The WAWG Blog

Pete Olson voted to end affordable health care for you, but not for himself – Who would have the audacity to vote for repealing affordable health care for 32 million Americans while gladly accepting generous, federally subsidized insurance for themselves?

Representative Pete Olson — along with 236 other congressional health care hypocrites.

Over the past two years, especially during the election season, Republicans and a select few Democrats did everything they could to derail health care reform. They fueled fears and misinformation, throwing around terms like “socialist,” “fascist,” “government takeover,” and of course “death panels.”

Now they’ve fulfilled their campaign promise and voted for a full repeal. But what most of them haven’t done is given up the affordable, subsidized care that they voted to deny so many of us.

Call out the health care hypocrisy by sending Rep. Olson the actual form he can submit to cancel his federal health insurance.

Regards,

Jim

‘You’re going to have to shoot them in the head,’ Glenn Beck said of Democratic leaders

Discussing Democratic leaders during a June broadcast for the Republican Fox News Channel, conspiracy host Glenn Beck told his followers they would have to “shoot them in the head” in order to bring an end to an alleged “communist” agenda.

“They believe in communism,” he said. “They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.”

Regards,

Jim

Tea Party Tries to Segregate North Carolina Schools – The new majority-Republican Wake County School District school board in North Carolina, backed by the national tea party groups want to concentrate poor children into just a few schools by allowing children to only attend their neighborhood school.

The effort is seen as the first organized tea party push-back to government-sponsored integration in public schools and one that has put the district squarely in the center of a debate many thought ended with Brown v. Board of Education–that is the idea that diversity and equality in education are essential to one another.

Prior to the meddling from national tea party interests, the school board and its integration policies was the beneficiary of strong bi-partisan support. Both Republican and Democratic leaders recognized the value in making sure all children in their district, regardless of income or geographic location, benefited from a diverse education experience. Both poor and wealthy students did well in the schools, and parents were happy with the system. But the Tea Party is willing to sacrifice all that so they can step back to 1950. (JLV)

The Legacy of Bush/Cheney: Drinking Water Being Made Unsafe Today – In 2005, the Bush/Cheney Energy Bill exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act, even though the EPA has agreed that it is associated with drinking water pollution in many states. During a process called “fracking”, millions of gallons of water, sand and proprietary chemicals are injected, under high pressure, into a well. The pressure fractures the shale and props open fissures that enable natural gas to flow more freely out of the well. Just days ago, 46 members of Congress wrote a letter in support of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s request that natural gas companies be required to disclose what chemicals they use in “fracking.”

Take Action: Support a repeal of the natural gas industry exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Republicans Complaining About Their Own Health Care Idea – High-risk pools are, in fact, a terrible solution to the health-care crisis. But they happen to be the terrible solution Republicans most favor (along with tax breaks) whenever they’re forced to state their preferred alternative to last year’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They were the central idea in the health plan proposed by Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during the 2008 election. They were the central idea in the House leadership’s proposed substitute for the Democratic plan in 2009, and they played a major role in the alternative plan set forth that year by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a medical doctor who became the GOP’s lead opponent to Obamacare. They were the central idea in a 2010 repeal bill introduced in May by Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif., that would have replaced the health reform bill that became law with the 2009 House leadership bill.

But in May, the House Republican Conference complained that these high-risk pools would be unfair to people currently enrolled in existing state-run risk pools because the latter group was paying higher premiums. In July, the House Republican Conference complained that implementation of this unfair federal program was being delayed. By January, the House Republican leadership was grousing (in a report titled Obamacare: A Budget-Busting, Job-Killing Health Care Law) that costs for this unfair-but-wrongly-delayed program were higher than expected even as participation in this unfair-but-wrongly-delayed-but-too-costly program was lower than it should be.

Republican health care policies, (“Pool Party”), typically segregate the healthy majority from the unhealthy minority in order to lower insurance premiums for the healthy. Never mind that that raises insurance premiums sky-high for the unhealthy. High-risk pools are the most efficient way to achieve such segregation and about the least efficient way to pay medical bills here on planet Earth.

Republicans Don’t Want You to Know They Have Federal Health Insurance – Despite their pledge for transparency, one of the first measures promulgated by the new Republican leadership was to block a proposal by Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY) that would have required all members to disclose whether they are taking advantage of their federal health insurance plan within 15 days of taking the oath of office. The measure failed on a strict party-line vote with Democrats supporting the measure and Republicans opposing it.

While the measure was largely symbolic by its own right, it illustrates the fundamental hypocrisy fueling the current crop of Republicans. They’ve had no issue campaigning on distortions and flat out lies concerning the new health care law and relentlessly push the these of shrinking the size of federal subsidies. Yet almost ever single one of them takes every federal benefit available to them.

“Rising Tide” Sinking a Lot of Boats – In 1962 the wealthiest 1 percent of American households had 125 times the wealth of the median household. Now it’s 190 times as much. Is that a case of a rising tide lifting all boats, just a few of them a little bit higher? No.

From 1950 to 1965, median family income rose from $24,000 a year to $38,000 a year. That’s close to 4 percent a year, close to 60 percent over 15 years. That’s a rising tide.

In 1964 there was a big tax cut. That’s when things started to slow down for average people. By the mid-’70s the rise of the middle class stalled. From 1975 to 2010 median family income rose $42,936 to $49,777. That’s not quite 16 percent over 25 years, less than six-tenths of 1 percent per year.

Briefly, when taxes went up under Clinton, median income rose, peaked at $52,587 in 1999, and then, after Bush cut taxes, declined. Keep in mind that this is median family income. In the ’50s and ’60s, family income was usually earned by a single person. Today, family income normally comes from at least two people.

At the same time, income for the richest soared. In 1979 the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 9 percent of all U.S. income. Now they earn 24 percent of all U.S. income. One percent of Americans earn nearly one-fourth of all the income in the country.

Moderate Republicans Resign Over Fear of Violence From Tea Party – A nasty battle between factions of Arizona Legislative District 20 Republicans and fears that it could turn violent in the wake of what happened in Tucson on Saturday prompted District Chairman Anthony Miller and several others to resign.

Miller, a 43-year-old Ahwatukee Foothills resident and former campaign worker for U.S. Sen. John McCain, was re-elected to a second one-year term last month. He said constant verbal attacks after that election and Internet blog posts by some local members with Tea Party ties made him worry about his family’s safety.

In an e-mail sent a few hours after Saturday’s massacre in Tucson that killed six and injured 13, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Miller told state Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen he was quitting: “Today my wife of 20 yrs ask (sic) me do I think that my PCs (Precinct Committee members) will shoot at our home? So with this being said I am stepping down from LD20GOP Chairman…I will make a full statement on Monday.”

Miller said when he was a member of McCain’s campaign staff last year has been criticized by the more conservative party members who supported Republican opponent J.D. Hayworth. The first and only African-American to hold the party’s precinct chairmanship, Miller said he has been called “McCain’s boy,” and during the campaign saw a critic form his hand in the shape of a gun and point it at him.

Regards,

Jim

Rick Perry’s Big Donor Trying to Sneak Through a Nuclear Waste Dump Permit – The Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission (TLLRWDCC) has proposed rules that would allow importation of nuclear waste from 36 states across the country into Andrews County. That’s a massive expansion from the current rules that only allow nuclear waste from Texas and Vermont. In fact, the volume of waste transported, imported and stored could go up as much as 19 times.

The proposed dump would be operated by a company called Waste Control Specialists (WCS), which is owned by Harold Simmons, a powerful Republican donor who has given Gov. Rick Perry $1.12 million over the past decade.

There are significant safety concerns with the proposed dump site, including those that arise from a study performed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

The TCEQ staff who reviewed the permit unanimously recommended against granting a license for a low-level radioactive waste dump. In an interoffice memo, TCEQ technical staff said that it was “highly likely” that radioactive waste would leak into groundwater.

Furthermore, the dump site itself sits very close to the Ogallala and other aquifers. The Ogallala is a huge underground aquifer that provides drinking water for nearly two million people and extends beneath eight states. This aquifer also supplies water for more than a quarter of the country’s irrigated land.

Several TCEQ staffers quit in protest when their recommendations went unheeded by then-Executive Director Glenn Shankle and the facility was licensed anyway. But the TLLRWDCC is trying to push the rules through during the busy holiday season when people are distracted and before the legislatures of Vermont and Texas have had a chance to assess it.

Click the link below to take action before the deadline this Sunday night at midnight.

In E. J. Dionne’s Where the ‘No Labels’ movement falls short, he states:

The truth is that the American right is much farther from anything that can fairly be described as “the center” than is the left. [This is actually confirmed by the research on authoritarianism by Professor Robert Altemeyer. ]

It’s not so much a sliding scale where any group has moved en masse to one end of the hypothetical left-right scale or the other. It’s more about an initially disconnected, unorganized, right-wing minority, with extreme views, getting totally absorbed into the Republican Party. It happened over time but included a sizable increase orchestrated by Ronald Reagan when he won the South in 1981. Since then, more of these minority “masses” were attracted to the Republican Party, where their extreme right-wing authoritarian worldview has a best, but not wide spread, fit.

Initially, this extreme-view minority was just an active, fearful, group of voters electing entrenched Republicans. Now, with the help of Fox News, hate radio, the Koch Brothers and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and Dick Army and the Tea Party, they have become more organized and will be taking control of The House in January. How many entrenched, non-extremist, Republicans have now been shut up and shown the exit by these minority extremists?

It’s these fearful minority “masses” that have also helped create our dysfunctional Senate of recent years. It’s like 1994 all over again – except that both houses of Congress are now under much tighter control by this fearful minority.

So, we are ruled by an extreme right-wing minority that just happens to be part of the Republican Party. That doesn’t mean that the Republican Party, as a whole, is farther right of some imaginary center. It’s like saying all Muslims are terrorists because a few Islamic, fearful, right-wing, authoritarians are more violent than the majority of Muslims. Neither group has moved en masse farther to the right. Instead, both groups have been invaded and taken over by a small, fearful and violent, minority which makes it look like the whole group has become extreme.

Unfortunately, control by this extreme minority, including a few Democrats, does mean that America no longer has a functioning democracy.

Republicans Out-of-Touch with Americans on Programs and Taxes – A Bloomberg National Poll taken on December 4-7 shows that, “The public wants Congress to keep its hands off entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. … They oppose cuts in most other major domestic programs and defense. They want to maintain subsidies for farmers and tax breaks like the mortgage-interest deduction. And they’re against an increase in the gasoline tax.”

The poll further reveals that the number of Americans who describe the deficit as “dangerously out of control” has dropped from 53% to 48% since October, and out of a list of possible ways to balance the budget, none of the proposed spending cuts gained majority approval. Instead, 60% wanted to end tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and 70% favored a tax on Wall Street profits.

Even among Republicans, only 50% wanted to retain tax cuts for the wealthy, while 47% were opposed. Overall, 82% of responders were opposed to any cuts in Medicare and 72% were against cutting the Medicaid program for the poor.

There was also strong support for raising the cap on wages subject to the Social Security tax — with those earning over $100,000 being significantly more supportive than those making under $25,000. And although 2/3 of Americans would be willing to see means-testing for Social Security benefits, only about a third support either raising the retirement age or reducing cost-of-living increases.

Tea Party supporters were the only group which tended to favor major changes in entitlement programs, but only by narrow majorities or pluralities.

More Profits for Corporations Does Not Result in More Jobs – The Commerce Department reported that U.S. corporations posted the highest profits ever recorded during the third quarter of the 2010 fiscal year. Despite a combined $1.659 trillion in corporate profits, hiring remains scarce.

American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago. At the corporate level, the Great Recession is a memory. Success for large companies has yet to trickle down. Since the end of 2008, when corporate America began enjoying the resumption of growth, profits have swelled from an annualized pace of $995 billion to the current $1.66 trillion as of the end of September. Over the same period, the number of non-farm jobs counted by the Labor Department has slipped from 13.4 million to 13 million.

How A Secretive Group Of Bankers Ensures That The Deck Is Stacked In Their Favor – On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.

The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge risk.

In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks.

The banks in this group, which is affiliated with a new derivatives clearinghouse, have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available.

Richard Nixon Was a Racist – Sixteen months before Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States, he was a fan of no one, especially not blacks, Jews, Italians or the Irish. We know this because much of it is on tape, but it’s just now that anyone is getting around to hearing the nastiness of his words thanks to new releases by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. So far, 265 hours of tape have been released with another 400 to go. It’s sort of like all of those posthumous albums by the Notorious B.I.G., except Nixon’s recordings probably have more bad words. Click on link above for recordings.

Let the mega and ultra rich take their capital-gains-based, inherited-without-struggle wealth and create high-paying jobs.

Here’s how.

Thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the mega and ultra rich now have a new untapped investment vehicle – the government. After they finish buying the government, they will implement their new austerity program.

First, they will create a few jobs by hiring their poorer rich friends into new high level government jobs. These new jobs will do nothing except manage the collection of new taxes from the rest of us.

They will also expand the contracts with Xe (Blackwater) and pay higher salaries to more of them to go out and forcefully collect these new taxes from the rest of us.

As a key element in their new austerity program, the new plutocratic government will raise tax rates to 91 percent for everyone earning less than $250,000 a year. We will all have to learn how to live off of 9 cents of every dollar we can get.

Of course, all of the new poorer rich government employees and Xe privateers, will be given no less than $1,000,000 a year. At this level of income, they are in the new 10 percent tax bracket. They are also eligible for tax credits of up to 10 percent for any out of pocket expenses incurred while collecting taxes from the rest of us.

What else should we expect from the gift of greed we have given them for so many decades.

The following are my two rants sent to the White House on their tax break stimulus package.

To Anyone who cares:

I’ve watched the White Board video to explain the infamous tax break agreement and I’m not convinced. Something about lipstick and pigs comes to mind. Statements like still being against the excessive tax breaks for the mega and ultra rich and the reduction in funding social security being only temporary, just aren’t credible.

The nation is witnessing the effects of the distorted reality of our national capital on political thinking in the White House. Living inside the beltway is like living inside a bad barrel that rots good apples. In 2007, while working outside of the beltway, a progressive Democrat was nominated and elected President to spend the next four years inside that bad barrel. Two years later the beltway bad barrel has converted the progressive Democrat to a moderate Republican. Over the next two years, the conversion will continue. By 2012, President Obama will have to change political parties to get renominated for a second term.

I was a union rep for 10 years and participated in 4 contract negotiations. We always made our proposal to the company first and we never started with what the company would propose. We knew if we started from their initial proposal, we would lose even more.

Goolsbee on Maddow and tax cuts for the ultra and mega rich

I’m still not convinced.

Two years from now, public opinion on excessive tax breaks for the mega and ultra rich may be the same as now – maybe not. We still have two more years of the highly effective Republican message machine and probably very little counter point from the left.

Two years from now, there will be not only more Republicans in Congress, there will be more right-wing authoritarians (Tea Party reps). They want tax breaks even more than those in Congress now.

Two years from now President Obama will be a lame duck president. He’ll have no influence then on what he has left us with now.

What would have happened if the left had started weeks ago with a strong, no compromise stand on the extension of unemployment payments. Couldn’t a strong drive from the left for extending unemployment payments win against tax breaks for the mega and ultra rich? How could Republicans argue for tax cuts and expect to win against extending unemployment payments if those were the two options? Wouldn’t they give up tax cuts for the top 2 percent just to look good in helping the unemployed? It’s all about framing the argument.

The lipstick is not helping me look kindly on this pig.

In 2003, Laurence W. Britt, reviewed seven national regimes which followed the “fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power.” From his study, he developed fourteen basic characteristics or “common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.”

In late 2005, a friend gave me a copy of Mr. Britt’s list. Soon thereafter, I started The WAWG Blog and began posting information on these characteristics of fascism as they applied to America.

In May of 2006, I released a posting about the “single party” state which summarized how fascism grew within authoritarian nation states like Germany or Italy.

In this WAWG article, a key component for forming a fascist state is referenced 23 times: the human “masses.” These “masses” are a controllable and highly active minority within the total population. They are ignored for decades but then circumstances bring them to national prominence as they help create a single party fascist state. These “masses” were the ‘brown shirts’ of Nazi Germany. They are violent jihadists who want to recreate an Islamic caliphate. These “masses” are present in America.

Also in 2006, the book Conservatives Without Consciences (CWC) by John Dean was released. Mr. Dean’s book explained how our path to fascism was started and about the “masses” that are making it happen. John wrote, “Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds.  … And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.”

John Dean made extensive use of the research done by Robert Altemeyer. Professor Altemeyer’s research evolved out of the studies of others on how fascism got started in Europe prior to WWII. His research refined the earlier efforts. Altemeyer defined personality traits of the authoritarian “masses” and created a set of questions to identify these traits in any individual. Also, the demographics collected as part of the questionnaire showed that these authoritarian “masses” were right-wing and evangelical. Thus he called them right-wing authoritarians (RWA).

Professor Altemeyer’s research shows there are left-wing authoritarians, but they are few and far between.

Altemeyer’s research also showed there were subcategories of the authoritarian personality: followers and social dominators. Here are the personality traits for the authoritarian “masses.”

*Denotes those authoritarian Social Dominator and Follower traits on which Double High authoritarians always score high. Those (and there are some according to John Dean) who score high on more of both sets of traits than just these, “are likely to be the particularly alarming Double Highs.”

In April 2010, Professor Altemeyer discussed the 12 behaviors of authoritarian followers as they relate to the members of the Tea Party. After detailing how well the Tea Party mapped to his 12 behaviors, he said:

Still and all, I was just amazed by the Tea Party protest movement. It seemed as if the demonstrators had read the research findings on authoritarianism and then said, “Let’s go out and prove that all those things are true.” Whatever else the Tea Party movement has accomplished, it has certainly made the research on authoritarianism look good.

In October 2010, another blog posting about the Tea Party by Sara Robinson of Cognitive Policy Works, discussed the Tea Party and what its success in the 2010 election could mean for our future:

They’ve already promised us that if they take either house of Congress, the next two years will be a lurid nightmare of hearings, trials, impeachments, and character assassinations against progressives. … Similar scorched-earth harassment awaits officials at every other level of government, too. And casual violence against immigrants, gays, and progressives may escalate as the Tea Party brownshirts become bolder, confident that at least some authorities [social dominators] will either back them up or look the other way.

In the 1930s, the minority “masses” got organized and transformed Germany into a right-wing Nazi state. During recent decades, the “masses” of America have become politically active and increasingly organized. They have been identified as CWCs, authoritarian followers, the fringe of the fringe, and social dominators born of the strict-father family model. They were a loose knit but consistent minority of citizens scattered around the country, but mostly in the south, that eventually concentrated their allegiance with the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan. Then Bush and Cheney came along and took over the Executive branch and, as authoritarian social dominators, moved America closer to a single-party state by furthering the development of the unitary executive.

In 2009, after decades of lopsided tax breaks to transfer wealth to the mega and ultra rich, the American right-wing “masses” were finally organized by other authoritarian social dominators like the Koch Brothers, Dick Army, Fox News, Hate Radio and others. They became members and town hollers of the Tea Party. They are so organized under the Tea Party, they nearly defeated national health care last year. This year they have defeated moderate Republicans across America. Just last month, with the help of the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision, they became members of the 112th Congress. They now control other Republicans in Congress by threatening their future reelection if they don’t follow the dictates of their right-wing social dominators. The last time they were this organized was just before we lost 618,000 citizens in a civil war.

Members of the Tea Party absolutely represent the right-wing “masses,” or the red-white-and-blue shirts, who are leading the way to a fascist America.

Professor Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba collaborated with John Dean on Dean’s book Conservatives Without Conscience (CWC), which I have referenced often. Professor Altemeyer has also written an on-line book about authoritarianism in the Tea Party.

Here are some excerpts:

Tea Partiers are “Authoritarian followers:” “They are happy to let Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin do their thinking for them. It has gotten so bad that their leaders casually say preposterous things that are easily refuted, because they know their audience will never believe the truth, or even hear about it.”

Tea Partiers are fearful and fearful people do stupid things: “The people who orchestrate the Tea Party movement know well what button to push first and hardest among social conservatives, and they work it overtime. And they know spreading fear “works” with others as well. Sometimes it seems they are all trying to out- boogie-man each other.”

Tea Partiers are self-righteous: “Theirs is the holy cause. They believe they are the only ones who can save the country.”

Fearful self-righteous Tea Partiers are hostile: “If you look at some of the videos of last August‟s protests, you can see veins bulging in the necks of some of the Tea Partiers as they vented their fury.”

Critical thinking is abhorrent to Tea Partiers: “Authoritarian followers have more trouble thinking logically than most people do. In particular, they tend to agree with sayings and slogans, even contradictory ones, because they have heard them a lot.”

Tea Partiers are always in fear of the next biggest problem: “Thus it was not hard to get Tea Partiers worked up about, of all things, a plan to improve health care to the levels found in other industrialized countries. Yet Tea Partiers believe the passage of the health care bill marks the end of liberty.”

Compartmentalized thinking comes naturally to Tea Partiers: “Ideas exist independently of the other ideas in their head. Their thinking is so unintegrated because they have spent their lives copying what their authorities say, without examining whether the ideas fit together sensibly.”

For Tea Partiers, double standards, or hypocrisy, are the standard: “It’s pretty clear that many, many Tea Partiers aren’t really against the things they say they’re against. For them, it‟s OK when Republicans do these things. But that is pure hypocrisy, which one finds in abundance among authoritarian followers. And in their leaders, such as the various governors who condemned the stimulus package, said they would refuse such funds, but then accepted them and had their picture taken at project announcements that followed.”

Tea Partiers thrive in mobs: “But experiments have shown that authoritarian followers are highly conforming. When they are in a group of like-minded persons they are much more likely to do things, especially aggressive things, that they would not do alone.”

Tea Partiers cannot be convinced they are wrong: “Experiments show that nothing (aside from their authorities) can convince them they are wrong. If overwhelmed by logic and evidence, they simply “castle” into dogmatism. This is probably because they don‟t really know why they believe what they believe. They didn’t figure it out for themselves; they Xeroxed what their authorities said.”

Tea Partiers need isolation from those not like them to maintain their beliefs – group think on a national scale: “Authoritarian followers are notably ethnocentric, constantly judging others and events through “Us versus Them” lenses. They largely choose their friends according to their beliefs. They stick to news outlets that tell them what they want to hear. They live in a polarized world, divided into their in-group, and out-groups consisting of everybody else. They stress in-group loyalty, and try to keep their distance from the out-groups.”

Tea Partier self-isolation both nurtures and hides there strong prejudices: “[T]hey really do not realize how prejudiced they are, compared with others, because they associate so much with other prejudiced people. So their prejudices seem normal and perfectly justified to them”

Still and all, I was just amazed by the Tea Party protest movement. It seemed as if the demonstrators had read the research findings on authoritarianism and then said, “Let‟s go out and prove that all those things are true.” Whatever else the Tea Party movement has accomplished, it has certainly made the research on authoritarianism look good.

Professor Altemeyer’s article continues with analysis of libertarians as authoritarian social dominators.

Note that Professor Altemeyer’s authoritarian studies are part of decades of research into what caused European countries to become fascist regimes. The authoritarian personality is one of the prerequisites.

In October 2010, another blog posting about the Tea Party by Sara Robinson of Cognitive Policy Works, discussed the Tea Party and what its success in the 2010 election could mean for our future – the coming fascist America:

They’ve already promised us that if they take either house of Congress, the next two years will be a lurid nightmare of hearings, trials, impeachments, and character assassinations against progressives. (Which could, in the end, backfire on the GOP as badly as the Clinton impeachment did. We can hope.) Similar scorched-earth harassment awaits officials at every other level of government, too. And casual violence against immigrants, gays, and progressives may escalate as the Tea Party brownshirts become bolder, confident that at least some authorities will either back them up or look the other way.