via Wired’s Idea Lab

You’d think that Congress would want to have an empowered regulator able to do something to protect the country from the rational, profit-seeking depredations of our new generation of monopolists. 

Instead, the House Republicans are going in exactly the opposite direction.

Disabling the FCC !

Thomas Frank: 

But the problem goes far beyond politics.

We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive.

…we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from.

1) is our government broke?
2) http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/military-spending-2011-chart 
3) are wingnuts popular?

@mims
People who have had premarital sex or watch porn are ineligible for GOP.

Yes. You’re reading that right.
If You’ve Had Pre-Marital Sex, You Can’t Be A Republican.

Religious freedom is as American as apple pie, isn’t it?
How could anyone oppose it?

To recover America’s biblical foundation, Christians had to “do battle on the entire front:” not just in church, but in the courts, classrooms, outside abortion clinics and everywhere else….

The emerging Christian right asserted that this was the true meaning of “religious freedom” in America: freedom to institutionalize Christian dogma in American society and law.

Freedom of religion — a phrase that sounds at first blush like a bipartisan nod to our common political heritage — is a weapon of culture war.

Featuring an all-star cast…

that wound is your brain

How popular is comedian Stephen Colbert‘s Super PAC ?

Texans give more money to Colbert’s PAC than to Romney’s !

Making A Better Tomorrow Tomorrow

Frank Schaeffer: 
How could they believe this stuff?
Trying To Understand the Republican Base

Let’s be blunt: science has rendered a literal interpretation of any scripture, be it Bible, Koran, whatever, as impossible.

For many religious people this means that they have sought out deeper meanings in a spirituality that depends on a more intuitive sense of meaning and purpose than a slavish attempt to follow texts that have been simply disproven.

But for another group – the fundamentalists of all religions – modernity has been ‘answered’ by opting out or attacking facts as lies.

Enter Madrassas of all kinds, literal — as in Pakistan — or virtual — as in the Evangelical home school movement and private school movement.

Enter Evangelical TV and radio and publishing industry and mega churches as personality cults.

Enter the ‘conservative’ Roman Catholic bishops cut off from their own far more tolerant (and liberal) flocks.

The rise of the religious right within religion is designed intentionally to isolate, indoctrinate and ‘protect’ from challenging ideas.

As the Bloomberg.com points out, Romney claims that his business experience is the primary reason that Americans should want to see him in the White House. Contrary to his claim, it seems to me that the more we hear about his business experience the less I think he is suited to the White House.

At Bain Capital, as at most private equity firms, Romney was willing to reap millions from taking a stable, operating company and turning it into a bankrupt by leveraging it up, firing employees, and otherwise destroying the stable business.

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter in Mother Jones’ Washington bureau.

She tweets, “This basically sums up my beat in one image.”

…variables such as wealth, education and occupation are in the 0.7 — 0.8 range over the last 200 years, the same as found in India with its caste system !

Well?

Let’s think about this too:

How the Stinking Rich Ate the Economy

“If a $100,000-a-year household thinks itself to be middle class,” the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol once wrote, “then it is middle class.” This sentiment is widely held, but it makes no mathematical sense.

Any family whose income exceeds that of 90 percent of all other families cannot sensibly be called anything but rich.

To believe otherwise would oblige you to judge your child mediocre when his teacher gives him an A.

And think about this:

The .0000063% Election
How American politics became the politics of the superrich.

1) Taliban.

2) 15 per cent of Afghanistan’s Gross National Product NOW comes from drugs.

3) …a business worth $2,532,159,996 each year.

The first round of Super PAC filings came in January 30. Most of the donors are individuals, but corporations are playing a big role.

90 people account for 79% of all donations to SuperPACs. Almost half (48%) has come from just 22 individuals.

via Angry Bear:

…the Supreme Court has pronounced corporations “persons” for purposes of First Amendment speech rights. Constitutional rights, I explained, apply only to persons. In order to accord corporations First Amendment rights, the Court had to declare them persons—not mere legal entities in a statutory sense (as in say, corporations can own property), but persons—in a constitutional sense. This, I said, is a really important distinction.

And it is. A really important distinction.

Corporations Are Not People !

A possible silver lining: Now that the candidates and both major parties have accepted the reality that they are owned by corporations and the wealthy, is fundamental reform at last possible?