:: I used to be mostly apolitical. This all changed when so-called "free trade" and bubblenomics handed me the worst 3 years of my life.
After the dot-com melt-down, my computer programming job was handed to H-1B visa workers from other countries. To add insult to injury, a lobbyist for Microsoft told me that there was a "shortage" of programmers in the US to my face, while unemployed. (More on Microsoft in later posts.)
I generally survived on scattered fly-by-night contracts with shady companies, but had to leave my family behind for multiple month stretches.
Both my father and grandfather were burned by lopsided "free trade". My father was a manufacturing process coordinator and my grandfather was a cartoonist. These fields mostly drifted overseas. IT (info technology) is not immune either.
Progressives invented the Internet. Conservatives invented spam.
Bobby Jindal: "Let's not be the Stupid Party." Rest of GOP: "Uh, why not?"
GOP follows their funders, not the founders.
Bush is not "somebody you can have a beer with", he's somebody who makes you wish you had a beer......or 7.
I wish conservatives could find a planet to run their Ayn Rand paradise experiment on. However, I hope it's far enough way so that their Death Star takes a good long time to get here.
How the Modern Right Came About
Big business decided to "merge" with Christian fundamentalists because it knew that was the most naive and gullible large group in America. Big business's well-honed Madison Avenue marketing techniques pushed through right-wing "think tanks" found a fitting home with the naive, simplistic jingoism of poorly-educated fundamentalists. After a while, it became a two-way deal: the fundies agreed to help the rich get richer, and the rich agreed to push the fundie's sex-control agenda.
The reason the GOP kept complaining about the number of pages in the health-care bill was because Sarah couldn't fit all that text on her hand with her Sharpie.
Teabonics
"We must stand up against experts" - Texas textbook meeting. Oh those pesky experts, always injecting facts and logic into perfectly good hallucinations.