Liberal Voices

Mad as Hell!

President Obama is averaging 30 death threats per day, four times more than George W. Bush.

If threats were based on payback for malfeasance in office, Bush would have been the preferred target, for the Bush regime was one of the most corrupt in modern history. Contrarily, the vitriol and anger seem to be generated by so-called tea-party events and the right-wing agenda.

Of course, the many demagogues in the Republican Party are doing their best to deride Obama, getting much help from the conservative media.

There are many rightwing miscreants in the media who subvert the president, but a good representation of the worst, and perhaps the most incendiary, is Rush Limbaugh hired by Clear Channel and Glenn Beck on Fox Near-News. Our focus is on Glenn Beck, who often seems to be the most inventive in terms of wild charges against liberals, the most rancor-focused, the most resistant to independent research, and thus the most truth-intolerant.

Beck hails from a small town near Seattle, claimed his mother committed suicide some two years before the Tacoma, Washington newspaper reported she died in a boating accident[i]. He reported to have been addicted to marijuana for fifteen years, from age 16 on, and had a varied radio DJ/talk-show career from age 13 to his more recent TV days.

He rejected college, wanting to take a direct route to fame. He proved rather talented in a creative, somewhat zany, DJ-type show from stations in DC, Corpus Christi, Louisville, Phoenix, Houston, and Baltimore. A stint in New Haven, Connecticut found a desire to do a talk-show format for a station, though the show wasn’t suited for his often uninformed views, coupled with fabricated experiences, sometimes borrowing from those of others.

Let go by the New Haven station, he was hired by Clear Channel in the Tampa Bay market in 2000, made it a success and moved to Philadelphia. He was chosen in 2006 for an off-beat talk-show on CNN, then picked up by Fox in 2008.

During a checkered career of demonstrated inventive skills, he left a varied trail of heavy drinking, drugs, dirty tricks, unorthodox broadcasting, nastiness toward competition, humiliating underlings, being fired multiple times, and thinking of suicide. More recently he has been converted to the Mormon faith and rehabilitated from alcohol[ii].

His nastiness, tunnel-vision, tastelessness, and provocations were long-remembered by cohorts and by management.

Tim Hattrick, a partner DJ in Phoenix, thought that Beck was talented but full of himself and incapable of thought outside radio and the ratings. According to Hattrick, “He was great at being a grandstanding, pompous idiot and shaking the brushes for attention.”

Bruce Kelly was a rival in the Phoenix radio market, and Kelly’s criticism of Beck’s work set Beck off. He took every opportunity to get revenge on Kelly, and Beck’s cruelty on morning radio was demonstrated when he called Bruce Kelly’s wife a few days after she had a miscarriage. Live on the air he says, “We hear you had a miscarriage.” When she said yes, Beck proceeded to joke about how Kelly can’t do anything right, he can’t even have a baby.

But Beck goes beyond hurting a few people when he is on the air. Motivated by the ratings, he will raise any subject that will draw out the attention, and bitterness, of his audience. For his audiences, rancor and resentment is fresh. They know they’ve been exploited in the current economy but can’t see the source. Though leaving office in a disgrace, Bush is still considered one of them, and Wall Street is an amorphous entity they can’t identify.

Beck and his rightwing cohorts point out the available target, mainly the intelligent, well-spoken black president. Who would you believe: the uppity smart guy in the Oval Office or a mal-educated user like Beck who spawns dedicated followers – malcontents, bigots, and lunatics?

The right-wing audience is specific, but hate media’s overflow is like a clogged toilet: it reaches all of us.

On a recent Fox show, Beck and Michelle Bachmann, a US Representative from Minnesota, were both on a trip of fantasy fabricated for fear, ranting about the federal government using the census to round up Americans and put them in internment camps, just like the Japanese-Americans during WW II.  Both also claimed federal census-related goals of taking away guns and imposing huge fines on non-participants.

Beck was also a top promoter of the 9/12 rally in Washington. Tea-baggers, amid racist and rancorous signs, were denigrating President Obama as Nazi and worse. In fact, a Fox Near-News employee was caught on camera fomenting malice among the tea-baggers.

It was on the 9/12 tea-bag day that a part-time census worker, Bill Sparkman, was found, an obvious homicide victim, hanged overlooking a cemetery in Kentucky, near where he did census polling in Clay County. He had the word Fed marked on his chest.

It was pointed out that this area in Kentucky is known for the cultivation of marijuana. This could be a motivation for the murder, but the media hate-mongering, including the fear-inducing Beck/Bachmann rant could well have been heard by the perpetrator.

As we know the Glenn Beck invective does not leave a narrow trail of bitterness. Millions watch his show nationwide. Still, it is part of an expansive scope of rancor that infects a broad spectrum of the US, fed by anger and resentment over a country BushCo left in shambles.

Picture this! You’re down and nearly out, like a punch-drunk boxer. A few decades of conservative leadership has left you working longer hours for less money, or just flat-out unemployed. Commercials entice you with goods you can’t afford. You are told that huge corporations need taxpayer money to save America. While you struggle with meager unemployment benefits, these same corporations pay their executives huge bonuses.

According to Frank Luntz, advisor to Fortune 500 corporations and politicians, 72% of Americans are “mad as hell,” 57% now believe that their children will inherit a worse America than they did, and just 33% believe their children will have a better quality of life than they have.

The Bush administration celebrated and enriched the empires of wealth and privilege, and so far Obama and Congress seem to be timid about challenging this monolithic power, at least as far as Wall Street is concerned.

Right-wingers are tapping into that anger and resentment, successfully redirecting it at Obama. How many hidden in that right-wing audience are potential assassins? With more than 200 million firearms in the hands of 60 million Americans, the odds say would-be assassins are armed, or can be, without much effort.

---

[i] http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/21/glenn_beck/, A Salon Three-part Series on Glenn Becks’s Roots, by Alexander Zaitchik, Part 1, Page 1.

 

[ii] Ibid, Parts 1, 2, & 3

Right-Wing Effort to bring down Obama

What do we call conspiracy theories anymore? Do we consider the effort to bring down Obama a conspiracy or just partisan politics?

Neo-conservative forces control the Republican Party and lead the unified campaign to regain power. With their simplistic agenda, the dominance of the free market and a paucity of government, at least for social causes, powerful corporations are their allies. Their legislative program is simple too: tax breaks for the rich, jingoistic rhetoric, and cuts in all social programs.

Thus after a decade in power and unrestrained greed, neo-conservatives fostered powerful business interests, a corporate media owned and controlled by a few corporations, and minimal social programs. For them, dialing back the huge plutocratic gains during neo-conservative rule is repugnant.

The corporate monolith has been enabled by a pliant government.  It has blossomed with the neo-conservative movement planned years ago, but gained impetus with Nixon and became central during the Bush regime.

Now the plutocratic infrastructure is established, helped by all members of Congress, who were compromised and swept up by a tsunami of pressure and greed.

The bottom line is that when neocons are not in government power, their number one directive is to get back into power, using whatever means there are. Health care reform could well lead to changing an order which they have spent billions to establish and which is well entrenched.  

With resources of money, power and media, a powerful attack machine has been in place back to the time of the last Democratic administration, that of Bill Clinton. Neo-conservative forces were relentless in bringing Clinton down, dogging him with his every utterance and diluting any influence he might have for social reform. Republicans and powerful interests, including pharma, the health care industry, and the AMA, unleashed a firestorm to defeat health care reform.

This familiar pattern continues with President Obama. Republicans and the corporate power structure behind them use any weakness, any shred of prejudice, any propaganda advantage their powerful machine can exploit. They have a media dominated by conservative forces behind them, plus an overwhelming lobbyist presence, which bribes with campaign money.

The major media forces report and dance around the racial attacks launched against Obama. News Corporation holdings include the WSJ and Fox Near-News. Both are rabidly conservative. The few other corporate media owners, including Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS are profit machines feeling no public responsibility.

However, Clear Channel, a radio monopoly which now owns over 1200 radio stations in 300 cities, pays Rush Limbaugh $50 million a year. To earn his money and to maintain his audience, he fosters a hate atmosphere against progressive enemies. His main target is President Obama, and his attacks are often racist.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Rush Limbaugh provided no doubt he is a racist when he mocked and derided Obama by continually playing, “Barack the Magic Negro”. He still does not hesitate to use racist images to bring out the latent bigotry of many listeners.

Racism also seethes in some places in the South. Last June, Sherri Goforth, a 20-year veteran of Tennessee politics, sent a mass E-mail showing dignified portraits of 43 presidents and the 44th as a pair of white eyes with a black background. Such disrespect to an American president would have gotten a black man lynched in Goforth’s South a few decades back.

The Fox Near-News cavalcade of character assassins includes O’Reilly, Hannity and now Beck.

A recovering alcoholic, if not a recovering fool, Glenn Beck cheer-led the 9/12 project, this while deviously calling Obama a racist. Imitating the Fox News' vitriol, 9/12 conservative protesters in Washington displayed a number of racist placards. One said, “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African.” While others spoke of burying him with Teddy Kennedy, there were images of hate and derision, including those of Hitler and the Joker (reminiscent of the white-faced clown).

 Internet email from the never-ending right-wing sources depict him as a monkey, on an Aunt-Jemima-type waffle box, and sardonically joke about calling the White House something else. “High Society - Obama on Drugs & The Racist Drug War” clip made internet stops last month. The videos depicting Obama as part of a black drug culture are endemic.

Tea Party right-wingers did witchdoctor placards of Obama. When Obama was pushing a stimulus bill, The New York Post, a Rupert Murdock holding, aired a cartoon showing the police shooting a chimp saying, “We’ll have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”

Can we doubt Jimmy Carter’s comment that racism is one of the driving forces behind the relentless and often scurrilous attacks on President Obama?

Neo-conservatives can always count on one thing: major news sources will give ample coverage to their racist attacks, whether they originate on the internet, in staged rallies, or tea parties – any public forum of the right-wing’s choice will be represented.

With seemingly clean hands, the right-wing knows how to use the media, and the media thrives on the lies, hatred and rancor they are fed. Sarah Palin, for example, just posts her death-panel lies on Facebook and they magically appear in newspapers and on television.

Whoever the Democratic president, you can count on more tailored attacks on character, whether real or manufactured. For Clinton, it was his overactive libido, for Obama, it’s his race.

For neo-conservatives, it doesn’t matter. Getting the job done justifies any means to accomplish it. And bringing down the country with their relentless effort for power is not even considered.

Neo-conservatives really believe they know what is best for America. They believe their manipulation and deceit of the public to gain power is like a parental privilege. They are confident that a right-wing representative for them can be manipulated for their cause.

The Republican successor to Bush could very well be another figure favoring corporate power over the people, who takes pride in an incurious mediocrity. Sarah Palin might already be the tentative right-wing choice for 2012.

By then, they hope to bring down President Obama and Democrats.

Republican Endgame

As Republican moneyed allies continue to unleash disgruntled troops upon our media lives, I want to give President Obama a vital message, “Forget that the Republicans exist. In fact, they do not reside in any universe of good will and cooperation. They suck decency and progress out of our very air.”  

The truth is that the right-wingers who control the Republican Party are engaged in a war to control our country, all funded by donors made rich by past Republican administration handouts.  To achieve this, right-wing think tanks have been working since before the time of Ronald Reagan to capture our minds and hearts.

It’s called social engineering.

It refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behavior on a large scale, and it has been highly successful. The social engineering effort at times seems so foolish that progressives call its troops “crazies,” thus making the think-tank program seem trivial when it isn’t.

The effort has been relentless in the last several decades, reaching somewhat of a crescendo with the Bush regime, which further fueled it with resources of money and power. And its resurgence since Obama’s election is most noticeable with the health care propaganda surge, for health care reform is thought to be Obama’s Achilles heel.

With this effort, issues are irrelevant except to win the propaganda war. It has seen lobbyists paid  by the private health care industry fronts drafting an army of the disgruntled, using fear and loathing -- the birthers, deathers, tea-baggers, czarists, and nativists – in a unified effort to drown out real debate.

As with all propaganda campaigns, there must be media forums to spread the message.

The corporate media is either owned or used by these special interests as money flows to the right-wing message on all levels: news reports, government reports during the Bush regime, books, leaflets, movies, radio, television, the internet and posters. Pet networks like Fox have readymade audiences built by past apartheid Republican and right-wing policies.

We can all identify most of the techniques of persuasion used over the years, techniques based on social psychological research and devised and implemented through right-wing think tanks.

The most common, especially when the chattels of the propagandists have no viable stand on issues or no interest in debate, is to attack your opponent, as opposed to attacking his arguments. Witness last Saturday’s target of the 9/12 project in Washington DC. The target was Obama using name-calling or racist visages on placards.

The issues specified were at best non-specific scatter-shots, if not a cover for character attacks. Incongruent signs suggested that fascism and socialism are the same thing. Some saw abortion as leading to 9/11. Others idealized Glenn Beck, a hired character assassin for Fox News, as a logical thinker.

A common technique is the tireless repetition of an idea, especially a simple slogan, that if repeated enough, may begin to be taken as the truth. After the 9/11 attack, the Bush regime’s lie that Hussein was responsible for 9/11 was sold by the corporate media, by fear, and by jingoism.

Rolled into this repetition technique were several others: demonizing the enemy (bin Laden and Islam, and anyone opposing the Iraqi War), spreading a big lie (WMDs) and waving the flag to put off dissenters. These tactics continue with the variegated tea-bagging campaign.

The current surge of Obama dissenters are spurred by other propaganda techniques: appeal to fear builds support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general population, thus the messages of deathers, birthers, tea-baggers, nativists, and czarists. All involve fear of something – death, government control, outside invaders, or tyranny. Over sixty years ago, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, claimed that the Allies sought the extermination of the Jews. Does that sound familiar, deathers?

Appeals to prejudice, another propaganda technique, is obvious, and some appeals not so obvious. Rush Limbaugh’s playing of the song, “Barack the Magic Negro,” during the presidential campaign was obviously racist. The signs displaying Obama as the Joker probably play on the black image in many American minds.

Most of us remember the George W. Bush exclamations, “You are either against us, or with us!” This relates to the bandwagon technique of being with the crowd and the black or white technique of there being only two choices for us as winners. Loud tea-bagger demonstrations drown out opposition and lend an atmosphere of invincibility.

The common man approach is still used by right-wingers but was ascribed to be George W. Bush’s mantra. Many key Republicans are from the South, as are Blue-Dog Republicans, and most display that down-home charm, saying in essence, they are one of you.

The direct order technique is used by the Glenn Beck’s and the Rush Limbaugh’s who command large, vulnerable audiences. This technique hopes to simplify the decision making process by using images (Storm-troopers) and words (Nazi) to tell emotionally-charged audiences exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choices. Glenn and Rush brought out some of the crowds for the 9/12 spectacle.

Many of the propaganda techniques are used on near-news networks like Fox News. MSNBC also utilizes some, but Fox Near-News employs most of them with the purpose of promoting a right-wing agenda. Techniques include glittering generalities, half-truths, intentional vagueness, oversimplification, stereotyping, and labeling. An evening with Fox News will reveal most of them.

So what is the endgame of this conspiracy? Titular leadership by the mediocre, shallow, and the incurious (Sarah Palin would fit the bill), continued polarization, the dominance of the privileged, a controlled media, and more corporate power.

If their social engineering succeeds, leadership might even let you look into the window of their highbrow stores to wish for goods that you can no longer afford.

The sins of their idols

Republicans, controlled by the right-wing conspiracy campaign, have one of their big guns, Glenn Beck, though he turns out to be somewhat of a toy gun, parading out the latest conspiracies.

It’s been the “Crazy Czar Conspiracies.”

It sounds like an Agatha Christie spy novel, doesn’t it? It actually indicates how fictional, if not fictitious, right-wingers are.

Beckers and right-wingers are taking credit for the departure of Van Jones, White House special advisor on green jobs. I guess they called him a czar.

Many believe that Beck's smearing of Jones was inspired by racism and a fear of black people in power, though Beck cites other Jones actions.

And Jones did call Republicans “a**holes.” Many have done that in private and certainly many politicians, but most especially Republicans, have and still do act the part.

But regardless, the right-wing way is to make up malfeasances even if they don’t exist. Beck and other right-wing blowhards such as Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh will continue to go head-hunting for liberal appointees of President Barack Obama.

As if deathers, birthers, tea-baggers and nativists are not enough, we have a czarist additive. And it’s not a sweetener. Right-wing czarists are saying that Obama czars represent a power grab.

But never mind, now it is the 9-12 Project for which Glenn Beck is a relentless promoter. To commemorate his project, on Saturday, right-wing protesters will gather in Washington, DC for a march to oppose health care reform, President Obama, “corruption,” and “an overall conversion to a socialist style government.”

Most of the day-to-day organizing for the 9-12 Project has been orchestrated by a now familiar set of lobbyists and Republican operatives who have helped plan anti-Obama “grassroots” tea party events since February. To complete the zoo, a set of far-right groups are bringing along self-described “American mob members” to join the bashing.

Ironically, there is some basis for the right-wing alarms, if you believe in time warps or parallel universes. Considering their greasy grip on reality, all came from another time, their time machine must have pitched them out about two years too late. The height of corruption and tyranny was occurring then with the Bush regime.

The keepers of the zoo are using a tactic heavily used by the Bush-Rove White House. Take all your own corruptions and project them on the opponents. As we know, the corruptions of the Bush regime were many, but raised a myriad of power fears among attentive Americans.

Though the corrupt are gone, their memory lives on in the minds of the fearful and resentful conservative followers of Republicans, for the Republicans and their media minions are stalwart propagandists while the Democrats fear their own shadows.

This propaganda technique was perfected in the Bush-Cheney-Rove incubus of ideas and is now stoked by right-wing think-tankers who perpetrate Republican strategies. Some of those recruited are so challenged by their slogans, they actually believe them.

In fact the little mind of Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) embraced his own nativist propaganda so avidly that when President Obama addressed Congress Wednesday, he shouted "You lie!" as Obama indicated his plan wouldn't offer free care to illegal immigrants.

Such are the war casualties of the indoctrinated. Whether muddled thinking, little thinking or no thinking, this is a dangerous time for such minds to grapple with vital economic and environmental reforms.

Certainly our problems require objective wits, not to speak of a full deck of wits. Statements by some really bring the latter into question: the many pretzel-brain twists of Michael Steel, the RNC head; Joe Wilson’s brain-melt/mouth-memo during Obama’s speech before Congress; Sen. Grassley’s illogic in opposing the public option because he said we need choice; Sarah Palin conjuring up 9/11 out of Obama’s speech; or Michelle Bachman suggesting that Democrats somehow bring out the swine flu.

And they are only part of the zoo.

These are some of the leaders that millions of riled Americans have voted for and who monopolize our public forum.

Perhaps psychological testing is in order for prospective candidates for public office and perhaps all politicians should be fitted for lie detectors, with a public feed, of course.

As for the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs and the right-wingers with bulging temple veins, just let them blow. Like errant hurricanes, maybe they’ll go far out to sea.

Then we can concentrate on the fat fingers handling the money behind them.

Republicans bring dishonor

The Republicans with no plank, no issue statements, and no principles have dominated the news. It’s ironic that they have no long-range plan for America’s future but they have a political plan for their own.

Now it’s “President Obama is about to pollute the minds of the young.

Obama will be addressing school age children next Tuesday in a live web cast. The White House address is meant to encourage students to stay in school and understand the importance of their education.

But it has become another Republican production – lights, camera, and action. The President is going to give kids a little pep talk about the virtues of staying in school and working hard.

Yet the crazy “like-a-fox” right wing fringe is calling it indoctrination.

The blogosphere is burning. The videos are produced: you can be a star swearing oaths, pledging that your children will not be exposed to such a heinous event. It’s another Republican production.

It is no accident. It is the contentious grab-the-headlines conservative only long-range plan.

It looks as though we will be permanently saddled with the conservative practice of puffing up every molehill of news into something threatening, fearful, or sinister.

This will happen as long as the so-called news media plays into the neocon plan, and the public tunes into Republican seedy made-for-political-gain news.

Yes, monopolizing thru character assassination has been a conservative think-tank plan since before Reagan, but now it is in full blossom.

It is easy to wonder if the corporate media is conspiring with the conservative element in making something noxious out of simple, everyday events, or whether the neo-cons have the formula nailed for drawing non-events into media news.

Politics has always been with us but it has taken a repugnant turn since the Gingrich “Con-man tract with America.” Mislead, distort, rile and lie has become the Republican mantra.

Conservatives now speak in bumper stickers and heave hateful “Hannitys” at public forums, leaving their offal on the floor and in the news.

Meanwhile, Obama speaks in thesis statements with points of reasoning.

Guess which the news media picks up, believing the slow-witted people can’t handle thoughts and reason.

Their strategy has been highly successful. It got Bill Clinton impeached. It got the mediocre George W. Bush elected. It misdirected us into the quagmire of Iraq. You can’t argue with success.

More recently, it hyped up the 2008 Republican presidential ticket by inserting an unqualified vice presidential candidate into the race, injecting every confrontational element and every smear into the race that was possible. Now it’s killing a vital health care reform.

It has cast webs of doubt, surly suspicions and odious assertions on everything wholesome, on everything constructive, and on change that is vital in an America that can’t move forward with the Republican albatross around its neck.

The Republican -- solely political -- plan is the dark force that brings disruption and dishonor to our lives as Americans.

Is Obama our “Luke Skywalker”?

If he is, he lost his light saber.

Dark and Light of Fear and Anger

There was fear and there was anger at our Move-On candle-light vigil, but mostly resolve.

There was the righteous indignation of mothers who fight not only to cure or lessen the suffering of their stricken children but also fight the insurance companies, a struggle more exasperating and more frustrating against the heartless private health insurance companies.

The angry included a relatively young lady stricken with a debilitating disease that put her on government disability rolls. Ironically, for want of full and continuing medical care, she still couldn’t work, costing government and society more than a full coverage alternative would.

The fear was from mothers and fathers who saw sick adult children holding onto employment, knowing that unemployment would rip away health care coverage and worsen their children’s illnesses.

Most of all there was resolve – resolve to fight the vested interests who still want huge profits and obscene bonuses off the backs of the people.

Knowing competition is the only inroad to an affordable system, all supported a public option, knowing the health insurance leeches will not deliver an affordable plan. History has proven this.

This vigil got no media coverage that I could see. It was some 70,000 people spread out across the nation. It provided no splash for television cameras. It didn’t have enough yelling and screaming and spectacle. As usual the media has failed to show the real picture, the real needs of the American people.

The people have no time to court the modern world of media. The health care industry has an avalanche of resources (much taken from our hides), and the connections to cultivate the media, manufacture events and pay politicians to thwart reform, though perhaps slyly and covertly. A lot of corporate money is already in the media and a lot of executives see their future in supporting the corporate interest.

As a result, the modern world of Republican politics and corporate lobbyists have merged with the world of barroom rile and roil, the bump and grind of burlesque, circus side-shows and theater. They know what the media covers and it contains most of those elements.

All four merge in the town hall rancor of riled Republican dupes: there’s shouting Republican shills; there is burlesque where nothing is bared except fangs of anger and resentment; and for more theatrics and side shows, there is always Fox News and multitudinous right-wing radio shows with screamers who tout common messages of hate.  

The zoo has been assembled and new animals continue to be added. We had the birthers, the deathers, and the tea-baggers, all in the mixed genus, dupus-repug, relating to being duped to promote the agendas of private health care and Republicans while venting unreasoning fear, and the repugnance toward cited targets. With the billows of blow-hards like Rush Limbaugh, fear and loathing is stoked up, calling stooges to gatherings where the media will be.

Now let us explain and recap. The corporations that benefit from the actions of the dupes pay those on their payroll: the lobbyists who organize the dupes, the Repuglicans who promote the lies and loathing against their enemies, the Democrats. These same corporations either own or support the conservative network of right-wing voices on television and radio and, of course, have either ownership ties or common needs with the corporate media.

Lest you be deceived, the corporate money also goes to the Democrats, many of which are severely compromised in half-heartedly supporting reform for the people, reform that the corporations don’t want. And you have the faux-Democrats, like the Max Baucuses, who fake support of reform, and blue-dog Democrats who openly oppose reform. Even President Obama seems compromised in that his campaign has taken money from the health care corporations.

The newest member of the genus dupus-repug is the nativist, fed yet another lie that health care reform pays for non-citizens. All members of this genus, surly, distrustful, and resentful, know they’ve been victimized, but can’t identify their tormentors. They do not realize that the same fat cat exploiters are guiding them against reform that will help them.

Special interest will supply a steady stream of these people. Misguided, misused by corrupt corporations, and victims of a corporate media effort, too many lack the time and the will to recover a country that cares for its own.

Instead of paths of caring, America's roads are covered with a layer of froth from the mad-dog anger and slime from the leech trails of conservative politicians and corporate blood-suckers.