Here’s the bottom line: if a measure proposed by Dems does not in some way line the pockets of Republican donors, then GOP members are opposed to it no matter how beneficial it might be for Americans. Can it be any clearer?  They are more than willing to kill Medicare, hold back funds for tornado victims and the unemployed, cut school funding, refuse to increase taxes for the top 2% of wage earners which would reduce the national debt but they are adamant about keeping subsidies for big oil while refusing to spend $7 billion over 5 years for a measure which benefits America’s schoolchildren and helps ensure a healthier nation.

Limbaugh then claimed that African Americans teach their children hatred of America, “Now, I know what you’re shouting at me. Wait a minute. This hasn’t happened in the black population. Yeah, it hasn’t.

Forged signatures of dead people have been discovered on Republican Party of Wisconsin recall petitions against Democratic senators, but Republicans are blaming their opponents for the forgeries. The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reported that Bill Pocan's signature was li …

Second, let's take a look at that "socialized medicine." What people advocate in its best form is modeled after places like Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Germany...perfectly capitalist, SUCCESSFUL nations. This is what Teabagger Hypocrite Supreme Santarpia is railing against, a healthcare system like they have in Sweden or Germany...which COSTS LESS than America's and yet delivers BETETR CARE.

He's losing it. It's only a matter of time before the men with the strait jacket show up. In Beckistan, not only is world controlled by Soros-funded liberals, but the GOP now wants to "politically assassinate" him and his fellow truth tellers, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.

If this strikes some as an example of the type of governmental tyranny that the Tea Party deplored (but never existed before in a state as far as we know), that is because it is.

The Tea Party - and the Republican Party - have shouted to the rooftops that local government and individual liberties are the true "patriotic" freedoms in America.

Yet, they elect a governor in Michigan who - as one of his first pieces of legislation - empowers himself to take those rights away, nullifying the will of the voters in a given town or city.

Now, in the Midwest and Republican-dominated states across the country, we are witnessing what a war on teachers really looks like. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's nuclear assault on public employees' collective bargaining and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's overheated claims that teacher pensions are bankrupting the state reveal a Republican Party bent on using its current electoral advantage to permanently cripple unions nationwide.

Yet, at the same time, Republicans in Washington are embracing the worst elements of the teachers unions' national education agenda, by insisting that the federal government should have a limited, possibly nonexistent, role in school policy. The result of what's happening at the state and federal levels could be a toxic combination for students and reverse years of hard-won education reform.

The Atlantic's Richard Florida generated some great graphs which showed that the march of Conservatism across America is correlated with a number of variables including religiosity, poverty, education, and the income level of a given state.

In the year leading up to and following the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the right-wing media engaged in a campaign to spread fear about what could happen if health care reform passed. One year after the health care reform was signed into law, Media Matters looks back at the most egregious attempts by the right-wing media to scare the American public into opposing the legislation.

It would be safe to say that most Republicans think that it is morally wrong to take wealth from the rich and redistribute it to the poor. It's also a safe bet that most Democrats think that Sarah Palin is rather stupid.

A recent study by economist Gary Richardson of the University of California-Irvine should cause partisans in both camps to change their assumptions.

Week, after week, after week, American families have learned more about the wrong spending priorities in the Republican spending bill. From slashing national security and veterans benefits to backing away from our commitments to education and research, House Republicans only protect their special interests, not the middle class.

The right-wing in America is committed to reducing the deficit on the backs of the middle-class and the poor. They are all for cutting the salaries of teachers and the benefits of seniors. And the rich have to pitch in as well by accepting painful reductions in…..taxes.

Today on a conference call with reporters, Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer blasted House Republicans over their refusal to negotiate on spending cuts. It left a strong impression that America should prepare itself for a government shutdown on March 5th.

A couple of months ago, former senator and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth (R) expressed some concern about the direction of his party.

"If Dick Lugar," Danforth said, "having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption."

As events in Egypt showed, you never know what will set off mass protest.

Here at home, over-reaching by a novice Republican governor of Wisconsin has finally triggered the protest marches that have been eerily missing during the more than three years of an economic crisis that has savaged the middle and bottom and rewarded the top.

It's not as if we lack a politics of class. As mega-investor Warren Buffett famously said, there is plenty of class warfare in America, but the billionaire class is winning.

Read the census data that have been coming out over the past couple weeks and you're compelled to a stark conclusion: Either the Republican Party changes totally, or it has a rendezvous with extinction.

What the census shows is that America's racial minorities, aggregated together, are on track to become its majority. The Republican Party's response to this epochal demographic change has been to do everything in its power to keep America (particularly its electorate) as white as can be. Republicans have obstructed minorities from voting; required Latinos to present papers if the police ask for them; opposed the Dream Act, which would have conferred citizenship on young immigrants who served in our armed forces or went to college; and called for denying the constitutional right to citizenship to American-born children of undocumented immigrants.

You cannot be fair in your historical evaluation of Ronald Reagan if you don't look at the terrible damage his economic policies did to this country.

When, for instance, the unemployment figure reached 9.5 percent—or, more accurately, 16.5 percent if we include the people who had given up looking—in the summer of 2010, some of the lost jobs could be attributed to the failure of Congress to appropriate funds to replace lost state and local revenue in time for localities to retain their needed staffing levels of police, firefighters, schoolteachers, and the like; a legislative package was purposely delayed in the Senate by a combination of single-senator holds and party-line obstructionist votes. But bad employment numbers were actually good news for Republicans, as they were roundly interpreted as evidence of the failure of the Obama administration's economic policies and therefore increased the likelihood of strong Republican showings in the coming November midterm elections.

They made lots of promises -- and they already have broken many as they came out of the gate.

Rep. Michele Bachmann earned her law degree from televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University, but that doesn't necessarily mean her alma mater backs her possible presidential bid. The dean of the university's Pat Robertson School of Government thinks her response to President Obama's State of the Union address was unwise and stated that she's too inexperienced to make it to the Oval Office just yet.

Dr. Charles W. Dunn, dean of Regent University's Robertson School of Government, spoke with the American Family Association's OneNewsNow, and said he thinks that Bachmann is "articulate, attractive, and bright" but her tea party response to Obama was "unwise."

For the next hour, we begin with the president of the United States addressing the nation and calling for a massive investment in this country's infrastructure, rebuffing the idea of giant tax breaks for the richest Americans, and warning anyone who would dare touch Social Security to keep their hands off.

You want to talk about red meat for the base? Listen to some of the language the president used. "Workers have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. And a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society." Wow.

How about this one? "Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice."

Last October, ThinkProgress helped break the story about the secretive twice annual meetings convened by Koch Industries owners Charles and David Koch. The meetings — which have been attended by top bankers, oil industry executives, two Supreme Court justices, Republican leaders, conservative fundraisers, and hate talks like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck — have been forums for election-related coordination and political strategy. In addition to judges, "journalists" like Tim Carney, Stephen Moore, and Michael Barone have attended the meetings and received funding from the Koch donors. The next event is this weekend in Rancho Mirage, California.

In substance, Bachmann's message was essentially the same as Ryan's -- a series of misleading statements about Obama's steering of the economy, dire warnings about the national debt -- but her tone was more strident. Where Ryan opened with a conciliatory-sounding acknowledgment that Obama inherited "a severe fiscal and economic situation," Bachmann trotted out a chart (PDF) of unemployment numbers under Bush and Obama that nowhere noted the crash of the stock market under the Bush administration. And Bachmann, unlike Ryan, failed to send a kind word out to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who is struggling to recover from a gunshot wound to the head.

But in assessing any president, it's more illuminating to focus on what he did rather than the bombast delivered to the rubber-chicken-and-mashed-potato circuit. Early in his political career, as governor of California, Reagan displayed his pragmatic side, signing an abortion bill and agreeing to a $1-billion state tax hike. Similarly, as president, he paid lip service to ending abortion but never did anything about it, and he worked with congressional Democrats on a massive tax hike in 1982, thereby averting the worst effects of the supply-side deficit spending he had endorsed when he entered office the year before.

Moreover, Reagan, the putative foe of big government, accumulated hundreds of billions in debt by the end of his second term. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who cleaned up the mess, leaving a budget surplus behind in 2000.

Question for the tea party and everyone who voted for tea party Republicans in November: Did you enjoy your purely cosmetic vote to repeal the health care reform law? Personally, I would feel pandered to, and not particularly satisfied with all of that fiscally expensive congress …

The new RNC chair Reince Priebus, implicated in Americans for Prosperity's voter-caging scandal, carried a lot of water for the Koch-led group in Wisconsin. Now he's rewarded.

In other words, the new RNC Chair is a Tea Partier.

What the Arizona Republic calls a "nasty little battle" has broken out among Republican members of Arizona's Legislative District 20 in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

It isn't true, actually. The religious right is central to the Republican coalition and more importantly, it's central to their organizing. The Tea Party is a flash in the pan compared to the churches. And while it's true that the Tea party isn't organized around social conservatism, you'll find that Tea Partiers themselves don't always know that:

There's an old Bill Cosby routine, called "Shop", on the album Why Is There Air? that is quite apposite to the events of the past two days. In it, Cosby describes how his junior-high-school shop teacher tricked the guilty party into tacitly confessing to having put a bullet in the shop class furnace — and without directly accusing the kid or even so much as saying his name. With the right-wing attacks on Pima County, Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, we're seeing something rather similar play out.

Some of the Republican Party's most prominent donors reacted Tuesday with shock — and then fury — to Michael Steele's decision to seek re-election, bluntly warning that they would not raise money for the party if the controversial chairman wins another term.
None of the contributors has a vote on the committee, but with worries about the debt-ridden party's finances hanging over Steele, the unambiguous threats could further undermine the incumbent's already-dim prospects for victory.

As Obama seeks to tighten federal control over local schools and boost accountability, he faces a tough battle with incoming GOP lawmakers, who advocate "parental rights" and tax credits for home schooling. When it comes to school reform, President Obama and his secretary of Ed …

I understand that the ignorant, backwards people in the country also need to be heard and need a political party to belong to. And the Republican Party does serve that purpose but are they good for anything else? I find it truly laughable how Republicans defend someone who has no clue such as the likes of a Sarah Palin or to vote for a President twice like George W. Bush who think being a regular guy or woman is what this country needs. Bush brought the Office of the Presidency to new lows and these Republican idiots want Sarah Palin to do the same exact thing. Do they care? Not a chance!

The overlap between white supremacists and white religious fundamentalists in the US has historically been large, particularly during the Civil Rights era. When big business Republicans targeted southern white segregationist voters, they also adopted the agenda of religious conservatives. While the two groups have successfully focused on the common enemy of progressive ideology, the fight for the soul of the party has never been far from the surface.

After a tough six months which culminated in Republicans taking control of the US House and picking up Senate seats in the 2010 election, many started to ask if President Barack Obama was destined to be a one termer, but something interesting has happened.

The Republican political machine spent over 30 years rigging both our economy and government in favor of corporations and the Super Rich. The result has been a badly broken economy with constantly dropping standards of living for the formerly large middle classes and a democracy severely undermined by corporate money.

After the 2010 Republican tide, corporatism hiding behind a fake "Tea Party populist image" runs everything. Expect things for working Americans to get much worse real fast.

President Obama lowered taxes. Why doesn't the country know that? Rick Perlstein on how Rush Limbaugh helped mislead a nation—and why the Democrats let him get away with it.

For instance, the Journal completely underplays the extraordinarily important role outside, non-grassroots, entities have played in propping up Tea Parties. Outside players like Fox News, right-wing billionaire David Koch, and Washington insider Dick Armey. Instead, the Journal sticks to the preferred Tea Party script of an authentic grassroots uprising.

The Journal also reports that Tea Party groups were instrumental in Scott Brown's Massachusetts win earlier this year; a claim that not even the Republican senator thinks is true.

But perhaps most amazing is how the Journal lets Tea Party founders claim that the conservative, anti-Obama movement was a reaction against Republicans, and that their anger was aimed at Republican members of Congress.

Huh??

Misleading fliers are showing up on the windshields of vehicles at a predominately African-American polling place in Houston that claim to come from a non-existent group called the "Black Democratic Trust of Texas."

Michelle Bachmann rose to national attention with her call for the news media to conduct an investigation of Congress for un-American policies. What could be more un-American than promoting the offshoring of American jobs? That is what Republicans favor.

Who says the Tea Party is intolerant? Indeed, aside from playing Nazi dress-up as a father/son bonding experience, you can do and say just about anything... as long as you want to "take back your country."

News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress, a source close to the company told POLITICO.

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. --By Matt Taibbi

Sarah Palin racked up a pretty impressive win-loss record in this year's Republican primaries, with her endorsement propelling women from the back of the pack to victory in at least three states -- Nevada, Delaware and South Carolina.

Hey, look, Christine O'Donnell joined the Twitter! When did this happen? No matter: Hooray, now we can Follow her and read cryptic 140-character gibberish-blurbs about her adventures as she travels across Delaware, using her virginity to bewitch all the grumpy white people who want to take America back (from "what," exactly, we don't know. Oh right! That black man).

The Tea Partiers have a point. Officially, the Republican Party stands for low taxes and limited government. But save during the gridlocked 1990s, Republican majorities and Republican presidents have tended to pass tax cuts while putting off spending cuts till a tomorrow that never comes.

Conservatives have justified this failure with two incompatible theories. One is the "starve the beast" conceit, which holds that cutting taxes will force government spending downward. The other is the happy idea that tax cuts actually increase government revenue, making deficit anxieties irrelevant.

The real world hasn't been kind to either notion. Cutting taxes without cutting spending, the Cato Institute's William Niskanen has shown, may make voters more likely to support big government, because spending feels like a free lunch. And while some tax cuts can raise government revenue, the income-tax cuts of the Bush years emphatically did not.

Healthcare is simple: Repeal, add malpractice reform and John McCain's old plan to allow people to purchase healthcare "across state lines," also known as the plan to allow every insurance company to relocate to whichever state ends up with the least regulation of their horrible practices. Expand HSAs. Keep the bit about preexisting conditions, which has turned out to be pretty popular. And "permanently prohibit taxpayer funding of abortion," one of the very few sops to the social conservatives in this documents.

Tea Party Republican candidates are running for Senate seats all across the country. Their mission is to obstruct and repeal, turning back the clock on President Obama's agenda-from health care, to the economy, to education. In short, the Tea Partiers are the most extreme candidates the GOP has to offer.

Take Christine O'Donnell, the Sarah Palin-backed Tea Party Senate candidate in Delaware. She's so far out of the mainstream that even the Delaware Republican Party has called her "reckless," "hypocritical" and "dishonest."

Unencumbered by any moral imperative to be truthful, some anti-immigration activists and politicians have no qualms about demonizing immigrants with half-truths and outright lies.

It is different when you hear it from political figures like Graham or John (Immigrants are God's children, too) McCain (R-Ariz.), who not long ago were champions of comprehensive reform. Theirs is just a cynical vote-getting game.

The CNN Opinion Research Poll, released July 2, shows an astounding 81% favoring the creation of a program allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the country to apply for legal status, subject to having a job and paying back taxes.

It's interesting that the same poll also shows that while 55% favor Arizona's SB 1070, 50% believe it will not reduce illegal immigration and 54% believe it will lead to discrimination against Hispanics.

As for the underlying D'Souza article that inspired Gingrich, what is there to be said? When last was there such a brazen outburst of race-baiting in the service of partisan politics at the national level? George Wallace took more care to sound race-neutral.

The Republican Party of Delaware has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing one of its own Senate candidates of illegally collaborating with the Tea Party Express.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I've ever heard. Ever. This Story A civil rights fairy tale

Media Matters, which has raised the torturing of Fox News to a high art, has come up with a new one: The group is trying to run an ad touting News Corporation's widely-reported $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association -- on Fox, during Bill O'Reilly's show.

The first president of the United States, George Washington, was not a member of any political party at the time of his election or throughout his tenure as president. Furthermore, he hoped that political parties would not be formed, fearing conflict and stagnation. Nevertheless, the beginnings of the American two-party system emerged from his immediate circle of advisers. (source: Wikipedia.com)

There have been a number of political parties throughout the history of the United States. Some were never large enough to have an elected official at the Federal level. Others only lasted a short time.

We currently have two main parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. A third large block of voters call themselves Independents, not giving their allegiance to either of the main two parties.

In each political Party, there are also subsets. For example, there are those who call themselves Progressive Democrats, Conservative Democrats, Liberal Republicans, Conservative Republicans, etc., etc.. This sometimes makes it difficult for an entire Party to speak with one voice.

Since, usually, it is difficult for all parties to speak in one place without a lot of conflict, I have posted this article for that purpose. Everybody is welcome, and all that I ask is to not put a political figure or another political Party down. Please tell us what your political Party and political ideology is, and why that is your choice.

Note: This is not for having a discussion about political candidates or government representatives, but for discussing political ideology.

These conspiracy theories in turn build off chain e-mails that have been circulating since at least 2008, portraying Obama as a Muslim Marxist Manchurian Candidate determined to undermine the Republic from within -- a fright wing fantasy that has proliferated via the internet. Depressingly, a CNN poll earlier this month found that 27 percent of all Americans believe that Obama was either definitely or probably not born in the USA -- a belief shared by 41 percent of Republicans.

"chain e-mails"... Now we know who the people are who fall for the Nigerian scams. If the right wing population is believing what they are reading in "chain e-mails", no wonder they are so misinformed. Now I can understand how they can believe information they hear from Rush Limbaugh, or FAUX news. A perfect example of the fall of American education. :(

Scholars continue to debate the psychological and sociological origins of conspiracy theories, but there is no arguing that these theories have seen a revival on the extreme right in recent years. Over the last two decades, a far-right conspiracy culture of self-proclaimed "Patriots" has emerged in which the United States government itself is viewed as a mortal threat to everything from constitutional democracy to the survival of the human race. This conspiracy revival -- which has been accompanied by the explosive growth of Patriot groups over the last year and a half -- kicked into overdrive with the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, who is seen by Patriots as a foreign-born Manchurian candidate sent by forces of the so-called "New World Order" to destroy American sovereignty and institute one-world socialist government.

The attack on the Fourteenth Amendment by conservative politicians is nothing more than a red herring, albeit a very dangerous one .

Meanwhile, the second big issues of the culture war is quietly taking over: a woman's right to choose. The Republican Party this year, without actually talking about it, is nominating a group of candidates for top of the ticket races that are more extreme on the issue of abortion than any other slate of top-of-the-ticket candidates in any year.

In Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle says the government should force women to bear the children of rape and incest, that it might be part of God's purpose.

And in Colorado, the frontrunner for the Republican Senate bid, Ken Buck, says he doesn't believe "in the exceptions of rape or incest."

Everyone who has even breifly glanced at the news coming out of Washington since President Obama took office, knows that the Republicans have been operating in "Sour Grapes" mode. As a group, they have blocked more legislation in the Senate during 18 months, than any group of Senators in United States history.

Sometimes, not so easily seen, are Republicans operating in "Sour Grapes" mode individually.

For example, Arizona Senator John McCain requested a report from retired Gen. James Clapper. Spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said "until that report is provided, Senator McCain will continue to hold his nomination."

The hold is a procedural tool individual senators can use to block nominations. This could delay Clapper's confirmation vote until after the August recess, which begins this weekend.

Our government could make a lot more progress, and do a lot more good for our country, if only we could get rid of all those "Sour Grapes"!

For the better part of the past year, Republicans have tried to come up with a new agenda for the American people with mixed results. However, with the Tea Party now the most potent force in Republican politics, and with the recent launch of the Tea Party Caucus on Capitol Hill garnering the support of Republican leaders like National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Pete Sessions and Republican Caucus Chair Mike Pence, the Republican Party agenda has become clear. Republican leaders and Tea Party-supported Republican candidates can now rally around the "Republican Tea Party Contract on America" as the blueprint for how they would govern.

According to the New York Times, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data, now after five terms, Chief Justice John Roberts' Supreme Court is "the most conservative one in living memory."

During this time, the Roberts court "issued conservative decisions 58 percent of the time" and, in the last year, that rate increased to 65 percent, the highest since 1953.

The media is on a continuim of trying to convince voters that the Republican Party will take control of the House and Senate. Many of us that do not live in "La-La Land" have one question; based on what? For example, Sharron Angle versus Harry Reid in Nevada.

For a couple of years, it was the love that dared not speak his name. In 2008, Republican candidates hardly ever mentioned the president still sitting in the White House. After the election, the G.O.P.

Leading up to the 2008 presidential election, the country — while tumbling down the hill into an economic swamp — was still dominated by the two political parties.

Given his history, it should be no surprise Ailes' minions at Fox News have obsessed over the discredited 18 month-old story of alleged voter intimidation by New Black Panther Party members on the day of the 2008 election. Since June 30, Fox News has spent more than eight hours of airtime and 95 segments on the story.

The truth is, it was President Bush's Justice Department, not Obama's, that made the decision not to pursue criminal charges against members of the New Black Panther Party for alleged voter intimidation at a Philadelphia polling center in 2008. In fact, the Obama administration successfully obtained default judgment against Samir Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party carrying a nightstick outside the polling center on Election Day.

Their mission isn't to find the truth, but to plant the seed in viewers' minds that maybe, just maybe, the President and the Attorney General are the same type of militants seen wielding a nightstick and repeatedly slurring whites on Fox News. As the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page wrote, "Now the New Black Panthers are being used to vilify a black president as being soft on black racism. Coming soon, I am sure, to campaign attack ads near you."

Congress allowed extended benefits for people who've been out of work for longer than six months to lapse at the beginning of June. Since then, Senate Democrats have repeatedly failed to muster 60 votes to overcome the deficit reduction demands of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Republicans.

Opponents have been preventing a final vote on the bill because of its $33 billion cost. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has blasted lawmakers for the delays.

"Almost two million people who are long-term unemployed," Reid said recently. "These are not numbers. They are people."

The Huffington Post has been documenting Congressional dithering on extending benefits for unemployed Americans. Here's are key developments in reverse chronological order:

"We all know that patriotism is a hell of a lot more than a flag pin or a bumper-sticker saying "Support the troops". Patriotism is about putting the good of the nation ahead of your personal good. The confusion for the Republicans is in what the nation really is.

Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol on Friday called for Michael Steele to resign after the Republican National Committee chairman said the United States should not be in a "land war in Afghanistan."

With the furor over the inadvertent public airing of RNC Chairman Michael Steele's attack on President Obama growing, Chairman Steele is scrambling to do damage-control.

And of course he doesn't address the fact that as the head of the Republican Party, he blatantly and stupidly lied about the President, and about when, why and how the war in Afghanistan began.

* * *
Update: Rep. Tom Cole calls on RNC chairman Michael Steele to resign

15 examples. Republican racism exposed.

In a campaign season of anti-establishment ferment, some of the Republican Party's best-known insiders are building an ambitious fundraising machine for the fall elections and beyond.

Boy, Rand Paul is fitting in very nicely in the hypocritical Republican Party of Kentucky.

Sarah Palin had much to twit about in the aftermath of a recent rude remark made by Helen Thomas that the Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and her further statement that they should "go home" to Poland and Germany 65 years after the end of World War II.

Today, in a noncampaign event, Obama made his critique more explicit.

"This idea that White folks give voice to every now and then that they're losing their country, sometimes they mean with Black folks and the Black president and sometimes they're referring to Latinos and Brown folks. It seems that though, when White folks say that they're referring to some nostalgic sentiments of the past that they want to resurrect," said Mr. Wise.

"They can't fathom a country wherein they are not the norm, the prototype of what an American is. The way they've grown up for years is when they hear the word American, they see their (own) face and people of color have never been able to have that reaction, that when they talk about American, they're talking about me, but White folks have, so when all of a sudden you've got to share that title, that symbol with Black and Brown people that have different names and faith traditions than yours, that shakes them up because they have that sense of entitlement."

The former Republican political operative went to federal prison after he pleaded guilty to charges of phone harassment. He jammed the phone lines of New Hampshire's Democratic Party on Election Day six years ago.

"The concept was to disrupt lines of communication. That's a fancy way of saying, 'make it so the phones didn't work,' " Raymond said recently. "No calls going out. No calls going in."

We're not going to give away exactly how Raymond did it. According to federal prosecutors, two top Republican Party officials tapped Raymond's Virginia-based telemarketing firm for the operation. Raymond then contracted out the job to a private phone bank in Idaho.

Two Iraq veterans who left the military after surviving charges of crimes against detainees are running for Congress. One, running in NC, killed two unarmed Iraqi detainees, twice unloading his gun into their bodies and firing between 50 and 60 shots in total.

Oh, for the love of [insert preferred deity here] ...