The "Two Santa Clauses" long con

Thom Hartmann explains how the GOP has been punishing Democrats for 40 years:

1. When in power, spend like a drunken sailor. Also cut taxes. Give people stuff you can't afford to pay for, and slip them money while you're at it. 
2. When out of power, howl about deficits. Make the Democrats cut spending and raise taxes. Deficits are the worst thing ever!!!
3. Get re-elected. Rinse and repeat.

It all started with Jude Wanniski, who proposed his evil Two Santa Clauses strategy in 1974:

Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. From food stamps to new schools to sending a man to the moon, the people loved the “toys” the Democrats brought every year.
Republicans could do that, too, the theory went – spending could actually increase without negative repurcussions. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes!
For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich, which wasn’t to be discussed in public, it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts.
The rich, Reagan, Bush, and Trump told us, would then use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus stimulating the economy and making average working people richer. (And, of course, they’d pass some of that money back to the GOP, like the Kochs giving Paul Ryan $500,000.00 right after he passed the last tax cut that gave them billions.)
There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd be forced into the role of Santa-killers by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

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Running for Office

If you want to run for office, start with this comprehensive resource guide from Slate. The only major resource this guide leaves out is Run for Something, which supports millennials running for down-ballot office.

Job Boards

JobsThatAreLeft and WellStone Jobs - two Google groups with great job postings.

Democratic Gain - join the largest network of progressive political professionals and associations.

Democratic Party Organizations

Democratic National Committee - the formal governing body for the United States Democratic Party.

Democratic Party Info for All 50 States - get involved by donating, volunteering/interning, or running for office!

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National Democratic Redistricting Committee - working closely with the Democratic party on comprehensive redistricting reform; endorsed by President Obama.

Grassroots Organizations

Indivisible - get involved with the nation's largest progressive grassroots network of local groups to resist the Trump Agenda.

Swing Left - find your closest Swing District and sign up to support a progressive win there in 2018.

Flippable - building a data-driven, people-powered movement to flip states blue and restore our democracy.

Emily's List and She Should Run - two great organizations dedicated to recruiting and supporting female candidates up and down the ballot across the country.

Sister District Project - pairing volunteers from blue districts with red district projects to maximize impact for volunteers across the nation.

It Starts Today - for only 4.88 dollars a month, you can help fund every single Democratic House of Representative candidate's campaign.

Spread the Vote and VoteRiders - two organizations dedicated to fighting voter suppression laws and providing voters with the necessary voter ID.

Tech for Campaigns - connecting world-class tech talent with progressive & centrist candidates for local, state, and national office.

Contacting your Representatives

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Other Issues

GoFCCYourself.com - tell the FCC to protect net neutrality. Use Battle for the Net to contact your representatives.

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Sierra Club - take action against the Trump administration to protect our environment!

Nuts & Bolts guidebook

What to do and where to go

Courtesy of the Good News Roundup over at Daily Kos, these are great links for connecting with other local activists, finding useful actions, and organizing events:

Indivisible	Indivisible435	Hope (an info app)
Swing Left	The Action Network	#Resist at Meetup
Flippable	Sister District Project	Postcards To Voters
The Resistance Calendar	5 Calls (easy impact)	Open Progress (texting)

and here are two more...

     Social Justice Organizations at StartGuide.com

     Environmental and Social Justice Organizations at Global Stewards.org

More ammo for your next wingnut encounter

10,853 Scientists Agree Global Warming Is Real, 

and Caused By Humans. Two Do Not.

The Deserving Poor: Ammo for next wingnut encounter

From Laura Clawson:

A child raised in the bottom fifth of the income scale through much of the southern United States has around a 5 percent chance of rising to the top fifth—4 percent in Atlanta and 4.3 percent in Charlotte—while a low-income child has a 9.6 percent chance of rising in Los Angeles and 11.2 percent in San Francisco. Do Republicans think poor kids in California are just twice as likely to be hardworking as poor kids in Georgia and North Carolina? Or might there be something else going on?

Unfortunately I can already hear the response, which will involve blah people. Still, these are useful statistics to have at hand.

Our corporatocracy, in which we trust

Ten corporations - Kraft, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Proctor and Gamble, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson - control almost everything we buy.

Greedy, sadistic, or both?

Two pieces came to my attention yesterday. Matt Taibbi's July examination of price-fixing by the rating agencies:

"Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at," writes one Standard & Poor's executive. "As you know, I had difficulties explaining 'HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it," confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. "If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value," complains another senior S&P man. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters," ruminates one more. [...]

40 percent of the world's wealth was wiped out in the aftermath of the mortgage bubble, according to some estimates. 2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction. If you can imagine a post-9/11 scenario where there were no metal detectors at airports and people could walk on carrying chain saws and meat cleavers, you get a rough idea of what was done to reform the ratings process.

And Charles Simic on the sadistic bastards of the GOP:

Bettering the lives of anyone but the wealthy, as we know, has ceased to be a concern of the Republican Party. But millions of Americans are on the brink of buying affordable health insurance and freeing themselves from a worry that makes their lives utter misery; the concerted effort backed by some of the richest men in this country to deprive them of that chance may be without precedent for sheer malice. Indifference to the plight and suffering of human beings of one class or another by some segment of the population is a universal phenomenon, but spending millions of dollars to deepen the misery of one’s fellow citizens and enlisting members of one political party to help you do so is downright vile. It must be motivated as much by sadism as by the political calculation that if these uninsured were to get insurance, they would give the Democratic Party a governing majority simply out of gratitude for letting them see a doctor.

These are not precisely the same behaviors but they are definitely connected.

UPDATE: Michael Tomasky calls the GOP stance on the ACA "indisputably the most strenuous effort at policy sabotage we’ve ever seen in the modern history of this country."

Republicans did not do this to Social Security. Majorities of Republicans voted in favor of Social Security. About half of Republicans also voted for Medicare. A group of senators sought to defund the Vietnam War, but that group was bipartisan. No, there’s never been an effort quite like this. It’s truly astonishing to step back and think about it. The great uniting cause of the Republican Party of the Obama era, the one thing they’re spent more time and energy on than any other, is preventing uninsured Americans from obtaining insurance.

I had no idea Roger Simon was this good

No kidding, the whole article is this good:

Boehner does not bend to the will of his Kamikaze Caucus because he is an evil man. He does so because he is a weak man. To borrow a line from Theodore Roosevelt, I could carve a better man out of a banana.

If you know five Republicans, two of them are insane.

It's a fact. William Rivers Pitt explains.

I want to remember this forever, perhaps tattoo it on my body

Bill Maher:

There is a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy. Of course the Democrats are disappointing---that's what makes them Democrats. If they were any more frustrating they'd be your relatives. But in this country they are all that stands between you and darkest night. You know why their symbol is the letter 'D'? Because it's a grade that means 'good enough, but just barely.' You know why the Republican symbol is 'R'? Because it's the noise a pirate makes when he robs you and feeds you to a shark.

[Everyone else seems to have already read this quote. Can't find the original source, so no citation. h/t Bill in Portland Maine]

The next time a Republican even looks at you cross-eyed

...tell him this:

If the income gain of most people since 1966 is one inch, the gain of the top .001% is five miles.

The corporate takeover: Chris Hedges says "Rise Up or Die"

I can't believe I missed this sobering piece back in May:

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power. [. . .] 

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace.

[Emphasis mine.] He notes that we can't vote our way out of this situation nor rely on the courts. The only way out? Radical mass movements. And if, like the Pequod's crew in Moby Dick, we fail to rise up through "habit, cowardice, and hubris," we will slide into serfdom.

And I'm pretty sure that rising up is not in the cards.

Everything I ever wanted to say about the media during the Bush years

...was said by Charles Pierce the other day, after watching the press fawn over Bush and his new library:

The coverage of the opening of this vast temple to prevarication and ruin is not about bricks and mortar. It's about an attempt by the courtier press to absolve itself of a dereliction of duty that rivaled even that of the president in question while New Orleans drowned, and while the economy was bubbling toward disaster. (That dereliction of duty, it should be noted, now and forever, began with the coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, and the disgraceful performance of the elite political press corps towards Al Gore.) It's about their efforts to help the country absolve itself from the immense damage it brought upon itself by electing, and then re-electing, a half-bright dry drunk who wrecked nearly everything he touched, and who now is trying to rehabilitate himself by explaining that he hasn't ruined anything else since he left office, and doesn't that make him a swell fella. The elite press is dedicating an entire day of coverage to the perpetuation of a monstrous public lie. Electing George W. Bush twice was a monumental act of democratic self-destruction from which the country has yet to recover. Celebrating him celebrating himself is simply to pour battery acid into the still-open wounds. I will take theories about dinosaurs in ancient China over the notion that George W. Bush was a good man confronted by insurmountable problems dropped on him by an implacable universe of chance. He was a career fk-up, from start to finish, and he finally found himself in a job where Daddy's money and Daddy's lawyers couldn't bail him out.

Goodbye, Old Yeller

I'm late to the updating party. But inspired by the ease of navigating and posting to my new blog, I realized it was past due time to update this one. So farewell, old Erratic:

I will miss your yellow simplicity but not the html code in your bowels.