In May of 2009, as President Barack Obama prepared to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, he let something terrible slip--something that could threaten the very fabric of our civilization! He would try and pick a new judge for our highest court that possessed "empathy," or the ability to identify “with people’s hopes and struggles” when making decisions that would intimately affect their lives.

In other words, slightly different than how Justice Clarence Thomas does it, which generally involves applying lessons learned from all-expenses covered, first-class corporate speaking gigs and serial viewing of the wacky antics of Long Dong Silver.

Predictably, right wingers from Senator Orrin Hatch to former Republican National Committee Chair (and lobbyist for every destructive interest in existence) Ed Gillespie were just beside themselves, hissy-fitting at the outrageous notion that someone who actually cares about people might become a sitting justice on the High Court.

It is this degradation of American culture since the Reagan Years--on steroids in our current Citizens United Era as corporations have become people (and were almost granted zygote status in Mississippi!)--that says the only healthy emotions are the ones that highlight one's personal greed and lack of compassion for others. This is the cultural sickness that has been on full display for all its misanthropy this past week.

The most egregious example occurred in University Park, Pennsylvania, with the growing and nausea-inducing scandal engulfing Penn State University. No, our culture didn't create the pedophilia of former Penn State Defensive Coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Sadly, this has been with us since the dawn of time.

But the greed of a big college football program and the fortune and fame it creates allowed it to go on for years. This certainly played a defining role to decisions made by everyone from an assistant coach who witnessed Sandusky's anally raping a 10-year old in the shower to the lack of action by the university's president to the post-2002 Rick-Perry-memory hole of the sainted (now) former coach Joe Paterno.

All of them spent at least a decade, perhaps closer to 15 years, covering up the behavior of a serial-child rapist. One who used their reputations and facilities to both locate his victims and commit his crimes.

For these men in positions of power, "greed was good," a lesson learned by the lunkheaded Penn State students who chose to "riot" Wednesday evening upon news of Paterno's firing by the Penn State University Board by turning over a car, breaking windows and performing other acts of mass stupidity. For them, being able to party hardy post-victory and continue the cult of Paterno was more important than the lives of potential peers violently victimized by a beast.

The personal responsibility touted by these protectors, and in particular Joe Paterno--rock-ribbed Republican friend of the Bushs and former Pennsylvania Senator turned presidential candidate Rick Santorum--was no match for the avarice their politics and personal-belief system would seem to espouse. The Pennsvlvania right winger, who sponsored the Republican-registered Sandusky for the Congressional Angels in Adoption" award, based on the non-profit he founded to provide care for foster children (see: target them), was still defending Paterno, last we heard.

So in case you're scoring at home, to Santorum being gay is terrible, because homosexuality is just like "pedophilia." But if the person performing or covering up child rape is a friend, pedophilia's a-ok. So does that mean Santorum supports gay rights--as long as the non-straight in question is a friend of his?

This has been a another edition of Deep Thoughts with Rick Santorum.

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There you go. Orrin Hatch has sent the signal: If we want a jobs plan, we'll have to give up any right to access our current health care system.

Of course, he buries the threat inside a rant about the individual mandate, because that's unpopular with many, not just those on the right. So now we have Republicans saying "Want a job? Die."

These people make me sick. Oops. Guess that's their goal.

Update: Eric Cantor has taken up the hostage-taking on behalf of the House. Washington Post:

But by putting the disaster aid funding on a separate piece of legislation that’s required to keep the government running, House leaders seem to be calculating that the Senate will have no choice but to go along or risk a partial government shutdown.

Oh, and this:

Besides being about half the overall size of the Senate’s disaster aid measure, the House bill ties cuts to an Obama-backed loan program to encourage the production of fuel efficient vehicles to pay for the $1 billion in immediate aid for 2011. Typically disaster aid is added to the budget as an emergency expense, and the insistence by Republicans on so-called offsets has Democrats fuming.

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Credit: Deloitte

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Judging from the furious reaction of some of the gilded-class crowd and their Republican protectors, billionaire Warren Buffett struck a nerve with his plea to Congress to "stop coddling the super-rich." Former American Express CEO, Harvey Golub and tea party sugar daddy Charles Koch were quick to protest respectively "the unfair way taxes are collected" and that "my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington." Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attacked President Obama's "efforts to incite class warfare."

Of course, a truism of American politics is that the side decrying the class war is the one winning it. And at a time when the federal tax burden is at its lowest in 60 years and income inequality at its highest level in 80, Republicans would still rather wave the unbloodied shirt of class warfare than ask what America's rich and famous can do for their country.

That became abundantly clear during the debt ceiling crisis Republicans manufactured. Weeks before Cantor's Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post accused President Obama of class warfare and a desire to "make it harder to create jobs," his GOP colleagues were already singing from the same hymnal. Senators Dan Coats (R-IN) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) quickly called a proposed $4 trillion debt reduction deal 17 percent of which came from new revenues "class warfare." Utah's Orrin Hatch wasn't content to lament "the usual class warfare the Democrats always wage." The poor, Hatch insisted, "need to share some of the responsibility." As for a Senate resolution asking the same of millionaires, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions said that was "rather pathetic."

Of course, what is really pathetic is the declining tax burden on the small slice of Americans now taking an ever-larger piece of the economic pie.

Even after extorting in December a two-year extension to the upper-income Bush tax cuts and steep reductions in the estate tax impacting only 0.25 percent of families, Republicans refused to countenance a dime of new tax revenue as the debt ceiling debate began. First Eric Cantor and then John Boehner walked out of the debt compromise discussions with President Obama for the same reason. As Boehner put it in his national address in July, "I know those tax increases will destroy jobs."

Back in May, John Boehner explained to CBS News who Republicans would be trying to protect during the debt ceiling negotiations with President Obama:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet after the tax cuts of George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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Credit: New York Times

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If nothing else, the debt ceiling crisis provided what Barack Obama is so fond of calling a "teachable moment." Hopefully, that extends to the President himself. After seeing his nominees blocked, his legislation filibustered and popular upper-income tax increases delayed by Republicans who withheld their support from his watered down stimulus and health care programs, President Obama nevertheless continued to seek common ground with those whose only goal remains his political destruction. The result was as painful as it was predictable.

As for the rest of us, here are 25 things we learned during the debt crisis.

(1) We learned that Republicans really care about the national debt, but only when a Democrat is in the White House. As Dick Cheney put it, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

(2) We learned that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan, forcing him to raise the debt ceiling 17 times. Overwhelmed by the torrents of red ink unleashed by his supply-side tax cuts of 1981, Reagan raised taxes eleven times while in office. (His deficit reduction initiatives of 1982, 1984 and 1987 relied on over 75% in new tax revenue.) It's no wonder Reagan called the mountain of debt he bequeathed to America his greatest regret.

(3) We learned that George W. Bush nearly doubled the national debt, leaving Barack Obama a $1.2 trillion annual deficit and almost $11 trillion in debt on January 20, 2009.

(4) We learned that the Bush tax cuts were the single biggest factor in erasing the projected surpluses Dubya inherited from Bill Clinton. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 accounted for almost half of the red ink during his tenure, and if made permanent, would contribute more to the debt over the next decade than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, the stimulus and TARP combined.

(5) We learned that tax cuts don't "pay for themselves" or "always increase revenues." Only in 2005 did federal tax revenue reach the pre-Bush tax cut levels of 2000.

(6) We learned that the Republicans' so-called job creators don't create jobs when their taxes are low. In fact, the data show that the far more jobs were created and the economy grew much more quickly when the top 1% of income earners paid higher - even much higher - taxes.

(7) We learned that for John Boehner, some "spending binges" are more equal than others. While spending under Barack Obama rose by about 10% from George W. Bush's last budget in FY 2009, federal outlays almost doubled between 2001 and 2009. As it turns out, the two unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 (the first war-time tax cut in modern U.S. history) and the Medicare prescription drug program drained the U.S. Treasury. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Eric Cantor voted for all of it.

(8) We learned that Republicans have short memories. When Eric Cantor complained recently that "what I don't think the White House understands is how difficult it is for fiscal conservatives to say they're going to vote for a debt ceiling increase," he apparently forgot that Republican majorities voted seven times to raise the debt limit under President Bush. Along with John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, Cantor and the current GOP leadership team voted a combined 19 times to increase George W. Bush's borrowing authority by $4 trillion. (That vote tally included a "clean" debt ceiling increase in 2004, backed by 98 current House Republicans and 31 sitting GOP Senators.)

(9) We learned that Republicans are bad at genetics, too. Last Friday, Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling claimed that for Republicans, raising the debt ceiling is "contrary to our DNA."

(10) We learned that in rare moments of candor, Republicans can speak the truth. In January, Speaker Boehner acknowledged that failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause "financial disaster." And Utah Senator Orrin Hatch explained that when President Bush was in the White House, for Republicans "it was standard practice not to pay for things."

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Credit: Wall Street Journal

The national debt of the United States tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush. Bush and the GOP Congress cut taxes during wartime, a first in modern American history. During his presidency, Republicans voted seven times to increase the debt ceiling. As Utah Senator Orrin Hatch in 2009 described Republican orthodoxy under Republican presidents, "It was standard practice not to pay for things."

But that was then and this is now. And now with a Democrat in the White House, Hatch and his Republican colleagues are demanding passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment as a condition of raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling. Whether that blackmail is paid or not, either way the result would be a catastrophe for the United States.

The Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) gambit is just the latest chapter in the Republican saga of "America Held Hostage." Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that "not a single one of the 47 Republicans will vote to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes with it some credible effort to do something about our debt." McConnell then upped the ante:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned on Friday that GOP senators will not vote to increase the government's borrowing limit unless President Barack Obama agrees to rein in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, laying down a high-stakes marker just weeks before the debt ceiling is reached.

Now, as Human Events and Politico reported Friday, America's Republican captors are threatening the shut down the government and undermine the full faith and credit of the United States if their demands for a "Starve the Beast" amendment are not met:

The Senate Republicans are preparing to tell President Obama that they want a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to the Constitution passed in Congress in exchange for raising the statuary debt ceiling above $14.2 trillion.

"My hope is that we would force a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment as a condition to voting on the debt ceiling," Sen. John Cornyn (R.-Tex.) told HUMAN EVENTS. "By next week, or shortly thereafter, we will have all 47 Republicans unified behind the effort, and then begin to reach out to our Democratic colleagues."

A BBA would force the federal government to balance the federal spending to incoming revenue each year and cap spending at 18% of the gross domestic product (GDP). For the current Fiscal Year (FY 2011), the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that government spending will be $1.4 trillion more than revenue and account for almost 25% of the GDP.

Of course, the GOP BBA is a recipe for disaster. If codified, Republican grandstanding on the budget would not only mean draconian cuts in government services. The fragile U.S. recovery would be stopped dead in its tracks.

As a matter of simple math, balancing President Obama's proposed FY 2012 budget would mean slashing $1.6 trillion from a $3.7 trillion spending request. That inevitably would devastate federal programs across the board. As this now-dated diagram of the 2011 budget below illustrates, you simply can't get there from here without raising taxes. Taking interest on the debt and defense spending off the table (as most Republicans insist) means cutting over half of everything else the federal government does. And that includes Social Security and Medicare.

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Cable news is obsessed with the Tea Party. It's not unique to Fox News, either. Chris Matthews did an hour-long special on them. CNN hires them as commentators, despite their ugly daily behavior online. and now Greta Van Susteren has gotten in on the Tea Party gravy train with an hour-long love song to them last night.

There are some revealing moments mixed in with the usual nonsense from the likes of Dick Armey and Sarah Palin about how the tea parties are all organic and populist. Humbug and idiocy, that. But two segments in particular are worth watching, both from Utah Senators.

Orrin Hatch looks like a deer caught in the headlights. He's being squeezed hard by the Tea Party and moves farther right with each passing day, but this interview tells me he isn't very happy about it. It's interesting to hear him repeat several times in the beginning, middle and end of this segment how he believes most of them are good people who are 'just fed up'. Here's the revealer though:

They're good people. You always have the radicals in any organization, but the vast majority of them are honest, decent people who are sick and tired of what's happening in our country.

That disclaimer about radicals in any organization was an interesting one for him to make. I think Hatch knows he's a goner in 2012 but will hang on as long as possible in the hopes of moving the Republican party back toward reason because he knows the truth: the majority of them are radicals with a few honest and decent angry folks on the fringe edges.

Former Senator Robert Bennett is a very interesting man. There's no question that he was (and is) very frustrated with how the Tea Party swept through the 2010 primaries in Utah leaving him high and dry.

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Politics Plus: GOP supports banksters who starve children.

Black Magpie Theory: Why the grudge against Sharron Angle is personal.

Empty Wheel: A curious way to celebrate Independence Day

MadKane: Orrin Hatch is why Elena Kagan has no judicial experience.

Pruning Shears: Why Looking Back Matters

Guest round up by Blue Gal. Send tips to bluegalsblog AT gmail.

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There's nothing right-wingers hate more than being reminded that it was the conservative mania for "small government" -- embodied in the massive deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy that have dominated American domestic policy for most of the past decade, following conservative dogma -- that drove not just the American economy over a cliff, but it dragged the global economy with it.

So when Sen. Orrin Hatch was asked by Jon Scott yesterday on Fox News' Happening Now about President Obama's recent stinging remarks in this regard:

Obama: And yet, after driving our economy into the ditch, they decided to stand on the side of the road and watch us as we pulled it out of the ditch. They asked, 'Why haven't you pulled it out fast enough?' 'I notice there's a little scratch there in the fender, why don't you do something about that?'

Hatch at first demurred, laughing it off as being part of politics. He knew this was not a conversation he wanted to explore much, and so instead he diverted it into a sustained wine that Democrats "won't work with us," and then nudged it into the subject of the Goldman Sachs fraud case:

Hatch: And by the way -- this whole Goldman Sachs thing. Isn't that a little odd, that all of a sudden, right at the height of this legislative period, we suddenly have the SEC filing suit against Goldman Sachs?

Scott: You think the timing -- you think the timing of those charges --

Hatch: Yeah, I think it's very suspect. It's very suspect.

Hmmmm. Yeah, there is something fishy there. It's sure peculiar, dontcha think, that it took a one-sided Democratic vote on the SEC to advance the probe. After all, the only politician whose ties to Goldman Sachs have been raised in the press so far is President Obama.

But in the end, Obama's remarks got Hatch's special underwear in a wad, and he couldn't resist returning to try to rebut Obama:

Hatch: And look -- when he blames us for the economy, that he, quote, inherited? Give me a break. Over the last 34 years I've been in the Senate, there have been very few times when you could say the fiscal conservatives were in the majority. And they certainly were not in the majority in the Bush years!

Hahahahahaha. Hoo boy. Now that's a good standup routine.

Is Hatch really trying to assert that his fellow Republican Senators, Trent Lott and Bill Frist -- who were the Republican Senate Majority Leaders during the Bush years -- were not "fiscal conservatives"? That his buddy, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee during the Bush years, was not a fiscal conservative?

Really?

Should we call Sens. Lott, Frist, and Grassley to get their input on whether they were "fiscal conservatives"? Because as I recall -- as they pushed out tax cuts for the wealthy and demolished regulatory oversight of the financial sector in those years -- those programs were all being pushed by the "fiscal conservatives" among both the Republican and Democratic parties.

You know, if I were in Hatch's shoes, and had to survey the economic wreckage that my policies had produced, I'd probably be in a state of denial too. But I'd also be in a straitjacket.

After 34 years, Justice John Paul Stevens is retiring from the US Supreme Court at the end of the current session, as has been widely expected since President Obama took office. Justice Stevens has consistently functioned as the court's bridge between fierce ideological divides. Jeffrey Toobin summarizes his role nicely in his New Yorker piece:

Still, Stevens’s views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy. Many great judicial legacies have a deep theoretical foundation—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s skeptical pragmatism, William J. Brennan’s aggressive liberalism, Scalia’s insistent originalism. Stevens’s lack of one raises questions about the durability of his influence on the Court.

But, more than anything, his career shows how the Court has become a partisan battlefield. In that spirit, Roberts last week denounced President Obama’s criticism of the Court in his State of the Union address, saying that the occasion had “degenerated to a political pep rally.” When Stevens leaves, the Supreme Court will be just another place where Democrats and Republicans fight.

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Nicole already weighed in on that mind-blowing piece of legislation about to become law in Utah that would make pregnant women criminally liable for "reckless behavior" that results in a miscarriage.

The man behind the law, Utah Republican legislator Carl Wimmer, appeared on CNN yesterday to defend his bill, which he claims will only be usable in the worst of circumstances.

Right. He never does explain why it treats women as presumptive criminals, and expands the definition of "illegal abortion" to include miscarriages. Nor does he explain why 93 percent of the women in Utah don't have legal abortions available within their home counties.

But that's par for the course. You see, Carl Wimmer isn't just your run-of-the-mill Utah Republican (see, e.g., Orrin Hatch). He's a flaming Tea Party fan (as his Facebook testimonial makes clear: "I am involved in the Tea Party and 912 movements."

He's not just involved in Glenn Beck's "912" teabagging movement -- he made an appearance on Beck's special "town hall" show last May promoting not just the "912ers," but Beck's wholesale embrace of the "Tenther" theories from the militia movement of the '90s.

Ironically, here's what Wimmer ranted about back then:

Wimmer: The Patrick Henry Caucus, we formed it in Utah, and the way I look at it is, it brings teeth to what the 912ers are doing. I'm a 912er. And the citizens are frustrated. The citizens are sick and tired of liberties and freedoms being destroyed, all the time. And the government doing it.

So what I decided to do, I'm sick of it, I know some of my fellow legislators were sick of it, and I know there's other legislators around the country who are sick of it. So I decided to form the Patrick Henry Caucus, which is state legislators from throughout the country who are going to unify and join together to push forward the agenda that the 912 group supports, and we're gonna do this together. The citizens can't do it together -- they can write letters, and they can organize. But they need the lawmakers, who can help repeal some of these laws, and fight back against a tyrannical federal government.

I dunno about you, but "freedoms being destroyed" and "tyrannical" seem to me like pretty apt descriptions for laws that invade women's wombs. Just sayin'.

None of this is particularly surprising. But it's interesting to see how Glenn Beck's version of "freedom" plays out on the ground when his minions put into action, isn't it?