Early Morning Swim: Rachel Maddow on the Koch Brothers’ Funding of the Tea Party
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 14th, 2010 4:49 am by HL
Early Morning Swim: Rachel Maddow on the Koch Brothers’ Funding of the Tea Party
In case you didn’t see it, The New Yorker’s piece on the Kochs is superb. Their old man was apparently a real charmer.
In case you didn’t see it, The New Yorker’s piece on the Kochs is superb. Their old man was apparently a real charmer.
In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”
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Value all-around
Bang for your buck, the morally bankrupt way.
Image courtesy of some Attaturk guy at Flickr.com
While the United States has a hefty-deficit that will lead to someone, not the wealthy mind you, being punished, Dan Froomkin notes that the source of much of that deficit is going along swimmingly when it comes to money:
The [GAO] report makes a direct link between U.S. government spending — including $642 billion on U.S. military operations there and $24 billion for training and equipping the Iraqi security forces — and Iraq’s cumulative surplus of $52.1 billion through the end of 2009.
For comparison purposes, Iraq’s annual gross domestic product is $65.8 billion. Meanwhile, the U.S. national debt has soared from $6.4 trillion to $13.4 trillion since former president George W. Bush invaded Iraq and decided to borrow the money for wars and slash taxes.
This coincides in time with a statement from the execrable Marty Peretz, continuing to glory in his latest anti-Muslim quote:
“Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, especially for Muslims.” This is a statement of fact, not value.
Well Marty, by the time it is all done and dusted in Iraq we’ll likely have spent in excess of $2 trillion dollars and ended the life of at least a quarter million Muslims, so that’s $8,000,000 a life on the American tax payer’s dime. Is that value enough for you as a sociopath?
Late, Late Night FDL: The Living Years
Mike And The Mechanics – The Living Years This song has always resonated with me, since I lost my father at a young age…! What’s on your mind tonite…?
Mike And The Mechanics – The Living Years
This song has always resonated with me, since I lost my father at a young age…! What’s on your mind tonite…?
