Catherine Crier's Blog, page 6

Two “Dark Money” Groups Outspending All Super PACs Combined

A recent ProPublica analysis of political spending shows the two largest non-profit super PACs, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, have outspent all other super PACs combined. Our political process has been so corrupted by anonymous corporate money that public campaign funding must be implemented to save American democracy.

Our elected officials and judges know how corrosive big money is, yet they refuse to reform campaign finance laws for fear of losing political advantage. What are your thoughts on how super PAC money will affect the billion dollar 2012 presidential election?

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From Kim Barker, Propublica

Two Dark Money Groups Outspending All Super PACs Combined

by Kim Barker ProPublica

Two conservative nonprofits, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, have poured almost $60 million into TV ads to influence the presidential race so far, outgunning all super PACs put together, new spending estimates show.

These nonprofits, also known as 501(c)(4)s or c4s for their section of the tax code, don’t have to disclose their donors to the public.

The two nonprofits had outspent each of the other types of outside spending groups in this election cycle, including political parties, unions, trade associations and political action committees, a ProPublica analysis of data provided by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, or CMAG, found.

Super PACs, which do have to report their donors, spent an estimated $55.7 million on TV ads mentioning a presidential candidate, CMAG data shows. Parties spent $22.5 million.

Crossroads GPS, or Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, is the brainchild of GOP strategist Karl Rove, and spent an estimated $41.7 million. Americans for Prosperity, credited with helping launch the Tea Party movement, is backed in part by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, and spent an estimated $18.2 million.

Campaign-finance reform advocates say the spending by the two organizations highlights the role anonymous money is playing in this election, which will be the most expensive in history.

“First of all, it shows how much desire there is for secrecy among huge donors who want to be able to spend money to influence this election without leaving any fingerprints,” said Fred Wertheimer, who runs Democracy 21, a watchdog group. “Secondly, it shows that so far, there is an enormous advantage being played in this election by just two groups that are exercising undue influence in the elections.”

In an email, Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads GPS, defended the group’s work. Wertheimer’s concern reflected partisan bias, he charged.

“Liberal partisans are attacking conservative nonprofits for doing the same things that environmentalist groups, anti war groups, and labor groups have been doing for years without a single complaint,” Collegio wrote.

Americans for Prosperity did not respond to a phone call or an email.

Conservative social-welfare nonprofits have spent about $70 million on TV ads in the election cycle so far, compared to just $1.6 million by liberal groups, CMAG data shows.

ProPublica’s analysis of CMAG data is part of an ongoing investigation looking at the growing influence of 501(c)(4) groups on the 2012 election.

The data reflects spending on ads mentioning a candidate for president this election cycle, including President Barack Obama, his Republican challenger Mitt Romney and former candidates such as Newt Gingrich. Most c4 groups didn’t start spending until after the Republican primaries, however.

CMAG develops its estimates based on regular surveys of TV stations of what they charge, plus discussions with media buyers about what they’re paying. The analysis for ProPublica includes data through Aug. 8.

Its totals differ from actual spending reported to the Federal Election Commission in several ways. CMAG’s numbers reflect expenditures on broadcast TV ads, but not on ads aired on local cable or radio. They also exclude robo-calls and mailers that some groups must report to election officials. In some cases, however, CMAG’s estimates include TV ads that social-welfare nonprofits do not have to report to the FEC because of their content or the time frame in which they ran.

After the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January 2010, which paved the way for unlimited corporate and union spending on federal elections, many predicted that super PACs would become the biggest vehicle for outside spending. Hundreds of super PACs soon sprang up, some of which paired up with c4s.

But it’s the sidekicks, the c4s, that have proved more muscular. Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads, has spent an estimated $6.6 million on broadcast TV ads mentioning a candidate for president, CMAG data shows. Crossroads GPS has spent more than six times as much.

To be notified about ProPublica stories on dark money, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or sign up for our email.

Conservative scholars disown attempts to rewrite our nation’s religious history.

Our founders knew religion provided invaluable moral and ethical instruction, but they established a secular, not religious, government. Their writings or public remarks that allegedly “prove” America was founded as a Christian nation are, instead, comments on the valuable role religion plays in a civilized society.

David Barton and WallBusters have been promoting anti-secular pseudo-scholarship for over two decades in an attempt to rewrite our nation’s religious history. Now, even conservative Christian scholars have had enough. The following article details the fallout over Barton’s most recent book, The Jefferson Lies. What are your thoughts on American historical revisionism taking place today?

From The Daily Beast

Christian Right Historian David Barton in Freefall Over ‘Jefferson Lies’

David Barton has been a hero to the right for claiming the founding fathers wanted a Christian nation. But now even his conservative peers are disowning his work.  By Michelle Goldberg

At the Rediscovering God in America conference in 2011, Mike Huckabee gave an impassioned introduction to David Barton, the religious right’s favorite revisionist historian. “I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced—at gunpoint, no less—to listen to every David Barton message,” he said. “And I think our country would be better for it.”

It’s hard to overstate how important Barton has been in shaping the worldview of the Christian right, and of populist conservatives more generally. A self-taught historian with a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University, he runs a Texas-based organization called WallBuilders, which specializes in books and videos meant to show that the founding fathers were overwhelmingly “orthodox, evangelical” believers who intended for the United States to be a Christian nation. Newt Gingrich has called his work “wonderful” and “most useful.” George W. Bush’s campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004. In 2010, Glenn Beck called him “the most important man in America right now.” At the end of the month, he’s slated to serve on the GOP’s platform committee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

But now, suddenly, Barton’s reputation is in freefall, and not just among the secular historians and journalists who have been denouncing him for ages. (I’m among them; I wrote extensively about Barton in my 2006 book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.) Earlier this week, the evangelical World magazine published a piece about the growing number of conservative Christian scholars questioning his work. Then, on Thursday, Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, recalled Barton’s most recent book, the bestselling The Jefferson Lies, saying it had “lost confidence in the book’s details.”

For decades, Barton has tried to write enlightenment deism out of American history, but it seems that by attempting to turn the famously freethinking Thomas Jefferson into a pious precursor of the modern Christian right, he finally went too far. “Books like that makes Christian scholarship look bad,” says Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical professor of psychology at Grove City College, a conservative Christian school in Pennsylvania. “If that’s what people are passing off as Christian scholarship, there are claims in there that are easily proved false.”

Throckmorton and another Grove City professor, Michael Coulter, have been so disturbed by Barton’s distortions that they wrote a recent rejoinder to his Jefferson book, titled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. Their book appears to have inspired other conservative Christians finally to take a critical look at Barton.

Jay Richards, a senior fellow at the conservative Discovery Institute who spoke alongside Barton at a conference last month, read Getting Jefferson Right and got in touch with Throckmorton. According to World, Richards proceeded to ask 10 conservative Christian scholars to review Barton’s work. When they did, the response was extremely negative, leading Richards to conclude that Barton’s books and videos trafficked in “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”

The most serious of Barton’s deceptions involve his efforts to whitewash Jefferson’s racism, part of Barton’s broader project of absolving the founders of the original sin of slavery, which would taint his picture of the country’s divine origins. His book argues, falsely, that Jefferson wanted to free his slaves, but couldn’t do so because of Virginia law. That claim so incensed some Cincinnati-area pastors, both African-American and white, that they threatened a boycott of Thomas Nelson publishers. “You can’t be serious about racial unity in the church, while holding up Jefferson as a hero and champion of freedom,” one of them said in a press release.

Barton’s history around race is complicated. As I’ve previously written, he got his start on the racist far right. In 1991, the Anti-Defamation League has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a Christian Identity group. A fringe creed, Christian Identity holds that Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, while Africans are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. That fall, Barton was featured at another Christianity Identity gathering, in Oregon.

As Barton went mainstream, however, he distanced himself from outright racism. Instead, he’s sought to prove that liberals have exaggerated the scale of black oppression in early America, and to paint contemporary Republicans as the champions of African-American freedom. In one document on the WallBuilders website, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s 1964 break with the Democrats to the senator’s “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation rather than civil rights.

Until this week, such outrageous claims had not diminished Barton’s influence. Perhaps now that will change.“If you’re going to have a discussion about political ideas, have it based on facts, not political distortions,” says Throckmorton. He sees Barton’s conviction that there’s a straight line linking fundamentalist theology, American history, and contemporary political questions as particularly pernicious. “When you say that, in a policy discussion, that a certain outcome is God’s will, then anybody who is opposing you is not just incorrect, they’re against God,” Throckmorton says. “I think it hurts discourse. I’m an evangelical, but I wouldn’t want to claim that my policy positions are anointed. There’s a danger in that that I think Mr. Barton has fostered.”

ICYMI: The Ed Show

In the last 48 hours, the Romney campaign has several times refused to give GOP voters a direct response on a coordinated Romney/Ryan tax policy. This, along with Ryan’s Medicare plan, are just two of the many issues shaping the GOP ticket that will cause a divide among Republican constituents.

On Tuesday, August 14, I joined Ed Schultz, Joy Reid, and Susan Del Percio on MSNBC’s Ed Show to weigh in on the Paul Ryan VP pick. Watch the clip below and share your thoughts on my Facebook page.

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From The Ed Show

GOP Off the Record: Reactions to Paul Ryan rollout

In public, Republicans are rallying around the Paul Ryan pick. Off the record, they’re less optimistic about the Romney-Ryan ticket. The panel talks about how Ryan’s budget and stance on Medicare is making the GOP nervous about their chances in November.

 

ICYMI: PoliticsNation on MSNBC

Paul Ryan may prove to be a hazardous running mate as the Romney campaign pushes forward on the campaign trail. Working class Republicans – when they really pay attention to the Ryan budget plan – are going to be extremely nervous about the economic possibilities that come with a Romney/Ryan ticket. Conversely, many economic conservatives will find themselves very uncomfortable with some of Ryan’s relatively radical social positions.

On Monday, August 13, I joined Reverend Al Sharpton and Margie Omero on PoliticsNation to discuss the latest feedback on Romney’s choice of running mate. Watch the clip below for a more in-depth analysis of what it is going to take for the Romney campaign to consolidate its base without ostracizing conservatives on the fence.

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From PoliticsNation

Culture war comes front and center with Ryan pick

As conservative as Rep. Paul Ryan is on budget matters, he is even further to the right on social issues. He co-sponsored a personhood amendment and is against abortion in all situations. Catherine Crier, author of “Patriot Acts: What America Must Do to Save the Republic”, and Margie Omero, Democratic Strategist, join PoliticsNation to discuss Ryan’s social beliefs.

Big Pharma spends 19 times more on advertising than it does on research.

With the exception of investment bankers and defense contractors, those who rule over the American pharmaceutical oligopoly are some of the most powerful corporatists in America. Have you ever wondered why we pay twice as much for drugs as citizens in other countries?

A recent study from BMJ shows that for every $1 dollar spent on research alone, Big Pharma spends $19 on marketing and advertising for brand-name drugs, not to mention the enormous sums paid to keep generic drugs off the market. Your thoughts?

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From The Huffington Post

Pharmaceutical Companies Spent 19 Times More On Self-Promotion Than Basic Research: Report

By Alexander Eichler

Pharmaceutical companies have developed a business model that emphasizes new variations on existing drugs, rather than groundbreaking medical advances, a report in the medical journal BMJ states.

Big Pharma might be working a lot harder to sell you products than to develop new ones.

Prescription drug companies aren’t putting a lot of resources toward new, groundbreaking medication, according to a recent report in BMJ, a medical journal based in London. Instead, it’s more profitable for them to simply to create a bunch of products that are only slightly different from drugs already on the market, the reports authors said.

“[P]harmaceutical research and development turns out mostly minor variations on existing drugs,” the authors write. “Sales from these drugs generate steady profits throughout the ups and downs of blockbusters coming off patents.”

The authors go on to say that for every dollar pharmaceutical companies spend on “basic research,” $19 goes toward promotion and marketing.

And apparently it’s been working. Drug company revenues climbed more than $200 billion in the years between 1995 and 2010, according to the website MinnPost. Meanwhile, in recent years, more than one in five Americans age 50 and up have had to cut down on their dosages or switch to cheaper generic drugs because the cost of medication is so high.

The BMJ study isn’t the first time pharmaceutical companies have been accused of putting their own profits ahead of the health of their customers. Lexchin, a professor at York University’s School of Health Policy and Management, was the co-author of another study in 2008 that argued that pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on promotion as they do on research and development.

And last year, an analysis of medical-journal opinion pieces on a certain kind of hormone therapy found that a surprisingly high number of the articles were written by authors who had accepted consulting or speaking fees from hormone manufacturers — and that these authors, unsurprisingly, tended to come out in favor of the treatment.

Of course, big pharma isn’t the only industry to dedicate a huge amount of its resources to advertising. Companies like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever — which both make hygiene and other personal care products — are among many corporations that boosted their advertising spending this year, according to The New York Times.

For Big Pharma ad spending may just be the cost of doing successful business. An executive at an advertising industry trade group toldAdvertising Age that a reduction in pharmaceutical advertising would likely lead to staff cutbacks at drug companies.

 

Divisive rhetoric continues to distract voters this election season.

Americans are being sidelined this election season by conflicting rhetoric on concepts of individual liberty, the nature and size of government, and the influence of special interests. Voters can’t let themselves be distracted by class and cultural divisions, worried that the other guy’s beliefs and freedoms are somehow a threat to the country.

What we desperately need is tough, independent-minded Americans demanding an honest assessment of our problems. If either the idealists or the “aristocrats” take control, the game is surely over.

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From The Economist

Meddling for morality: Republicans are for states’ rights—when it suits them

From Lexington’s Notebook

FOR a party that likes to preach about the evils of an overweening federal government and the virtues of deferring authority to states, localities and individuals, it was a peculiar stance. Yet the vast majority of Republican members of the House of Representatives voted this week to ban abortions in Washington, DC beyond 20 weeks of pregnancy. The constitution gives Congress the power to administer the city in which it sits (and denies the city’s residents the right to send any representatives to Congress), and although a more magnanimous bunch of legislators granted the city home rule in the 1970s, their successors regularly meddle in everything from its transport budget to its needle exchanges.

Thanks to a procedural quirk the abortion bill needed, and did not get, a two-thirds majority to be approved. It never stood a chance in the Senate, and would doubtless have suffered legal challenges too, since it seemed to run against the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade. It made no exception in cases of rape or incest, threatened wayward doctors with prison sentences and would have allowed third parties to secure injunctions against abortions they suspected were about to happen. It was, in short, election-year posturing of the most transparent sort. Nonetheless Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s official but impotent observer in Congress (the Republican leadership did not even allow her to testify at a hearing on the law), was livid. “States’ rights—I thought that was their thing,” she sputtered.

The District of Columbia is not, of course, a state, and Republican congressmen who wish to micromanage its affairs are perfectly within their rights, constitutionally speaking. Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that the party’s current thinking about federalism is, as one conservative scholar tersely observes, “confused”. There is a general sense that the federal government has expanded beyond any reasonable limits, best exemplified by the tea party’s revulsion for Barack Obama’s health-care reforms. In the primaries the Republican presidential candidates tried to prove their fealty to this view by outbidding one another in their zeal to abolish cabinet departments. Newt Gingrich promised to dispense with the Environmental Protection Agency; Rick Perry saw no need for the departments of Commerce and Education along with a third that he couldn’t recall, and Ron Paul had it in for no fewer than five departments, plus the Federal Reserve.

Some state legislators have taken this approach to even greater extremes, introducing “nullification” laws, whereby state governments could refuse to enforce federal laws they consider unconstitutional, as if the civil war had not put paid to such thinking. Yet when it comes to abortion, gay rights and gun control, many of the same people want the federal government to bar states from meddling with the proper order of things. And most Republicans did little to resist George W. Bush when he boosted the federal government’s role in education, expanded Medicare and created the Department of Homeland Security. It is only now that a Democrat is inflating federal authority that they have rediscovered their distaste for it.

Opportunism, Romney-style

Mitt Romney’s campaign for president is equally opportunistic when it comes to states’ rights. Generally, he seems to deploy the concept as expiation for past ideological lapses. Thus he condemns a federal “individual mandate” to buy health insurance as an affront to liberty, while defending the nearly identical policy he instituted as governor of Massachusetts as a laudable exercise in state sovereignty. By the same token, he explains away his past support for a ban on assault weapons as a concession to local sensibilities, not to be repeated on the national stage.

By and large, Mr Romney embraces the standard Republican view of a meddling federal government in desperate need of restraint. He has not publicly called for the elimination of any government agencies (although he reportedly suggested dispensing with Housing and Urban Development at a fund-raising event), but he does want to both cut and cap federal spending, and turn expensive federal programmes such as Medicaid and food stamps into block grants administered by the states. He supports Arizona in its bid to take on greater responsibilities in the fight against illegal immigration, something the Obama administration has resisted. At the same time, however, he wants the federal government to bar states from legalising gay marriage and marijuana. And he is willing to use federal handouts as an enticement to states to adopt more exacting evaluation schemes for teachers, a tactic often attacked by conservatives.

To be fair, it is not easy to come up with a consistent formula for how much devolution is enough. The right is generally happy to devolve decisions about education or health care to the states, notes Charles Fried, a professor of law at Harvard and former solicitor-general, but not product-liability rules and other forms of business regulation. The argument that some matters, such as abortion, are of such moral urgency that they supersede a general preference for devolution sounds reasonable, until you try to decide which subjects are suitably urgent. The left might include health care and civil rights, say, to the consternation of conservatives. (Indeed, Democrats are just as opportunistic about invoking states’ rights, but bang on about the subject less.)

The only principle that stands up to scrutiny, Mr Fried argues, is efficiency: states should take on anything they can handle more cheaply and with better results than the federal government. That, more or less, seems to have been the approach adopted by the drafters of the constitution. It also seems to guide Mr Romney, who makes an unconvincing ideologue, to put it charitably. But then again, efficiency is not nearly as rousing a rallying cry as resisting federal usurpation.

Climate change study asserts extreme weather a direct result of global warming.

Unless we take immediate action to reduce human contributions to global warming, rising temperatures and wildly fluctuating weather patterns will produce major social disruption and potentially cause great conflict.

Dr. James E. Hansen’s most recent climate change study examines whether record-breaking temperatures over the past few years are a direct result of global warming. Take a look at his findings and share your thoughts.

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From The Washington Post

Climate change is here — and worse than we thought

By James E. Hansen

James E. Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.

But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.

But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.

The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.

Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.

This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.

The future is now. And it is hot.

Louisiana’s new voucher school program forces revisionist history on students.

Louisiana’s new voucher school program not only enables corporations to turn our public education system into a for-profit gold mine, it also endorses private schools forcing creationist doctrine and revisionist history on students.

We need to teach our students that the ability to reason – to analyze, research, question, articulate, debate, and extrapolate – is the essence of an educated mind. Read a few of the historical and scientific “facts” taught in these Louisiana voucher schools and share your thoughts on whether they should receive millions in public funding.

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From Mother Jones

14 Wacky “Facts” Kids Will Learn in Louisiana’s Voucher Schools

Thanks to a new law privatizing public education in Louisiana, Bible-based curriculum can now indoctrinate young, pliant minds with the good news of the Lord—all on the state taxpayers’ dime.

Under Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program, considered the most sweeping in the country, Louisiana is poised to spend tens of millions of dollars to help poor and middle-class students from the state’s notoriously terrible public schools receive a private education. While the governor’s plan sounds great in the glittery parlance of the state’s PR machine, the program is rife with accountability problems that actually haven’t been solved by the new standards the Louisiana Department of Education adopted two weeks ago.

For one, of the 119 (mostly Christian) participating schools, Zack Kopplin, a gutsy college sophomore who’s taken to Change.org to stonewall the program, has identified at least 19 that teach or champion creationist nonscience and will rake in nearly $4 million in public funding from the initial round of voucher designations.

Read about  Bobby Jindal’s exorcism problem .

Many of these schools, Kopplin notes, rely on Pensacola-based A Beka Book curriculum or Bob Jones University Press textbooks to teach their pupils Bible-based “facts,” such as the existence of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and all sorts of pseudoscience that researcher Rachel Tabachnick and writer Thomas Vinciguerra have thankfully pored over so the rest of world doesn’t have to.

Here are some of my favorite lessons:

1. Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out: ”Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years.”—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

Much like tough cop Katie Coltrane and Teddy the T-rex in the direct-to-video hit Theodore Rex Screenshot: YouTube

2. Dragons were totally real: “[Is] it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls…The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke.”—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

3. “God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.”—America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994

4. Africa needs religion: “Africa is a continent with many needs. It is still in need of the gospel…Only about ten percent of Africans can read and write. In some areas the mission schools have been shut down by Communists who have taken over the government.”—Old World History and Geography in Christian Perspective, 3rd ed., A Beka Book, 2004

[image error] The literacy rate in Africa is “only about 10 percent”…give or take a few dozen percentage points. 

5. Slave masters were nice guys: ”A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991

Doesn’t everyone look happy?! Edward Williams Clay/Library of Congress

6. The KKK was A-OK: “[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001

Just your friendly neighborhood Imperial Wizard Unknown/Library of Congress

7. The Great Depression wasn’t as bad as the liberals made it sound: ”Perhaps the best known work of propaganda to come from the Depression was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath…Other forms of propaganda included rumors of mortgage foreclosures, mass evictions, and hunger riots and exaggerated statistics representing the number of unemployed and homeless people in America.”—United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1996

Definitely Photoshopped. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikipedia

8. SCOTUS enslaved fetuses: ”Ignoring 3,500 years of Judeo-Christian civilization, religion, morality, and law, the Burger Court held that an unborn child was not a living person but rather the “property” of the mother (much like slaves were considered property in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford).”—American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997

9. The Red Scare isn’t over yet: “It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism.”— American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997

Catechetical Guild/Wikipedia

10. Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson were a couple of hacks: ”[Mark] Twain’s outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless…Twain’s skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.”—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

“Several of [Emily Dickinson's] poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.”—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

To say nothing of her poetry’s Syntax and Punctuation—how odious it is. Todd-Bingham picture collection, 1837-1966 (inclusive)/ Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University

11. Abstract algebra is too dang complicated: “Unlike the ‘modern math’ theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Bookteaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute…A Beka Bookprovides attractive, legible, and workable traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory.”—ABeka.com

MATHS: Y U SO HARD? Screenshot: MittRomney.com

12. Gay people “have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”—Teacher’s Resource Guide to Current Events for Christian Schools, 1998-1999, Bob Jones University Press, 1998

13. “Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world’s richest nations.”—Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1999

Plotting economic apocalypse, BRB Lynn Freeny, Department of Energy/Flickr

14. Globalization is a precursor to rapture: ”But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God’s Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell.”—Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1999

Swapping insider-trading secrets is the devil’s favorite pastime. Luca Signorelli/WikipediaWhew!

Seems extreme. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. Gov. Jindal, you remember, once tried to perform an exorcism on a college gal pal.

 

47 donors contribute more than half of the $230 million taken in by super-PACs this year.

With enormous resources and an agenda driven by short-term profits, most plutocratic super-PAC donors are apathetic toward the American public interest. A recent analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data reveals that a mere 47 donors contributed more than half of the $230 million taken in by super-PACs this year, with 1,082 individual donations making up 94% of that total amount.

With corporate takeover of our political campaigns well underway, the only power still capable of opposing ‘USA, Inc.’ is the people themselves — an informed, united citizenry willing to reclaim their country. Where do you stand?

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From Mother Jones

Charts: Just How Small Is the Super-PAC Gazillionaire Club?

A mere 47 people are responsible for more than half of all super-PAC cash.

By Andy Kroll and Tasneem Raja

The 2012 elections are on track to be the nastiest in recent memory. By the tail end of primary season, in May, 70 percent of all presidential campaign ads were negative, up from a mere 9 percent at the same point in 2008. The culprits for this spike in attack ads were super-PACs and shadowy nonprofits, which together dominate the growing universe of outside political groups poised to spend billions of dollars this election season.

Now a new report from the liberal think tank Demos and the nonpartisan US Public Interest Research Group has revealed how what has been called a “tsunami of slime” is funded by a tiny cadre of wealthy donors.

Just 1,082 donors—a group small enough to fit inside a single high school gymnasium—accounted for 94 percent of all individual donations to super-PACs from January 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012. Those 1,082 donors amount to just 0.00035 percent of the US population.

 

Not exclusive enough for you? Then there’s the “Super-PAC Million-Dollar Club.” Forty-seven individuals have given $1 million or more to super-PACs in the 2012 cycle. That’s a group small enough to fit on a Greyhound bus (not that they’d consider coach), and they’ve ponied up well over half of the $230 million pocketed by super-PACs.

 

Super-PACs at least disclose their donors and their spending. On the other hand, dark-money nonprofits like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and the pro-Obama Priorities USA don’t disclose any of their donors. Worse yet, as Mother Jones has reported, these nonprofits reveal very little about how much they spend.

As of August 2, more than 700 super-PACs had reported spending money on elections. However, just five of those account for nearly two-thirds of the spending, with Republican-leaning groups, including the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future and Rove’s American Crossroads, leading the charge.

 

The dominant presence among super-PAC donors is Las Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who’ve given $36.3 million so far. That’s chump change for the Adelsons—in fact, $36.3 million is a mere 0.15 percent of their total wealth. It would take 321,000 American families giving up 0.15 percent of their wealth to match the Adelsons’ super-PAC giving.

 

Andy Kroll is a reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips and insights at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. Follow him on Twitter here. RSS | TWITTER

 

Tasneem Raja is MoJo‘s Interactive Editor. She wears all the hats. RSS | TWITTER

 

Four years after bailouts, megabanks continue to dismantle efforts to restore economic stability.

During the 2008 bailouts, our financial policies were so out of whack that the failure of a single investment house threatened to bring the most powerful nation on the planet to its knees. Now, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, and Barclays, among others, are dismantling efforts to restore economic stability. Politicians must re-regulate the banking industry or ‘out’ themselves as industry lackies.

In his latest New York Times blog post, MIT Sloan Professor Simon Johnson lays out three myths used by megabank executives to defend against serious regulatory discussion. Read the article and share your thoughts.

[image error] From The New York Times

Under Pressure, Biggest Banks Rely on 3 Myths

By SIMON JOHNSON

Global megabanks have had a tough summer.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and a vociferous opponent of restrictions on reckless risk-taking by big banks, presided over large losses because of exactly such behavior in the company’s London office.

HSBC, which prided itself on a uniquely decentralized management model, was found to have violated – on a vast scale, over many years and in a uniquely decentralized manner – United States laws on money laundering and other actions; its head of global compliance resigned in July while on the witness stand during a Senate hearing.

And Barclays – which had bulked up on the strength of its capital-market activities – acknowledged that traders from that part of the company had conspired to rig Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate), a crucial benchmark for global interest rates. In the ensuing public outcry, its top two executives were forced out.

And last week Sanford I. Weill, who amassed a vast fortune building Citigroup and pushing to dismantle the constraints on such megabanks’ activities, acknowledged that the entire exercise had been a mistake: “I’m suggesting that they be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk, the depositors won’t be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonable.”

According to American Banker, former top executives calling for the biggest banks to be broken up now include Philip J. Purcell, the former chief executive of Morgan Stanley; John Reed, the former chairman of Citigroup; and David Komansky, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch.

Backed into a corner, representatives of these too-big-to-fail banks and their allies are forced to fall back on perpetuating three myths.

First, their critics are “populists” who do not understand banking or economics. But this is belied by the credentials of the people raising serious issues with how global megabanks currently operate.

American Banker highlights the critiques of Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and an experienced financial industry executive; Thomas Hoenig, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and now the No. 2 official at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; and Sheila C. Bair, former head of the F.D.I.C. and now the chairwoman of her own Systemic Risk Council (of which I am a member).

As I wrote here last week, Sarah Bloom Raskin, a governor of the Federal Reserve, has emerged as an important voice calling for rethinking crucial aspects of big banks, including why they should have implicit government backing for their securities and trading operations. Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, and Jon Huntsman, the former Republican presidential candidate, have also expressed articulate and well-informed proposals for making big banks less dangerous – primarily by forcing them to become smaller.

In this context, you should read Neil Barofsky’s new book, “Bailout,” a compelling critique of how the bailout was handled, including the treatment afforded to banks and the relative lack of effort that went into directly addressing problems with mortgages.

The pushback from the Obama administration is that Mr. Barofsky is some form of populist, in contrast to the supposedly responsible professionals of the Treasury Department (many of whom were previously or have subsequently become employees of large financial companies).

But a close reading of Mr. Barofsky’s narrative and analysis confirms what was evident to anyone who studied the reports he produced when he was special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Mr. Barofsky, a distinguished law-enforcement professional, was given the job of preventing fraud and abuse in the Congressionally mandated bailout program, and his efforts to ensure that TARP was run effectively and more in line with taxpayer interests were opposed by senior Treasury officials at almost every turn.

The true issue is not populism versus responsible bankers. Big banks have become a dangerous special interest with powerful friends. It is the reformers who are responsible. Executives who run megabanks – and anyone who supports their continued existence – are the ones who have become reckless and damaging to society.

The second myth is that a “cost-benefit analysis” would show that the Dodd-Frank financial reforms are not worth pursuing. This is actually a clever – or perhaps devious – legal strategy that is being pursued in a low-profile but effective manner. Even well-informed people in Washington frequently have no idea how much damage this myth can still cause within the rule-writing process.

Fortunately, Dennis Kelleher and his colleagues at Better Markets are fighting hard against this myth. In a report released this week, Mr. Kelleher, Stephen Hall and Katelynn Bradley point out that the industry never wants to take into account the real costs of the crisis – millions of jobs lost, growth derailed, lives disrupted and enormous damage to our public finances.

We had a frank discussion of this report at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics on Monday, and I was struck by how many people have a hard time getting their minds around the scale of the damage wrought by large financial institutions that got out of control.

This relates also to the third myth – the assertion that financial reform will hurt our growth prospects. Again, as laid bare by Better Markets, it was reckless risk-taking at the heart of our financial system that led to the largest crisis since the 1930s; the damage will be with us for a long time.

Some decisive government actions helped to reduce the impact on the real economy, and we avoided a second Great Depression.

But, as Mr. Barofsky makes clear, there is almost nothing about these bailout measures that should make you feel good. Putting the big banks back on their feet, with essentially no conditions requiring real change, was a mistake – reinforcing the moral hazard and implicit government subsidies that are now at the heart of our financial system.

Today’s global megabanks are too big to manage. It is not “the market” in any sense that keeps these companies at their current scale; this is the largest and most dangerous government subsidy scheme on record. Such subsidies can only be ended by government action.

It is time to break up the largest banks. Make them small enough and simple enough to fail.

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”