This has been a great week in America.
1. A bill was passed by the Senate that includes indefinite detention in internment camps by the military of American citizens without warrant or due process. The GOP and too many Democrats have been working hard for 12 years to totally destroy any adherence to the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Habeas Corpus. Why not throw the post-Civil War Posse Comitatus laws in the dust bin of history, too? As Sen Graham said, “the Homeland is the Battlefield”. To which I say: A hearty Sieg Heil, Senator Graham.
2. The Senate and House were on the verge of passage of the Kill the Internet so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (House) or the Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act (Senate); better known as the “We the corporations and governments will take over the Internet and destroy any site on which people dare to speak truth to power act.” The bill was written, of course, not out of an act of conscience by members of Congress, but by Motion Picture Association of America. It is very important that the 99% ability to communicate and speak truth to power be squelched as soon as possible by a bill that pretty much abolishes the role of the judiciary and due process, and puts the corporate oligarchy in control of shutting down just about any web site they want to, on their say so alone. We don’t need no stinkin’ due process or judiciary anymore.
3. Then yesterday Grover Norquist strolled through Congress and explained to his Republican followers and worshipers that the payroll tax cut on the middle class and poor must be allowed to expire, because it is not the same as the tax cut on the 1%, the Bush tax cuts that have helped produce the current deficit, which must NOT be allowed to expire. Glad Grover cleared that up. By the way, it was recently revealed his whole total opposition to taxes philosophy came to him when he was 12 years old. Why am I not surprised?
As for the true ruler of the Republican Party, Grover Norquist, I think the comment by Dennis G. on the blog quoted above sums it up pretty well.
The Grover has spoken. A tax increase on millions of Americans is not actually a tax increase because the Social Security Tax Holiday is temporary and will expire without Congressional action to extend it. But, The Grover does not apply the same logic to every temporary tax cut with an expiration date
As a demigod who makes the rule, The Grover can also break them. In a complete flip-flop, The Grover has also ruled that letting the temporary Bush Tax cuts for the top 1% expire in January 2013 would be increasing taxes. Strange are the ways of The Grover and one should never expect consistency from a conservative grifter demigod.
On Thursday, he gave his minions marching orders. An extension of the Tax Holiday and unemployment benefits would be OK as long as they are not paid for by asking that any millionaire might be forced to cut back on their caviar allowance by even the smallest tax on their earnings above $1,000,000.
Sacrifice is needed, but it must come from the poor and the middle-class.
Congressional Republicans have come up with a plan for a ritual sacrifice of workers that is crafted to appease The Grover. Instead of asking any of the Nation’s 300,000 millionaire to pay their share, they will ask all Federal Employees to pay for the extension of the tax holiday and unemployment benefit through payroll freezes and the elimination of 200,000 workers from the work force.
Jobs will be destroyed, more people will suffer and gap between the 99% and the 1% will get wider, but sacrificing workers is how Modern Conservatives engage in the ritual blood sacrifice that The Grover demands. And The Grover—above all other oaths and all other Gods—must be appeased or you will face his terrible vengeance.
And what is “Conservative” about the GOP Masters of the Universe, anyway? I think Robert Reich has it right in his comments in the following.
They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.
They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.
They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.
What kind of society do Republicans want? It looks like social Darwinism.
