True faces

The mask keeps slipping:

BBC: Can you pin down exactly what would keep investors happy, make them feel more confident?

TRADER: That's a tough one.  Personally, it doesn't matter. I'm a trader.  I dont' care about that stuff... We don't really care how they're gonna fix the economy, how they're gonna fix the situation.  Our job is to make money from it.  And personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years.  I have a confession, which is, I go to bed every night, I dream of another recession, I dream of another moment like this.

BBC: Why?

TRADER: Because, people don't seem to maybe remember, the 30s Depression, the Depression in the 30s, wasn't just about a market crash.  There were some people who were prepared to make money from that crash.  And I think anybody can do that.  It isn't just for some people in the elite.  Anybody can make money, it's an opportunity.

BBC: If you could see the people around me, jaws have collectively dropped at what you just said.

London trader dreaming of another recession

He's only saying what his colleagues believe. By some reports the Koch brothers doubled their wealth in the last year. By all reports the top 10% took all the gains in income for the last 20 years.

Americans are not completely unaware of this. Right now support for the Buffet rule - the idea that rich people should pay the same percentage of taxes that working people pay - is huget:  73% of the electorate supports it, and only 16% oppose it (11% aren't sure, which makes you wonder what they are sure about). 73% of people making over $100,000 support it; 66% of self-identified Republicans support it; 59% of self-identified Tea Partiers support it.

But have you seen a single Republican official go against Grover Norquist and come out in favor of any kind of tax? Do you expect to?

And yet, Republicans are still leading in polls and winning elections. What motivates these people to vote against their own economic interests? I would like to think it's simple racism, because as ugly as that answer is, it's better than thinking Americans are just that ignorant. A populace that supports racism is evil, but at least coherent; a populace that doesn't know how to support what it wants is the death of democracy.

Reality check

If you're watching the current self-inflicted economic disaster, caused by a failure to learn anything from the last self-inflected Great Depression; or if you're looking at the current crop of Republican candidates for loser in Nov 2012, and wondering when people will finally learn from the past, here's a depressing reality check:

"The universe is infinite because it has not been produced by a creator. The causes of what now exists had no beginning."

"There is an infinite number of worlds of different sizes: some are larger than ours, some have no sun or moon, others have suns or moons that are bigger than ours. Some have many suns and moons. Worlds are spaced at differing distances from each other; in some parts of the universe there are more worlds, in other parts fewer. In some areas they are growing, in other parts, decreasing. They are destroyed by collision with one another. There are some worlds with no living creatures, plants, or moisture."

"The material cause of all things that exist is the coming together of atoms and void. Atoms are too small to be perceived by the senses. They are eternal and have many different shapes, and they can cluster together to create things that are perceivable. Differences in shape, arrangement, and position of atoms produce different things. By aggregation they provide bulky objects that we can perceive with our sight and other senses."

"By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color: but in reality atoms and void."
- Democritus, 5th century BCE

That's right. Over 2,500 years ago a Greek philosopher laid out the basics of empiricism. And yet Heaven is for real recently made the NYT Bestseller list.

So, reality check: progress is measured by the fact that only 98% of the populace believes in nonsense, instead of 99%.

The only people worse than the Republican debate candidates

are the Republican debate audiences.

First they cheered Perry's 234 executions. Then they cheered Ron Paul's "let 'em die." And now they booed an active duty soldier simply for being gay.

It is a sad day when you realize that a corrupt, stupid weasel like Rick Perry is actually better than his typical constituent.

The Progressive case in three paragraphs

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Elizabeth Warren

You'd think a ni-dan would have a better ground game

To be fair, she is armed with the invincible power of cuteness.

And a towel.

A nation of slackers

Here's Rep. Steve King asserting that the economic recession is due solely to Americans being lazy:

We can't have a nation of slackers and then have me have to sit in the Judiciary Committee listening to them argue that there's work that Americans won't do

And he's right, in a way. There are lots of jobs that have been exported overseas because Americans are unwilling to do dangerous, soul-crushing jobs for pennies an hour. Give the Republicans credit: if we enacted their program and eliminated all workplace safety regulations, minimum wages, and unions, there really would be plenty of work for everyone.

This is a great test. Anybody who thinks that creating full unemployment via the above strategy is a good thing is literally too stupid to vote. If you found yourself thinking, "Ya, maybe we should do that, and get everyone back to work" - tear up your voter registration. For your own good, you can't allow yourself to make public policy decisions, because you are retarded.

Unless you're a billionaire. Then, of course, the idea of employing people for less than 25 cents an hour, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with absolutely no government oversight, sounds like Heaven. Or more accurately, 1930's America.

A young worker's plea

While President Franklin Roosevelt was in Bedford, Mass., campaigning for reelection, a young girl tried to pass him an envelope. But a policeman threw her back into the crowd. Roosevelt told an aide, "Get the note from the girl." Her note read,

I wish you could do something to help us girls....We have been working in a sewing factory,... and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week... Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a week.

This is the kind of story that warms a job creator's heart. This is the America they want to go back to. This is where the Tea Party is going, whether they know it or not.

Here is the principle that should be self-evident: as long as you embrace No work, No pay, you will always have Will Work for Food. Given an employee a choice between starvation and labor, and they will always choose labor.  Give an employer a choice between lower wages and lowest wages, and they will always choose lowest wages. They have to - the power of the free market compels them to. If they don't, their competition will undercut them and force them out of business. By allowing the free market to set the wage for labor, you guarantee that the most efficient price of labor will be set: which is to say, subsistence wages. Because efficiency is measured by corporate profits, not by social goods like psychological happiness, lower crime rates, or better health care outcomes.

A year in Oz

Well, I survived my first year in Oz. To celebrate I had a Whopper at Hungry Jack's, which is what they call Burger King out here. It was just as lousy as the real American deal.

So what penetrating insight do I have on this august occasion? Well, two of them:

1) There's a lot more movies shown on TV. Late at night, several stations broadcast full-length movies. We've got District 9, Pitch Black, and Star Trek on the DVR now. Also, I've watched sub-titled French and Spanish flicks.

2) They show full frontal nudity on broadcast TV here. After 9:00 PM, it's presumed adults are watching, and are therefore capable of not only seeing graphic senseless violence (just like in America) but the occasional thematically appropriate nudity.

Everything you need to know about Republicans in two links

While Republicans say this:

“Job creators in America are essentially on strike,” Mr. Boehner said, according to excerpts released by the Speaker’s office. “The problem is not confusion about the policies. The problem is the policies.”
Job creators are on strike.

Wall Street economists say this:

Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in July of this year (in a clients-only newsletter obtained by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson) that “profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades,” and “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement.” “US labor compensation,” he explained, “is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”

Wall Street discovers income inequality.

To be fair to the job creators, they're not hiring because there's no demand. To be fair to the truth, there's no demand because the laissez-faire policies of Reaganomis have killed the economy.

Addicted to failure

Here are two incidents:



Shutting down the government for attention is fun


Fox puts words in Perry's mouth

There are, of course, many more where those came from. What they all have in common is failure.

The Republicans in Congress have become so used to obstruction that they don't know how to stop. Even when the leadership realizes it's gone too far, they can't reign in all the rogue elements. This is, of course, the danger of using rogue elements and relentless obstructionism in the first place.

Fox news has been telling increasingly brazen lies for so long they've forgotten how to stop. Now they are putting words in Republican's mouths. This is, of course, the danger of a culture that winks at dishonesty.

And yet, people continue to vote Republican and watch Fox news. The tilting has been gradual enough that people have time to adjust their bearings in between, and so they haven't noticed how far in absolute terms the tilt has gone. Like lobsters on the boil. Is there any point at which people wake up, look at the last 20 years, and say, "Where are we, and how did we get here from there?"

If President Obama loses the 2012 election, it's not just the end of  his career. It is the beginning of the end of democracy for the entire the world. When minority parties realize they can seize power simply by wrecking the economy because the electorate isn't paying attention, then every minority party in turn will repeatedly sabotage their own government in a death spiral to the bottom. You know, like Rome did.

If a democratic electorate cannot see past the economic numbers and the faux news, then it's over. The electorate no longer possesses the ability to govern itself, and soon enough, it will lose the privilege. This process will be repeated in every democracy of any consequence; as the vultures flee the self-imposed collapse of American society, they will take their money and tactics elsewhere. So even if a nation were inclined to exercise its civic duty, it won't have a chance. The rats from our sinking ship will sink theirs. I already see signs of Americanization in the Australian insurance and housing industry. And of course Murdoch is Australian.

There was a reason we adhered to strict empirical standards of truth and accountability, even when it cost us our political victories or jobs. Because not doing so costs us everything.

Ronald Reagan, incomptent socialist

Not content to cheer the mass execution of Americans, a Tea Party crowd is now cheering to let people die. The columnist draws the correct conclusion:

What it clarified, however, was less the cruelty of the Tea Party crowd than the absurdity of the health-care positions of all of the Republican candidates. 

This article makes perfectly clear what I have been telling conservatives for years: we already have socialzed medicine, just the worst possible way to pay for it:

hospitals are required to treat the urgently ill without regard for their ability to pay, thanks to a bill signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986

So everyone gets medical care, once their condition becomes the most life-threatening - and expensive -  it can be. In true Republican fashion, the problem of people dying in hospital waiting rooms was resolved by an unfunded mandate that hospitals provide care out of their own pocket; meanwhile, the cost of this care would not only be unpaid, but unacknowledged by Republicans who would continue to object to forcing people to spend money on other people.

The unfunded mandate forced on hospitals is effectively a poll tax; everyone winds up paying it at the same rate. This is the definition of a regressive tax, which is to say, a tax that hits poor people harder than rich people. Ever since Reagan, the only consistent platform in the Republican party has been, "Tax cuts for the rich."

And yet poor and middle class people keep voting for them. Truly, we get the government we deserve.

When bank runs affect entire continents

Paul Krugman is warning that the Euro might collapse in a matter of days.

The problem is that Europe put itself at the mercy of the financiers. All governments borrow; it is a fact of life. When they can't borrow, they run into trouble. When they run into trouble, they can't borrow.

Somebody put out a rumor that Spain might default. So the interest rates on Spain's borrowing starting going up. The higher the rates go, the riskier Spain's debt looks, so... the higher the rates go. So now, Spain might actually go bankrupt, due to a run on their national treasury, just like even the good banks in the Great Depression went under.

This can't happen to America. We can always print money to pay off our old bonds. Sure, it would piss people off and cause inflation, but the solution only has to be temporary. Once it's clear we aren't going to default, the pressure drops, and we can stop printing money. Since the financiers don't want us to print money, that stability point will come pretty quickly. So, we're protected: despite the best efforts of the lunatics who want to abandon fiat money (and thus leave us completely at the mercy of anyone who can corner the gold market), America is still safe.

But Europe isn't. Whole governments will fall, people will suffer, but the financiers will win. They'll make money speculating on the collapse, and then they'll buy national assets for pennies. And then they'll do it all again.

And we worried about Islamic terrorists...

Intellectual pornography

Sometimes you come across a piece of writing that is so partisan, so indifferent to ordinary standards of truth, that it isn't even propaganda. It's not attempting to convince other people, or even to strengthen and bolster the faithful. It only exists to excite the believer, in the crudest possible way; it plays to arguments so shallow they can only occur in the privacy of one's own head without mortifying embarrassment. In other words, the intellectual version of pornography.

American Thinker is such a rag. As a perfect example, here's an article so feckless with the truth that I'm not even sure what its goal was. It looks like Accommodationism, that auto-masochistic hobby wherein atheists flagellate other atheists for being too atheistic. But it contains sops to every conceivable audience, sort of the same way porns have at least one scene for every perversion (how democratic!).

At first we have the "atheist admiring religion" shtick:

it is high time for a non-believing scientist to express my love and admiration for the great religious traditions.

OK, fair enough. But in the next paragraph, we run into a problem:

It (Religion) is how civilized morals and values have been taught from one generation to the next for the last 6,000 years of recorded history, and probably for 100,000 years before that.

Um. Just a moment. Isn't one of the great religious traditions that history is only 6,000 years old? In fact, isn't Biologos (the premiere science and religion compatibilist organization) currently imploding over the dueling facts of a) science proves humans are not descended from one couple, and b) without Adam and Eve's fall, there is no original sin, hence no redemption, hence no Christ, hence no Christianity?

For a guy who's all into revering great traditions, Mr. Lewis doesn't object to just stomping on one of them right out of the gate.

Nor does he bother to mention that not all religious traditions are good. Genocide, slavery, witch-burning, polygamy - what about these grand traditions? And that's just Christian tradition. With Islam we get marriageable nine-year-olds; with Hinduism a racism so stringent it applies to social classes; and of course the old pagan stand-by of sacrificing virgins to volcanoes. Really, how much more traditional than that can you get?

But perhaps it is supposed to be evident from context that Mr. Lewis only approves of good Christian traditions. Like a porno flick, the question of why the plumber is there when the housewife is in the shower isn't even supposed to be asked. This stuff doesn't work if you analyze it too much!

It is possible to make an argument that religion served (or serves) a necessary role in expanding communities from tribes to nation-states. If Mr. Lewis were making such an argument, it would be possible for me to make a counter-argument. However, Mr. Lewis is not making an argument. He is simply throwing out vacuous talking points that the reader can construct into whatever fantasy meets his or her needs. You know... like pornography.

Mind you, this is just the first two paragraphs. The rest of the article is worse. He staggers from one poorly-constructed scene to the next: a bit about the World Heritage sites being mostly religious simply ignores the fact that religiously dominated societies of course produce monuments through religious labor and themes, that often those sites were constructed with slave labor to honor gods that Americans would find horrific, and he includes cave paintings on the list. Has every magic ritual now been classified as religious? Why, yes, it has, as he makes clear later on when he writes:

Such panpsychic experiences are reported by mystics throughout human history.

Painting with a bit of a broad brush, aren't we? Are the readers of the American Thinker really prepared to grant the validity of all supernatural claims and experiences? Or do they just fast-forward past this part, the way viewers fast-forward past the scenes that indulge perversions they aren't interested in.

Next comes a series of encounters with literature. Honestly, people, the only time you can cite literature as evidence for your theory is if you are doing literary theory. It's one thing to point out that great novels use religious themes; it's something else to point out that in great novels, scientists are often religious, and therefore we can conclude that scientists were often religious!

But of course my favorite paragraph has to be this one:

Today's crusading atheism is a fanatical cult that desperately needs to make converts, to silence its own inner qualms. Intolerance is progressive, see?

Followed by the usual conclusion which asserts that liberals are intolerant, and therefore bad. Yes, once again we have an article reeking of intolerance complaining that other people are intolerant. Never mind the factual distortions of the above paragraph; many, many religions today are evangelical. Catholics and Protestants each strive to convert the other, and both claim the other are bound for Hell and damnation. So if atheism really were just another religion trying to make converts by criticizing other denominations, why would that be bad? Didn't Mr. Lewis just argue that we should tolerate that kind of behavior from every other religion? Why single out one particular religious viewpoint for denigration in an article asserting that only crass philistines denigrate religious viewpoints?

Why does the plumber have KY Jelly in his toolbox? Once again, stop asking those pesky questions! I'm trying to enjoy myself here. If you know what I mean.

Sometimes people make me sick

I am not opposed to the death penalty; I can make a pretty good argument for why it is both moral and necessary (even though I can also a pretty good argument for why it isn't). However, I cannot imagine, under any circumstance, cheering about it:

Debate audience cheers Perry's execution record

I didn't object to a few celebrations about Osama bin Laden's death. People are only human, after all; payback for a vicious mass-murderer who had eluded justice for ten years is going to provoke emotions. But the executions of your own citizens, under sometimes questionable circumstances - Perry almost certainly presided over the death of at least one innocent man, and almost did so for at least one other - are a different matter.

Are we to believe applause for a body count represents the American electorate?

Arizona in the news again

A single worker's error led to a massive power outage that swept across Arizona, Southern California and Mexico, left millions of people in the dark and brought major West Coast cities to a standstill, according to a local power company.

One Electrical Worker Blamed for Leaving Millions Without Power in California, Arizona and Mexico

The real story here, however, is that this is only the beginning. Experts have been warning about crumbling infrastructure for years; this is what they were talking about. Expect this to happen more and more frequently, with worse and worse outcomes.

The price of health care

Regular readers of my blog - all three of you - will already know how much I've complained about prices in Australia. Everything costs twice as much. Except used cars, which oddly seem to cost the same as in the USA, even though new cars cost twice as much.

Well, I went to the dentist today for a cleaning and check-up. The total bill was $102. In America I would pay $230 for the same service, at the hands of a dental hygienist instead of an actual dentist.

Other health care services, such as hospital stays, are also cheaper. When I tell people what the bill for Sophie was, they can't believe it. Here it would have cost 1/4 as much. Now you might argue that is because the government subsidizes health care; the actual out of pocket expenses for a hospital birth here with public care are probably similar to America with insurance.

But dental care isn't subsidized by the government at all. So why is it so much more affordable?

Another view of the direction of the Right

For another view of where the Right wants to go, I strongly recommend this article, by a 16-year veteran GOP staffer on the House and Senate Budget committee. Read all of it, even the footnotes; here are some highlights:

As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself...

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner...


Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy...

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another.  More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters,"...


There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials...

Goodbye to all that: Reflections of a GOP operative who left the cult

He asserts that the GOP has only three platforms: protect the rich, wage wars, and pander to religion. He makes a compelling argument that the latter - the politicization of religion - is both the worst and the source of all other evils. Democracies only function when dissent is noble; but under monotheistic religions, dissent is diabolic. You can't mix religion and politics without destroying both.

In case you weren't already sick of it

The 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases...

A limping Middle Class

Why can't the Right go back to this?

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

President Abraham Lincoln, first annual message to Congress, December 3, 1861

Funny how the Republican obsession with returning to the past doesn't include returning to the Republican's past.

Edit: Oh, look. here's a former Boehner staffer explaining where they do want to go back to:

Former Boehner Staffer Suggests Rick Perry Would Be Happier With the Confederate Constitution

Another table of doom

You don't have to read the text if you understand this table:

Income Percentile	Higher top tax rate 1947-1981	Lower top tax rate 1982-2007
95th	2.11%	1.62%
60th	2.22%	0.97%
20th	1.96%	0.58%

When top tax rates were higher, the middle class was actually holding its own against the folks at the top, and the poor were moving up at roughly the same rate as the rest of the nation. When tax rates were cut at the top, there was a radical change. Under the low taxes on the wealthy regime, middle class growth was cut in half. Growth of income for the poor was cut to less than a third of the previous pace.

Why? Because cutting taxes at the top does exactly what the conservatives have always advertised—it encourages the wealthy to make more money. However, personal taxes aren't paid on the revenues of a company. They're paid on how much you take home. Cutting taxes at the top encouraged the wealthy to put more cash into their own pockets and hold back pay that otherwise would have gone to middle class employees and the working poor...

When taxes drop so far that they cease to be a consideration, the best move is to simply grab all the money while it's available. Why tempt fate in the marketplace, why risk unforeseen circumstances, why do all that boring old work if you can simply pocket the profits and run?

The current system provides no incentive to build companies and systems that can stand the test of time, companies built around valuable and educated workers who have a stake in the success of the company, community, and society. We've built a system that's tottering on the edge of terminal instability, and those calling for still lower taxes are likely to knock out the last supports holding up the floor.

Serfs up: how coddling the rich is destroying the American dream

So, to be fair to rich people, they're not actually any stupider than the rest of the population. They voted for Reaganomics because it was in their own short-term best interest. Presumably the rest of the working class Republicans thought it was in their interest, too.

But they were wrong. And we know that now. The empirical data is there, the history is told. But it requires understanding, and that requires honesty. One dishonest way to look at the past is to smear it all together; to lump the two categories in the table above into one. Then the dismal performance of the last 25 years erases the good performance of the previous period, and so the conclusion becomes that we have to roll back the whole thing. This is what a lack of nuance does.

In fact, the Republicans are using this strategy right now, claiming that Obama is responsible for the economy that Bush built. (They've even convinced some people that Obama created the TARP act!) No wonder they think nuance is a dirty word.

Where the Right wants to go

Perry would like to return the country to an idealized past—a time when government was an invisible presence. When he appeared on “The Daily Show” last year, to promote his book “Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” Jon Stewart asked him when Washington had gone “off the rails.” “About a century ago,” Perry said. He blamed Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive movement, which promoted the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, sanctioning a federal income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, mandating direct election of U.S. senators rather than their selection by state legislators.

“There are very few people that, I think, would go back to a pre-1920 United States, because that movement didn’t arise out of nothing,” Stewart observed. “Children worked in factories. Women were not allowed to vote.”

“I get that,” Perry said, amiably, although he and Stewart were clearly talking past each other—to audiences in two Americas who are no longer within shouting distance of each other.

Assessing Rick Perry

And there you have it, right from the horse's mouth: where the Tea Party wants to go is 1910. That's their destination. And it's a great place to be, if you're a Gatsby.

But if you're black, or gay, or non-Christian, or female, or poor, it's not a good place. I don't understand the people who think the 1940's were some kind of paradise. They confuse me with their historical rose-colored glasses. But surely no person paid by the hour thinks that 1910 would be better for them.


And, of course, Perry wants to go back to the world that directly led to WWI and then WWII. How much more empirical evidence for the utter failure of government policy can you ask for than that? You know, that whole 1910 thing, we tried it; and it lead to two world wars. So... can we learn anything here?

If nothing else, you'd think that the rich would remember what they didn't like about 1910. Back then, the popular solution to the problems of social inequality was Communism. Communism doesn't work; it's hideous and savage and leads to great misery. But lots of people chose it anyway, because the life they were leading was worse. We only avoided a Communist revolution in this country because the rich decided to ease up and turn to socialism, out of fear of said revolt. And now here the banksters are, with both hands in the cookie jar. It's as if the absence of a credible threat by an irrational, oppressive system empowers them to act irrationally. It's as if disproving the existence of Hell turned Christians into sociopathic monsters.

Which it doesn't; the vast majority of Christians who lose their fear of Hell remain generally good and decent people (in sheer point of fact, religious doctrine of any stripe seems utterly uncorrelated with personal morality). So what this proves is that the rich really are different than you and me; they're irredeemably stupid.

Where the Right has gone

I realize the American Thinker is a right-wing rag, and does not speak for all (or even a majority of) Republicans, but the mere fact that they could post an article like this:

Registering the poor to vote is Un-American

It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

This same author would be the first to tell you how much he reveres the Constitution - even while he advocates eviscerating it.

Anyway, the good news is, they're finally coming right out and admitting their real objectives. So, props for honesty, at least.