“Obama Hatred And The IRS”: Republicans Rage At The Continued Existence Of Barack Obama
So now we know a little more officially than we did before that the Republican Party higher-ups know or at least suspect that there’s likely no actual political scandal in the IRS matter, and that they’re letting Darrell Issa have his fun and make a fool of himself just for the sake of doing whatever random damage to Barack Obama they can in his remaining time in office. An article by Shane Goldmacher in National Journal yesterday, when read properly between the lines, says as much. And if they can’t get him while he’s in office, by ginning up some flimsy reason to open impeachment hearings, they’ll hound him on his way out the door and afterward, trying to add words like “corrupt” and “tarnished” to the first paragraphs of historical summations of his tenure. That’s all this is really about—their base’s rage at the continued existence of Barack Obama, and their own twisted craving to acknowledge and stoke it.
The Goldmacher piece makes the commonsensical and nonideological observation that you might think that Issa, who has been out there throwing unproven allegations against the wall like Oscar Madison did Felix Unger’s linguine, would be reined in a bit by his party. This is especially so after calling Jay Carney a “paid liar” and backing it up with nothing specific. In fairness, a couple of Republicans—interestingly, Lindsey Graham and John McCain chief among them—did urge a holding of the horses after that one.
But by and large, Republicans are perfectly happy for Issa to keep stirring the pot. Eric Cantor—this happened after the “paid liar” remark—singled Issa out for praise at a closed-door meeting of the House GOP on Tuesday. At a press conference the same day, Cantor twice refused to criticize Issa even mildly.
I would love to know what someone like Cantor really thinks about this IRS thing. My guess about him and most top Republicans: they’d love for some unexpected nugget of political gold to turn up, of course, but they surely know very well that this scandal is almost certainly a bureaucratic one. With luck, they might land proof that someone in the Obama reelection campaign knew about the IG probe into the matter, but then the question will be how much detail this person or persons knew. The likelihood would be simply that they knew of the existence of the probe but nothing about the details.
On the other hand, there may be even less to all this than that. Issa once promised that he would release all the transcripts of his closed-door proceedings. He has not done so, and I gather he is stonewalling reporters on the question. Could it be that there’s something in the full transcripts that would more or less end this whole thing? I’m sure we can trust him, though, because Republican staffers never doctor docum—oops, never mind.
Whatever. Nothing would stop the GOP from trying to turn this thing into another Watergate. Their base will demand it, because to them, Obama is capable of all manner of evil. Ted Cruz’s recent McCarthy-esque comparison of Obama to Nixon (because the IRS matter somehow proves that Obama has an “enemies list”) is, to the base, soft-pedaling the situation if anything, and undoubtedly insulting to Nixon to boot.
Over the years since Obama arrived on scene, right-wingers have believed and circulated and peddled the following about him (and this is just a very partial list from Snopes.com, putting aside the ones you already know about the birth certificate and his “Muslim” heritage): that he refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; that his campaign was funded by Hugo Chávez; that he wanted to replace “The Star Spangled Banner” with the less martial “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”; that he must have used a non-U.S. passport to travel to Pakistan in 1981; that he plans to ban recreational fishing in the United States; that he had to surrender his law license; has banned the National Day of Prayer; stopped wearing his wedding ring in observance of Ramadan; and once kissed David Cameron, smack on the lips.
All that is to say nothing of the racist invective that is the constant background music of this presidency. We in the media never discuss this (go Google “chat board Obama n—-r,” except use the actual word, and just see what you get), but it is a daily diet in this country—yes, daily—and nothing said about any president in history that I can think of comes close to matching its relentless and savage sickness.
This is the rage the Republicans are feeding—and conservative intellectuals are doing their best to ignore. And no, it’s not this way when the situation is reversed. The Democrats specifically did not embark on these political fishing expeditions, and while much of the base wanted them to, a lot of liberal commentators did not. (I was against pursuing impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney, which you can read about here; I did urge Democrats to hold war-profiteering hearings, on which they vexingly ignored me.) The liberal base hated George Bush all right, but the hate wasn’t quite as existential, wasn’t quite as drenched in the same kind of suppurated derangement one finds in quarters of the right.
Besides which, Bush discredited himself through his uniform incompetence. Obama, clearly competent, has not done that and is unlikely to do it. So the Republicans have to do it to him. Tarnishing Obama is the only way they can emerge from these eight years not completely humiliated by him, so we’re just going to have to endure it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 6, 2013
“HOAP Hypocrisy”: Republicans Who Want To Repeal The Health Law Are Still Taking Money From It
House Republicans are launching a coordinated campaign against Obamacare, hoping to emphasize the negative effects of the health law to their constituents at upcoming town hall meetings. At the same time, however, they’re fully prepared to tell those same constituents to enjoy all the benefits available to them under health reform — ultimately taking advantage of Obamacare funding in their home districts.
As Politico reports, several of the GOP members of the new coalition — called the “House Obamacare Accountability Project,” or HOAP — went on the record to confirm they will help their constituents figure out how to get the benefits funded through the health reform law. The Republicans said that if they’re asked, they will help people get access to the insurance premium subsidies or the Medicaid coverage that’s available to them under Obamacare. “That’s an important part of constituent services,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) explained.
They’re not the only lawmakers who have advocated for getting rid of the health law even while simultaneously enjoying its benefits. As Lee Fang reports in the Nation, several anti-Obamacare Republicans like Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Rob Portman (R-OH) have requested grants funded through the health reform law for their districts. GOP lawmakers who decry Obamacare in public have requested Obamacare money to bolster their states’ health clinics, extend health services to uninsured residents, and launch public health campaigns.
In their letters requesting Obamacare funds, Republican lawmakers have praised the positive long term effects of the health reform law’s initiatives. Cornyn wrote that a grant from the Affordable Care Act would “improve the health and quality of life of area residents.” In reference to the same grant, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) called the effort a “crucial initiative to achieve a healthier Houston/Harris County.” Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) praised a local nonprofit for winning Obamacare funds that will help give “people the tools to live healthier and longer lives.”
That reflects a larger trend when it comes to Obamacare: Although Americans may say they oppose the health law as a whole, they support its individual provisions. That seeming contradiction may partly be thanks to GOP-led initiatives like HOAP. Since political controversy has swirled around the health reform law for the past three years, Americans remain confused about what Obamacare actually does — and over 40 percent of the public isn’t even sure whether it’s still law.
By: Tara Culp-Resseler, Think Progress, June 7, 2013
“Wink, Wink”: House GOP Committee Ignores The Tea Party’s Non-Exempt Political Shenanigans
When a gaggle of local Tea Party leaders came before the House Ways and Means Committee, complaining that their organizations had been unfairly and unconstitutionally “targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for their personal beliefs,” the reception by the Republicans who control the committee was predictably credulous. Once more the June 4 hearings provided Tea Party groups an opportunity to play the victim and listen to politicians praise their courage and patriotism.
But a closer examination of these particular Tea Party outfits by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights found copious evidence of political activity that might well have disqualified their requests for 501(c)(4) non-profit status – notably the San Fernando Valley Patriots, the Wetumpka Tea Party, and the Laurens County Tea Party.
In weepy tones, Karen Kenney, the founder of the San Fernando Valley Patriots (SFVP), told the committee of her concern “about the jackboot of tyranny upon the field of our Founding documents. To whisper the letters I-R-S strikes a shrill note on Main St., USA, but when this behemoth tramples upon America’s grassroots, few hear the snapping sounds.”
Kenney’s emotional testimony was long on the language of patriotism, but short on the facts of the case. Her testimony, like the entire hearing, ignored the dubious political conduct engaged in by her group, which appeared to have trampled all over IRS non-profit regulations.
Consider the group’s Meetup site, run by Kenney, which bluntly states: “Our aim is to promote — by political action or events – the core Constitutional and conservative values that built America [emphasis added].”
Indeed, Kenney and the San Fernando Valley Patriots actively engaged in partisan political campaigning. This year, they organized rallies for the only Republican in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Listed as the organizer and event host, Kenney wrote, “We have a total of 15 campaign or city issues posters, plus some U.S. flags to draw attention to Kevin James’ campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles. Our silent ‘rally’ with smiling patriots is a fun way to get boots on the ground for a true fiscal-conservative and our friend, Kevin.”
The San Fernando group also appears to have openly endorsed other candidates. Its website published a list of endorsed candidates and ballot measures for the Los Angeles County election. The post clearly states that the list names the candidates that “we are recommending.” In another post, the group tried to pass the endorsement list off as a “Voter Guide,” but it only contains a list of candidates the group had approved. On another page, Kenney posts her own “SFVP Selected Personal Choices (Karen Kenney, coordinator, SFV Patriots)” for the election, listing the candidates she endorsed for mayor, city attorney, and board of trustees.
Still another SFVP webpage features a declaration by Lydia Gutierrez: “I have looked over the list of candidates and I am making the following recommendations. Seat 2: John C. Burke. Seat 4: Jozef Essavi. Seat 6: Tom Oliver. After you have marked these three candidates on your ballot, please forward these recommendations email with 10 voters you know who care about our young people’s future.”
Nor did the SFVP neglect national and statewide political contests. In October, 2012, the group organized a get-out-the-vote flash mob in front of the local headquarters for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and GOP state senate candidate Todd Zink. The group also hosted a brainstorming session in October, 2011 “on local and state politics with a GOP insider!”
SFVP is an affiliate of the national faction known as the Tea Party Patriots, an outfit with its own history of questionable political involvement.
Such activities clearly represent the “indications of significant political campaign intervention” highlighted by the May 14 report of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration – namely, indications that would tend to disqualify a group from obtaining IRS non-profit status. Yet none of these activities were discussed during the hearing supposedly investigating the tax-exemption controversy.
Becky Gerritson of the Alabama-based Wetumpka Tea Party did her best to heighten the melodrama of the hearings. Gerritson emphasized her Tea Party entitlement, making a federal tax exemption sound like a birthright for her and her group. “I am not here today as a serf or a vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy,” she told the committee. “I am a born-free American woman – wife, mother and citizen – and I’m telling my government that you have forgotten your place.”
But the Wetumpka Tea Party’s political activism was well-documented prior to the hearing, notably in a New York Times article by Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo. Confessore and Luo reported that the Wetumpka Tea Party “organized a day of training for its members and other Tea Party activists across the region in the run-up to the 2012 election. The training was held under the auspices of the Adopt-a-State program, a nationwide effort that encouraged Tea Party groups in safely red or blue states to support Tea Party groups in battleground states working to get out the vote for Republicans.” Yet nobody on the House committee asked Gerritson about the political activities of her group.
Dianne Belsom, president of the South Carolina-based Laurens County Tea Party, testified about some of the questions posed to her group by the IRS concerning their request for tax exempt status. Of the nine questions she mentioned, all indicated that the agency’s officials were trying to determine how deeply her group had engaged in significant political interventions. She was asked to describe “how much time/resources are devoted to vetting candidates,” and to specify “amounts expended in support of any candidate for federal, state, or local public office.” Other supposedly “invasive” items requested by the IRS included asking for the group’s articles of incorporation.
Even a cursory examination of the Laurens County group’s website shows plenty of reason for the IRS to have become concerned. The website notes proudly that in July, 2012, Belsom “spoke and outlined our strategy for the remainder of the year, with a large focus on how to defeat Obamacare and get the more conservative candidates elected. At a September, 2012, meeting the Tea Party group also voted on candidate endorsements.
In December, 2011, Belsom told The State newspaper that the Tea Party was working politically against President Obama, and that, despite disagreements over candidates, “There’s agreement that we need to replace Obama and get our country going back in the right direction.” The Laurens County Tea Party also served as a co-sponsor, with the Tea Party Express and CNN, of a September, 2011 Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Florida.
Aside from the Tea Party groups, representatives of several other conservative organizations testified about problems regarding the status of their tax-exemption applications, though none of those groups were apparently part of the keyword targeting by the IRS. John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposing marriage equality for gays and lesbians, testified about an alleged IRS leak of their donor list. Sue Martinek of the Coalition for Life of Iowa testified about questions the organization had to answer regarding its application for 501(c)(3) status back in 2008. (The Inspector General’s report did not examine 501(c)(3) applications, however, only those for would-be 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations.)
Kevin Kookogey, founder and president of Linchpins of Liberty, which applied for 501(c)(3) status and conducts conservative training for young people, testified that his group had been waiting 29 months to gain non-profit status. He failed to mention that despite this two-year-plus period, his group’s board of directors still had not been fully constituted and remains “under construction.” Having a fully constituted board of directors is an important requirement for any prospective non-profit organization, as the board is legally and financially responsible for the conduct of the organization.
In the end, the Republican leadership demonstrated no interest in ascertaining the actual facts of Tea Party involvement in prohibited political activity. Instead, Republican committee members simply used the Tea Party witnesses as props to score political points against the Obama administration.
While apologizing to the witnesses and calling the IRS handling of the matter “inept,” “stupid” and “a whole lot of other things,” Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) nevertheless insisted on raising the central issue. “I’d like to remind everyone what we’re talking about here. None of your organizations were kept from organizing or silenced. We’re talking about whether or not the American taxpayers will subsidize your work. We’re talking about a tax break. If you didn’t come in and ask for this tax break, you would’ve never had a question asked of you. You can go out there and say anything you want in the world.”
Congressman Sander Levin (D-MI) noted early in the hearing that while 298 organizations were set aside for review, only 96, or a third, contained “Tea Party,” “9/12,” or “Patriot” in their names, while 202 did not. In fact, according to the draft report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, none of the 296 questionable applicants had been denied a tax exemption by the IRS The unaddressed scandal is that the IRS let so many of these groups get away with what appear to be severe violations of the law. Toward the hearing’s conclusion, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) indicated that the IRS’ flagging of groups by name had been wrong but noted, “No one has a God-given right to a tax-exempt status.” Tell that to the Tea Party.
By: Devin Burghart, The National Memo, Jube 6, 2013
“In The GOP, Every Day Is A Bank Holiday”: The Republican College Loan Plan Would Help Banks, Hurt Families
Big banks are doing better than ever. Sunday, New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson wrote that 2013 has been a very good year for the financial industry. The KWB Bank Index which tracks the stock prices of 24 leading banks has risen 30 percent this year and it’s at its highest level since 2008.
With the banks doing so well, why are House Republicans pushing so hard to make banks even more money on the backs of kids from working families who want to attend college? The answer is that every day in the Republican Party is a bank holiday.
House Republicans took a step last week to boost the fortunes of their banker backers even higher. The GOP House majority proposed changes for the college student loan program which is scheduled to expire July 1. The Republicans would allow the interest on student loans to double. This will mean even higher profits for the GOP’s banker backers. But it will end the hopes and dreams that thousands of young Americans and their families have for their future in the cut throat world economic competition.
President Obama made his case to stop the interest rate increases in a speech last Friday. The president supports a Senate Democratic plan that would freeze interest rates for 79 million students at 3.4 percent for 2 years. Congressional Republicans want to tie the interest rate to the cost of a 10 year Treasury note. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the House Republican plan would push interest rates to 5.0 percent next year and to 7.7 percent by 2018.
If Republicans get their way, increased interest rates for 79 million college students will mean a big payday for the financial industry next year and a another step down for middle income families. Millions of college grads are already up to their armpits in debt. The Republican plan would make it even harder for young college graduates to get up from under the crushing debt that they already face.
Chinese president Xi Jinping will be in the U.S. this week. His visit should focus the United States on what it needs to do to compete economically with the emerging industrial tiger.
The United States has fallen to 10th in the world in the percentage of people with a college degree. That may be why it’s much easier for people to advance economically in Western Europe than it is in the U.S. The Republican plan will push us down even further on the education ladder and give our economic competitors in the world a leg up. If we want to compete effectively internationally, we should do everything we can to get more young people into college instead of making it more difficult for them to attend college. College is the ticket young Americans need to punch to get the training they need to compete with China and other engines of international economic growth.
The U.S. should build on its strengths. We still have the best higher education system in the world. Hundreds of thousands of international students are currently enrolled in American colleges and universities to get the best college education in the world. We would be a lot better off if American students could afford to attend them too.
The GOP plan to boost banks at the expense of kids in working families mirrors the trends in the American economy at large. The Dow Jones Index, which measures the fortunes of corporate America on Wall Street, has hit record highs several times this year. While profits for corporate America have mushroomed, real income for middle class families has been stagnant. The Republican student loan program will accelerate an unfortunate trend that has enriched Wall St. and improvised middle class families who are working overtime just to meet ends meet.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, June 4, 2013
“Can Dish It Out, But Can’t Take It”: The Republican Delusion, Free Speech Includes The Right To Be Free From Criticism
The GOP is a “party of crybabies.” Or so says Jonathan Bernstein in yesterday’s Salon, reprieving one of my biggest pet peeves, which is the presumption by conservatives that freedom of speech entails freedom from criticism for one’s opinions – no matter how absurd or obscene those opinions might be.
The reason this matters is that one important measure of the health of a democracy is the quality of its public discourse and debate. Politics, after all, is the process by which unlike groups sort out their differences.
“I’m Okay, You’re Okay” sounds harmless enough. But inside the velvet glove of the right wing’s democratic-sounding assertion that we are all entitled to our own opinions and that all opinions should therefore be equally tolerated and respected is the iron fist of an authoritarian mindset that presumes when one group – typically theirs – seeks to demean or marginalize some other group there is not a damn thing the rest of us can do about it but grin and bear it.
On the contrary, the entire justification for freedom of speech in a liberal democracy, and why it is one of our cardinal political values – enshrined in the very First Amendment of our Constitution — is that free speech provides the foundation for open and robust debate, for a marketplace of ideas, for the sifting process of political give-and-take that sorts the wheat of what is true from the chaff of what is false.
Debate defines the mental habits and values — the character — at the core of what Walter Lippmann called the “traditions of civility” which separate Western democratic political institutions from all others that have existed throughout history.
Yet, we know that right wing conservatives do not believe in free and open debate or subscribe to Lippmann’s traditions of civility, or at the end of the day believe in free speech at all for any but themselves and likeminded true believers, because of their hysterical reaction to requirements like the long-dead Fairness Doctrine that do nothing more than guarantee opposing ideas equal time.
What right wing conservatives want in the end, says Bernstein, is not the freedom to speak and compete as participants in a democracy but the freedom to monopolize the means of communication, to proselytize without interruption, to propagandize without rebuttal, to transmit whatever angry, hateful, insulting and offensively anti-social messages they choose without censure.
In this way, conservatives hope the larger society will eventually conform, by a process of relentless repetition and attrition, to their reactionary notions of what a proper society ought to look like.
And so, says Bernstein, “it’s time to call out” Republicans for their belief that “democracy” means giving them “the supposed right to be free from criticism.”
Such “epistemic closure” might be popular inside the “faith-based community’s” closed-information loop, he says, “but it’s a nasty idea that sorts exceptionally badly with democratic politics.”
Thus, to right wing conservatives, it was far less offensive for immigration “expert” Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation to call blacks and Hispanics mentally deficient than it was for Richwine’s critics to call him a “racist.”
The mainstreaming of extremism begins with the absurd — and very unconservative assumption — that in some way all ideas are created equal, or that standards do not exist for identifying and ostracizing wrong or deeply offensive ones.
Thus, we are logically led to a conviction popular with conservatives these days that “the accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life,” as Richwine himself pleads, for “once that word is out there, it’s very difficult to recover from it, even when it is completely untrue.”
Yet, someone with more imagination than Richwine might imagine even worse things to be called than “racist,” counters Bernstein. “For example, someone could be called a member of an intellectually inferior race, genetically doomed to always be looking up to those races that have superior intelligence. But pointing that out would no doubt violate Richwine’s standards of civilized political discourse.”
The same goes for Christian fundamentalists. With them, calling homosexuality a crime against nature and a sin against God barely registers on their Outrage-o-Meter. What really stings is to call these anti-gay holy-rollers “bigots.” Indeed, it’s the liberal critics of religious anti-gay critics who are the real bigots, according to these right wing fundamentalists, because it’s liberals who are persecuting the devout for offenses no more sinful than defending their Judeo-Christian traditional family values.
Similarly, notes Bernstein, the Republican response to the Democratic rhetoric of a “war on women” wasn’t so much that the substance of Democratic charges was wrong, since Republicans made no effort to offer a point-by-point substantive rebuttal. It was, rather, as one Republican Congressman put it, that the criticism of conservatives itself was “repugnant.”
No wonder the perpetually put-upon Peggy Noonan is always shaking her well-coiffed head and sighing her by now-famous sigh and asking why do President Obama and the Democrats always seem to be picking so many disagreeable fights?
Even more telling, says Bernstein, was Mitch McConnell’s “epic” op-ed in the Washington Post this week, in which McConnell claimed the First Amendment was imperiled by the Obama campaign’s “explicit attacks on groups and other private citizens” in 2012.
How so? Because the Obama campaign published opposition research on big Mitt Romney donors on its website, says Bernstein. There were no claims from Republicans that the information on the website was false. One Romney big-money donor singled out did in fact pour millions of dollars into anti-gay rights crusades. Neither were their claims that criticism of Republicans was linked in any way to their harassment at the hands of federal agencies in the same way Richard Nixon once ordered the IRS to target those on his “enemies list.”
No, for McConnell, the truly offensive thing about Democratic criticism was that it occurred at all.
For McConnell, such criticism is all part of “the left-wing playbook: Expose your opponents to public view, release the liberal thugs and hope the public pressure or unwanted attention scares them from supporting causes you oppose.”
What McConnell objects to, in short, is the possibility that billionaire businessmen who bankroll Republicans or other far right causes might face retaliation from their customers exercising their own First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly to organize boycotts of right wing businessmen whose politics or causes they oppose.
That’s what McConnell cannot abide: The idea that the plutocrats he supports — the upper crust, the ruling class, the New American Oligarchy — might in any way be inconvenienced or held accountable through the normal channels of democratic give-and-take for their exercise of political power.
McConnell and fellow plutocrats like Mitt Romney think members of their class ought to be able to pull strings anonymously, surreptitiously, “quietly behind closed doors,” without the public being any the wiser or able to retaliate in any way.
“The First Amendment was written to protect speech that was not popular,” said McConnell, cynically twisting the meaning of one of America’s fundamental democratic rights to suit his own self-serving purpose, which is to revive a new Gilded Age Plutocracy. “The American people need to remain vigilant against any effort by the powerful to stifle speech.”
That means, as Bernstein points out, keeping speech as anonymous and immune from criticism as possible.
That idea is not only “nuts,” says Bernstein, it is also “deeply anti-democratic.” We should all be careful in democratic politics to avoid questioning other people’s motives, he says. But there is nothing wrong with taking note of whose interests are being served in politics or questioning who benefits from a particular policy.
“Indeed, there’s nothing wrong with the press using those donors as a shorthand way of informing citizens which interests are represented by the various candidates, or for those candidates to make a point of which interests finance their opponents,” he says.
Recent liberal complaints about conservative criticisms have been limited to legitimate concerns about their accuracy, as in the phony idea that 47% of the population is a parasitic class of “takers” who pay no taxes. Liberal complaints of conservative behavior have also focused on their decency, as when Sandra Fluke was slandered as a “slut” for offending right wing talk radio fat man Rush Limbaugh when she testified publicly for birth control benefits under the Affordable Care Act.
Free speech and democracy are inextricably linked, says Bernstein, and so “the Republican delusion” that free speech includes the right to be free from criticism is, therefore, “quite destructive.”
It’s destructive because right wing conservatives think they have the latitude to attack ethnic groups without the risk of being called out for their racist comments, says Bernstein, or to dominate campaigns financially without the risk anyone will notice who really runs the country.
Democracy and secrecy – or silence — don’t mix. But that is what Republicans think they are entitled to under their contorted definition of what “democracy” entails.
It’s long been said that if ever government of, by and for the people were to perish from this earth, it is likely to be done in from within – by those who had grown weary of its disciplines of liberality, disinterestedness and broad-mindedness or found that popular government did not serve their selfish, parochial interests.
That’s why this debate over free speech matters, and why it’s important we understand its meaning. With their dangerous assertion that criticism of conservative ideas imposes an intolerable contraction of their First Amendment rights, political reactionaries like Mitch McConnell have once again unfurled a rich liberal tapestry of individual freedoms, liberties and democratic rights as a cloak for autocracy and authoritarianism.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, May 26, 2013
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