this number: one-third. Depending on which question you go by, according to recent polls, around one of three American voters sympathize, empathize or otherwise endorse the efforts of the Tea Party. Granted, NBC points out in its poll with the Wall Street Journal, released this week, that of the 41% of voters who say they support the Tea people, 75% get their news from Glenn Beck and FOX News. An AP-GfK poll released last weekend says that one quarter of potential voters "called themselves supporters of the conservative tea party movement."

Enter Rand Paul, the new Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, with his election victory "message from the Tea Party," saying, "We have come to take our government back." The message goes even deeper than that. The Tea Party movement thrives on its marginalization by the "establishment," and we dismiss the group at the peril of all that is civil about America.

Before the sun was even cracking the horizon in Appalachia Wednesday morning, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had issued a press release critical of what it called Paul's "out-of-touch views to the general election electorate in Kentucky." It seems to me, that is exactly what got him elected - his out of touch views. Even his missteps with Rachel Maddow the next night only made the revolutionary tea baggers appreciate him even more.

Compare the DSCC's attempt to thwart Paul's momentum with that of his challenger in the GOP primary race, the McConnell backed Trey Grayson. Grayson issued one television ad accusing Paul of wanting to "hide his strange ideas." Senator McConnell issued an ad saying, "I know Trey Grayson and trust him." Trust from someone as inside Washington as the Senate minority leader doesn't go very far in an election where there is a pervasive, irrational loathing of incumbency. Despite the fact that Grayson even had the endorsement of Dick Cheney, he was just too "establishment."

"A lot of the things we [in the Tea Party] talk about are a chastisement to both parties," Paul told CBS News on Tuesday, before the polls closed, and both parties - like Wall Street before the collapse - are blind to the threatening rhetoric from those who walk in lockstep with Glenn Beck.

They would be wise to heed the words of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (D), who told CNN, "It was an anti-incumbency vote across the nation. If you ran against Washington, you did well."

That anti-Washington sentiment, and telling voters their candidates are outside the mainstream, will only embolden and strengthen their willingness to confront the status quo, now that the Tea Partiers have a face in the race.

-PBG

PoliticaSutra

The Passion of Political Partisanship

Partisan Politics requires three kinds of actions to thrive: to exist, through blind faith and bottomless financing; to replenish its adherents, luring them with passionate, serotonin inducing rhetoric, and fear of what happens if the other side gets control, that makes their hearts beat rapidly and their palm sweat in hungry anticipation; and to define the behavior of the adherents, so that everyone understands the amount of tunnel-vision necessary to maintain their roles, and the stubbornness required, to the survival of the dogma (which ups the passionate responses).

In the communities where political opinions are given more weight than they are probably worth, they are represented by three targets: money, passion and a strong belief in the moral high ground. In that way, the pervasive political partisanship assures adherents to their respective sides and gridlock in the political process.

As for passionate partisanship, it is further defined as the enjoyment of feeling that you sound, look, smell, feel and pray better than those whose politics you choose to despise, for they are your unholy adversary. Particular to this passion is the relationship between the talking point and the myopic mind, and the consciousness of pleasure from that contact, which is called partisan politics.

-PBG