Oh Dear: American Deja Vu & Madness

Victim Ke'Arre Stewart, 29

Sadly, here we are again. What a way to close out the month.

Another weekend dominated by the dark shadow cast by more senseless gun violence from yet another incident of home-grown terrorism.

As you've likely heard or read by now, this latest mass shooting began around 11:30am last Friday when 57-year-old Robert Dear entered the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs with an assault-style rifle and started shooting.

As widely reported the three innocent victims include a married 44-year-old police officer and father of two named Garret Swasey, a 35-year-old wife and mother named Jennifer Markovsky and Ke'Arre Stewart, a 29-year-old Army veteran (pictured left) who served overseas with the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq - along with nine other people who were wounded.

Earlier this morning Joan Malin, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood in New York City appeared on a segment of The Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the impact of Friday's shooting on the organization's services, facilities and employees. 

During the interview she mentioned that Garret Swasey, the campus police officer who raced to the scene of the shooting to help other first responders, was actually a pro-life Christian who strongly opposed abortion; but yet he still went to the Planned Parenthood facility to try and help save lives - and ultimately gave his own.

That has stuck in my mind all day.

To me the scope of this latest horror is multiplied by a few disturbing things, first of which as I mentioned before is that this is just the latest in a string of incidents with troubling similarities.

John Russell Houser

It was only back in late July of this year when 59-year-old John Russell Houser walked into the Grand 16  movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana and purchased a ticket to a 7:10pm showing of the Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck. 

He then sat at the rear of the theater for about 20 minutes before opening fire with a .40-caliber handgun - killing two women and wounding nine other people before turning the gun on himself.


Houser turned out to have had an extensive and documented  history with extremist right-wing views on topics like gender, immigration, race and politics.

According to Wikipedia:

"The July 27th issue of The Hollywood Reporter reported that investigators believed Houser chose to commit his attack in a theater playing Trainwreck due to its feminist themes and characters, as well as its lead actor's Jewish background. Houser was said to have been a misogynist and praised the actions of Adolf Hitler on online message boards."

Shooter Robert Dear

Like Houser, shooter Robert Dear seems to have been a troubled loner with extremist right-wing leanings who was motivated by the toxic extremist rhetoric manufactured by Republican politicians in Washington who turned the vilification of Planned Parenthood into a national obsession.

Only the modern conservative mindset could explain how in the world a provider of health care services like Planned Parenthood could be cast as the manifestation of evil in the contrived theatrical spectacle put on by Republicans earlier this summer and early fall on Capitol Hill.

Exactly two months ago to the day on September 30th, I blogged about the absurd Congressional hearings on Planned Parenthood held in Washington, D.C. at the height of a highly-politicized ideological frenzy generated by House Republicans.

To add to the absurdity, the manufactured political outrage vented by Republican Congressmen, Senators and 2016 presidential candidates was sparked not by truth or actual facts; it came as the result of a widely-discredited fake "sting" video that was intentionally and deceptively edited to misrepresent Planned Parenthood's involvement with fetal tissue research.

Despite evidence that the video was little more than anti-abortion propaganda and an extensive investigation by Missouri State Attorney General Chris Koster showed that there was absolutely no evidence found to suggest that employees of Planned Parenthood had mishandled fetal tissue samples, Republicans whipped themselves into a state of borderline hysteria over the fake videos created by the misogynist right-wing nut bag David Daleiden.

Republican House Oversight Comm Chair Jason Chaffetz

Remember the seething moral indignation from Republican House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz (pictured left) as he grilled Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards?

His constant interruptions, shameless grandstanding and bullying set a new low for Congressional hearings.

The Utah Congressman even tried to present a concocted chart as evidence that Planned Parenthood had decreased cancer prevention and screenings as they increased abortions until Cecile Richards reamed him by pointing out that the chart was made up by a right-wing anti-abortion group and had nothing to do with Planned Parenthood's spending records.

Remember presidential candidate Carly Fiorina standing on the stage of a live, nationally televised Republican debate during the week of September 14th and repeating an outright lie about David Daleiden's fake sting video? She told this whopper:

“Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ ” 

Not true, Didn't happen.

In an act of defiant political lunacy, Republicans from the House Freedom Caucus sought to use the stripping of government funding for Planned Parenthood as a wedge issue designed to hold up the authorization of a budget deal.

Think about that for a moment.

Republican House Freedom Caucus members

Yearly budget spending intended to ensure that the government of the largest economy in the world would be funded so it can function was held up by Republicans based on a fake smear video put together by fringe anti-abortion activists.
        
The outrageous claims from the video were quoted repeatedly by Republicans eager to capitalize on the anger they sparked - stoking bogus claims that Planned Parenthood was dealing in "baby parts".

Now I'm not saying all this just to tee off on Republicans (well...), I think it's important to illustrate how these politicians with the help of conservative media saturated people like Robert Dear with toxic lies, distortions and half-truths about Planned Parenthood for weeks over the course of the summer.

Then tried to legitimize this bogus smear campaign designed to motivate the pro-life voter base by having no less than four separate Congressional committees "investigating" Planned Parenthood.

When police in Colorado Springs finally subdued Robert Dear after a lengthy standoff last Friday and began to interrogate him to try and understand why he'd murdered three people in cold blood and injured nine more, according to the NY Times, he reportedly told police, "no more baby parts."

Let's hope the anti-abortion wing are proud of their efforts to demonize a personal medical decision and pass laws making it harder for women to access critical health care services.

They (Republicans) were certainly successful in motivating the pro-life constituency of their target voter base; too bad they "motivated" Robert Dear to take the lives of a wife and mother, a church-going Christian campus police officer-husband-and father and an Iraq war veteran and father.

All in the name of the "pro-life" movement.

To quote director David Lean's 1957 masterpiece POW film The Bridge Over the River Kwai:

"Madness."

Inside Professor Brownback's Laboratory & The Vilification of the Working Poor In America

Ready? Cut! Kansas Governor Sam Brownback

There are arguably some pretty crazy Republican governors in these United States, but you really have to admire Governor Sam Brownback's stubborn determination to turn the state of Kansas into an idealistic conservative Utopia; at any cost.

Earlier today he signed into law some of the most restrictive laws in the nation that severely limit how Kansas welfare recipients can spend their money.

That's right, the same governor who's ranted about "big government" and the intrusion of government authority has used the legislative power of the state government to mandate draconian restrictions on how Kansas families on welfare can spend their money.

According to an article on Aljazeera.com, the list of no-no's includes things like concerts, tattoo artists, psychics (yes psychics), cruise ships or movies.
 
But interestingly, as NPR reported today, the new Republican restrictions do NOT apply to firearms.

So Kansas welfare recipients can't use their money to take their kid to see a movie, but they can buy ammo; how Republican is THAT?

But wait, there's more. Remarkably, the restrictions also limit each ATM transaction of the debit card Kansas welfare recipients are issued to a mere $25. As the Aljazeera.com article notes, that essentially imposes a tax on welfare recipients given that most ATM's charge withdrawal fees, don't issue bills in $5 denominations and the majority of poor or lower middle-class Kansas welfare recipients often don't have access to normal banking services.

As an article posted on ThinkProgress.org reported, "Meanwhile, during debate over the bill state Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau (D) pointed out that many recipients need to withdraw hundreds of dollars some days in order to be able to pay rent." 

No one is going to argue that transitioning Americans off welfare in ways that will allow them to be self-sufficient is a bad thing, but the extreme nature of the Kansas welfare restrictions come off as  vindictive, petty and chiefly motivated by a desire to appease the fringe element that now holds the strings of the Republican party; thanks to ALEC, similar restrictions have been passed in 20 other states.

Kansas Action for Children CEO Shannon Cotsoradis

The Associated Press quoted Shannon Cotsoradis, president and CEO of the advocacy group Kansas Action for Children as saying of the new Kansas laws severely restricting how welfare recipients spend their money: "

It really seems to make a statement about how we feel about the poor."

These kinds of restrictions on how welfare recipients spend their money are disturbing on multiple levels.


They reinforce distorted perceptions of the working poor (most American adults on welfare work) as 2nd class citizens who need to be told how to spend their money.

But perhaps more disturbing is that these restrictions are essentially a retreaded version of the vilification of the poor used by the Reagan administration when he and his economic advisers ranted against "Welfare Queens" back in the 1980's, regurgitating simplistic stereotypes of poor African-American, Hispanic and whites and mocking populations of poorly-educated urban and rural residents geographically locked into impoverished neighborhoods through economic and racial discrimination and stuck in cycles of poverty.

When it comes down to it, is there a difference between an impoverished family that lives in North Philadelphia, rural Kentucky or on a reservation? These restrictions are economically discriminatory as much as they are racial or political; or based on other ethnic attributes.

Brownback has never hidden how he feels about the wealthiest and the poorest in the state of Kansas.

He made national headlines over the past couple years after his bold initiative to take advantage of his gubernatorial powers and an eager GOP-majority state legislature to use the state of Kansas as a working "laboratory" for executing fringe conservative ideas.

Aided by a former key Reagan administration economic adviser and representatives from groups including Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and yes, the Koch brothers, Brownback enacted a series of sweeping tax cuts affecting top earners and businesses.

How sweeping? Like a mad swordsman he slashed regulations and all but eliminated taxes on businesses in the state of Kansas while gifting wealthy Kansas citizens with unprecedented cuts in income taxes.

Conservatives drooled and fawned.

Here at last was a chance to validate the long-disproved "Trickle Down" economic theory long espoused by wishful Republicans as if it were some kind of magical elixir that could jump start the American economy and set the nation on a path to prosperity instead of the discredited political-economic philosophy credible economists have shown it to be. 

We've all heard the party line: slash taxes for the wealthy and business and they will pump that money back into the economy creating jobs and prosperity for all. But Brownback's "experiment" was a colossal failure that drained state revenue, stalled economic growth in Kansas to anemic levels, killed job growth and sent the state economy straight into the red.

Read op-ed writer Yael Abouhalkah's piece published in The Kansas City Star back on February 2nd of this year if you want to get a true picture of how Brownback's tax cuts have destroyed the Kansas economy.

Abouhalkkah quotes figures right from the Kansas Department of Revenue showing that in the first two years of Brownback's tax cuts starting in 2013, revenues from state income tax dropped by a staggering $713 million.

The remarkable thing is even after the state began slashing spending on essentials like public education, roads and public pensions in order to try and make up the difference - the people of Kansas re-elected Brownback to another term during the fall 2014 elections. 

If I were a political cartoonist, I'd sketch Brownback as a modern day Don Quixote sitting astride an elephant.

His checklist of destructive conservative policy initiatives is so bizarre and brazen, I'd bet a five-spot that he's eager to jump into that growing pool of "potential GOP presidential candidates" which seems to get stranger by the minute.

Take for example, the Republican party's "answer" to Hillary Clinton, "potential" presidential candidate Carly Fiorina - who's been dipping her toes into the presidential pool as well.

GOP presidential hopeful (?) Carly Fiorina

And yes, that's the same Carly Fiorina (pictured left) who spent over $22 million in a failed bid to unseat Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer back in 2010.

Earlier this evening Sarah Farris posted an interesting piece on TheHill.com.

According to the article, Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard CEO, was quoted as saying that "Conservatives are 'winning' on abortion" at an event hosted by the conservative pro-life group known as the Susan B. Anthony List.

By any measure, that's a pretty astounding statement.

If stripping access to healthcare and cutting off access to breast cancer and other types of screening for millions of low-income women and making it harder for abortion clinics to operate through arcane laws enacted by Republican state legislators is what Fiorina meant by Republicans "winning" on abortion, then yeah, I guess she's "right."

But it's says a lot about today's GOP that Fiorina, who once led an enormous high tech company with thousands of employees, is now proudly trumpeting the trampling of women's rights as a credential for being president of a nation of over 300 million - more than half of whom are women.  

Maybe it's not surprising though. Fiorina earned a reputation at HP for being a "big picture" ideas-oriented executive who was adverse to compromise and reluctant to delegate authority; the latter two arguably being fairly important qualities of anyone who expects to be the chief executive in Washington, DC.   

For a couple of Republicans with little mainstream appeal who have their respective eyes on the GOP presidential nomination, Fiorina and Brownback are making an awful lot of conservative noise.

But to quote Shakespeare, "Sound and fury, signifying nothing."