“Do you hate Obamacare more than you love your country?” a well-deserved “gotcha moment” for Marsha Blackburn.

Watch Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on the hot seat. http://www.flickr.com/photos/egbertowillies/10294367566/

Lebowski Fest this weekend

in San Francisco.  

Smokey, at left

Chris Hedges goes there: The Sparks of Rebellion

Chris Hedges starts the discussion of what would happen if the government remains subverted.

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them.

Sort of the opposite of the Weather Underground.

The corporate state, meanwhile, is preparing privately for the world it knows is actually coming. It is cementing into place a police state, one that includes the complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the militarization of the internal security apparatus, as well as wholesale surveillance of the citizenry.

Where is the country going? Right now, it’s unclear. But the corporate vampires are on the throat of democracy. This may not end in a place we have seen before.

GOP throws shit in America’s face

Elephant political party throws shit in America’s face

Juan Cole on the Tea Party, its backers, and their successful shutdown of the government of the United States

Make no mistake, this is class warfare, and a naked move towards outright plutocracy. The few hundred superrich do not want a government regulating their pollution, and investigating their white collar crime. They do not need a government to provide schools, roads, bridges, fire protection, libraries and the rest.  Juan Cole takes a shot at it, at Informed Comment:

There should be no confusion about who shut down the US government and why. It was shut down by billionaire backers of the so-called Tea Party faction in the Republican Party. They ordered their sockpuppets, like Ted Cruz, to defund the government so as to take a hostage for ransom. They don’t want to help pay for affordable health care for most Americans, because having $4.8 billion instead of $5 billion is just too humiliating. We don’t even know the names of Cruz’s biggest campaign contributors any more because of the corruption in US campaign finance. But Goldman Sachs and Berkshire Hathaway want him there, and we can bet that the Koch Brothers do, too. They should all be boycotted.

We don’t have a functioning government this morning because our super-rich are on the whole too stingy to help guarantee all Americans the basic human right of health care. They won’t share, even though their tax rates are low in world terms and they couldn’t have gotten rich without the infrastructure and legal latticework provided by the US government, and without the skills and labor of American workers.

Did millions of these working Americans not have affordable health care? Let them, Ted Cruz says, go to the emergency room. Except that it is impossible for ERs to handle all those millions, and it is mmuch more expensive to have them treated that way, and pregnant mothers can’t get prenatal care at ERs. The number of babies lost and infants who die goes way up when the mothers don’t see a physician regularly during pregnancy, and poor women couldn’t afford to do that before Obamacare.

In other words, Ted Cruz and his billionaire backers are telling us, “let them eat cake.”

The Scrooge Oligarchs want to go back to the age of Robber Barons in the nineteenth century.