Phoenix Woman

Even as Texas and Wisconsin Republicans see their versions of ALEC’s voter ID model bill run into constitutional problems, Minnesota’s Republicans — who wafted into office on a magic carpet propelled in large part by cash from corporate voter ID backers — are prepared to flout that part of the state constitution that guarantees the right to vote.

How did it come to be that what once was the Party of Lincoln is now the Party of David Duke and Strom Thurmond? It was a simple business calculation — Corporate America and rich people in general wanted to get out of paying the taxes needed to sustain our societal infrastructure, and they figured the best way to do that was to manipulate race hatreds among whites in order to convince them that societal infrastructure helped black people more than white people.

It succeeded very well in cutting the taxes on the rich and on corporations, but that success came at the price of poisoning the minds of the Republicans, from the lowliest grunt worker to elite-level opinion controllers like Noonan and Carlson, with the deep-set sickness of bigotry.

One of the tropes most often used by the right-wing and often blatantly racist defenders of George Zimmerman, the man who shot an unarmed Trayvon Martin to death in a Florida gated community last month, was that Zimmerman was allegedly beaten to a bloody pulp by the 17-year-old boy he killed: Punched in the nose hard enough for it to break, knocked down, head slammed into the ground, dripping blood from his various wounds.

The tale of Zimmerman’s many serious wounds was already in question: For one thing, he refused medical attention when it was offered to him. And now, thanks to the release of this police surveillance video, we can now see that the tale of the bloodily-beaten Zimmerman is just so much nonsense.

One of the interesting things about the widespread depression of the last five years is that it’s hit different places with varying effects. One of the other interesting things is that the places that are doing the best are the ones whose people have told the austerity jackals to bugger off. Yet another of the interesting things is that the establishment media outlets in the US aren’t exactly eager to tell you about these places.

Faith-based, Bachmann-allied, and Bradlee-Dean-friendly local Christian antidrug group Minnesota Teen Challenge has talked a Republican state legislator into trying to give it a few million in free money.

Just as ALEC’s “Stand Your Ground” Laws don’t seem to have done much to stop crime but have definitely allowed paranoid bigots to act out their deadliest desires, ALEC’s voter ID laws, which their backers tout as a way to stop the nonexistent problem of people using fake IDs to vote, have instead kept at least nine voters who have every right to vote from being able to do so. Here are some of their stories

Apparently racism is starting to lose its luster as an electoral tool for the servants of the 1%, so now they have to broaden their focus from picking on nonwhites and nonconservatives to attacking the very white working-class voters on whose backs they’ve rode time and again to victory.

Welcome to Bizarro World, where black is white, up is down, the fire department starts fires and ALEC is just a bunch of toothless eunuchs holding a debating society.

I learned two useful things that are central to American life today, yet which I have never once heard stated on the radio or TV or read in a newspaper: I learned about the labor shortage that fueled the 150-year period of rising wages in the United States, and I learned about the fact that corporations used to pay a lot more in corporate taxes, especially as an overall percentage of American tax revenues, than they do now.

It turns out that the states that vote most strongly Republican are the ones where the middle class is weakest and where the majority of persons don’t benefit from Republican economic and tax policies.

So why do they do it?