GOP candidate reveals Tea Parties' true motivation

You can read the rest of this article about one of the last "Republican Establishmentarians" fighting (albeit passively) for his political life, but what I found fascinating was this frank admission from Tea Party challenger, Glenn Beck/Breitbart darling and Senator wannabe Chris McDaniel of Mississippi [emphasis mine]:

McDaniel, however, routinely casts his mission not as a break with the past but as a bulwark against a frightening future."Millions in this country feel like strangers in this land," he says. "An older America is passing away. A newer America is rising to take its place. We recoil from that culture. It’s foreign to us. It’s offensive to us." This is a remarkably frank declaration of the vision of the Tea Party embraced by liberal social scientists: an expression, above all, of old white people's anxieties at the prospect of an urbanizing, liberalizing, diversifying America.

Tea Partiers can talk all they want about being for smaller government and fiscal conservatism -- they are -- but that's not what really drives them emotionally, it's not what gets their back up. 

It's the "culture wars" -- more precisely, the demographic destiny of America -- that alternately worries and infuriates them. 

America is getting less white and more liberal and this trend will only continue. The old white Tea Parties know it and it drives them nuts.

Thad Cochran, the Last of the Naive Republicans

By Molly Ball

June 3, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/thad-cochran-the-last-of-the-naive-republicans/372084/

An annual tradition: And the poorest states are...

In 2013, I neglected one of my annual rituals: reminding everybody that the poorest U.S. states vote Republican. Nine out of 10, to be exact, and that's backed up by PolitiFact.  Here it is, the Top 10 list of shame:  

10. Oklahoma

9.  South Carolina

8.  Louisiana

7.  Tennessee 

6.  New Mexico - The only state in the top 10 not in the South. West side represent!

5.  Kentucky - Just like in neighboring Tennessee, 1/4 of children live in poverty.

4.  Alabama - Median household income: $41,574, despite having the lowest property tax, and being the second most religious state.

3.  West Virginia

2.  Arkansas

1.  Mississippi - Median household income: $37,095. Official motto: "Making other states feel better about themselves."

Next in the ritual comes the part when I remind you how Red States are also more likely to be federal welfare queens, i.e. they receive more federal money than they pay to Washington in taxes.

This year I'll offer a rebuttal to that: Granted, if you look at all elections, or number of registered Republicans, and not just how these states voted in presidential races, then defining a "Red State" gets trickier. But since Republicans and Democrats use the same Red-Blue state labels, that argument doesn't hold much water with me.  

Finally, I conclude this ritual by lamenting all those poor, hypocritical reactionaries in Flyover Country who vote against their own economic interests.

Till next year!....

Lessons from acid rain on climate change

This story about the follow-on effect of acid rain is important for a few reasons. First and most important, it shows that our tampering with nature can have unexpected consequences. Second, it shows that, even after corrective measures, those consequences can be long-lasting.

Mother Jones recently reported:

In 1990, Congress amended the Clean Air Act to include the Acid Rain Program. The impact on the targeted pollutants, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from power generation, was remarkable. Between 1995 and 2011, emissions of sulfur dioxide fell by 64 percent; nitrogen oxides by 67 percent.

Despite this environmental success story, acid rain has done its work, eating away at the rock in our creeks and riverbeds. Perhaps counterintuitively, acid rain has made our waters -- including the Mississippi River -- more alkaline than acidic. Said one researcher: "The impacts are large, larger than we ever thought 50 years ago they might be."

This is why global climate change is so scary.  Even when we can predict the immediate effects like drought, flooding, salination, we can't predict what will be the domino effects of man's messing with the climate, even with the best scientific models. Therefore prudence is even more necessary.  

'Rivers On Rolaids': How Acid Rain Is Changing Waterways 

By Christopher Joyce

September 13, 2013 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/1atN3De

Fund the IRS to reduce the deficit

This story will drive my dear Republican friends crazy because it's true:

The Internal Revenue Service’s limited, focused exams of federal tax filings—known as correspondence exams—can yield a $7 return for every dollar spent, the Government Accountability Office found in a December report. Even more complex face-to-face investigations yielded a return of $1.8 for every dollar spent.

My man David Cay Johnston mentioned similar stats in his well-researched books Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch and in his articles on tax policy. Recently, Johnston cited a report by Citizens for Tax Justice that found that, [emphasis mine]:

Every dollar invested in the IRS’s enforcement, modernization and management system reduces the federal budget deficit by $200. Here’s another metric. Every dollar the IRS “spends for audits, liens and seizing property from tax cheats” garners ten dollars back.

And as WaPo describes, Mississippi, one of our 50 "laboratories of democracy," increased its spending on tax collection at the state level and got an even better return: $23 for every dollar spent on tax collection!

So why isn't the Grand Old Tea Party demanding that the IRS and every state do the same, to shore up our deficits and restore our fiscal health? Could it be they don't really care about budget deficits at all, only lowering taxes for themselves?.... 

How Mississippi turned $3.5 million into $80 million

By Niraj Chokshi

September 5, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1aaf3vu