Written by Robert Greenwald and Axel Caballero

Carly Fiorina, the 2010 Republican nominee for the Senate representing California, has launched a strong campaign to lure Latinos under two main premises: 1) She has always been a friend of Latinos; and, 2) she holds the same values as Latinos.

Her campaign has launched a website titled “Amigos de Carly” (Friends of Carly) where she appears in a picture banner surrounded by what appear to be Latino business folks. The conservative group American Principles Project has also summoned millions for her and have launched the campaign titled “Tus Valores” (Your Values) in an attempt to make Fiorina appear as if she has always cared for Latino issues.

The problem is that there is absolutely no way to substantiate this. In fact as recently as the primaries Firoina was speaking out against many of the issues and “values” that Latinos truly hold dear.

As a response the campaign The Real Carly: “Carly No Es Mi Amiga” (Carly Is Not My Friend) duly points out how Fiorina’s attempt to lure Latinos is yet another charade of California GOP candidates who can’t hide from their recent anti-Latino words and actions.

As part of this effort, The Real Carly: “Carly No Es Mi Amiga” project has put together a video, a more “adequate” picture banner for Fiorina’s site, as well as the following top 5 reasons why Fiorina is not a friend of Latinos:

1. Fiorina pretends to be a friend to Latinos, but her positions on immigration, education and health care put her in direct opposition to the values that Latinos hold dear. DO NOT BE FOOLED, Fiorina is not good for Latinos in California.

2. Carly Fiorina fiercely supports SB 1070 and racial profiling in Arizona. In fact Fiorina was quoted saying, “This law [SB 1070] is necessary because the Federal Government isn’t doing its job and the people in Arizona are in danger.”

3. Carly Fiorina opposed emergency state aide to help teachers for our schools and Medicaid for our community’s poor. The  emergency state aid bill saved the jobs of approximately 13,700-16,500 teachers in California and also funded Medicaid programs serving approximately 7 million Californians.

4. California’s Latinos need a strong economy, and not a job killer CEO Senator with a history of outsourcing jobs and firing thousands of workers. While CEO of HP, Fiorina outsourced jobs and called the move “smartsourcing.” In 2003, she dismissed almost 18,000 people from HP.  She had already created job loss in California, and we don’t need her to cause any more.

5. Carly Fiorina wants to repeal President Obama’s health care bill which would help this nation’s uninsured.

By Sam Fulwood, Originally published on Center for American Progress blog Race and Beyond,

So now we know what the Tea Party stands for and who stands behind it.

Until this past weekend, the various factions of what’s collectively known as the Tea Party struggled to define who they are and what they represent. The amorphous movement backed by some of the wealthiest conservatives in the country couldn’t decide if it was a political organization, an ideological alternative to the Democratic or Republican parties, or an Internet-inspired and media-driven coalition of grassroots activists whose organizational base exists ephemerally in the nexus of the World Wide Web and right-wing blab shows.

The Tea Party’s split personality led its folk to wrestle with what a Tea Party platform should contain. Should it be exclusively about eliminating all taxes and rolling back progressive social programs? Or should it demonize President Barack Obama and glorify former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to boost web traffic and daily viewership? Or maybe it should focus on the relationship between the Tea Party and local, state, and federal governments? Could it be all of this? Or none?

Well, leave it to conservative Fox News entertainer Glenn Beck to declare definitively what the Tea Party stands for and who stands behind it–the All Mighty. Beck made clear at his rally this past weekend on the National Mall that the Tea Party is, in fact, a religious movement. “Something that is beyond man is happening,” Beck said, sounding like an evangelical preacher. “America today begins to turn back to God.”

Beck, who organized the rally and heavily promoted it on his television show, said divine inspiration directed his decision to have the gathering on the same day 47 years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Beck declared that politics had no place on the agenda and that his fuzzy version of Christian redemption was necessary to “restore” America to an idealized past. So, he said, it was God’s will that he stand in the same place as King to issue his regressive definition of what the Tea Party represents.

But other than time and place, the Beck-led antigovernment rally shared little with King’s Baptist-fired civil rights demonstration. Most significantly, King used his moment to call upon the federal government to produce voting, housing, and economic rights for black Americans. King’s speech was an affirming call for government action. Not so with Beck’s religion-flavored rant, which was at its heart a negative protest against the government and the people it aims to help.

Indeed, the day after his rally on the National Mall Beck declared that the Tea Party does not stand for social justice of any kind, telling Fox News that his new religious movement stands in contrast to liberation theology, which he says underpins President’s Obama’s faith. Predictably mischaracterizing the president’s faith and Christian-inspired social justice the president supports, Beck said “it’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”

If so, it’s also a perversion of exactly what King preached and Beck mimics. King envisioned the mountaintop where our nation moved forward, to grant justice and equality to all its citizens. King’s speech soared with its language that stands to this day in diametric opposition to the call by Beck for a return to an era when white males defined and imposed their self-idolizing view of American culture and society. Those days are long gone, thanks in part to the protests, marches, and martyrdom of social justice advocates like King.

Palin, who is something of the movement’s star attraction since her failed run as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, confirmed Beck’s not so hidden agenda behind his religious revivalism. “We must not fundamentally transform America as some would want,” she said in what sounded like part-political swipe at President Obama and part-religious call to order. “We must restore America and restore her honor.”

It’s fairly obvious what Beck and Palin are attempting. In marketing terms, they are repackaging the old, stale product of white resentment that lurks at the heart of the Beck’s popularity and Tea Party outrage. Having exhausted racist tactics, Beck and his Tea Party faithful seek mainstream acceptability by cloaking their politics of resentment in a religious shawl. He links God and support for the military with his talk of “turning back” and “restoring honor.” This is old wine in new bottles, an appeal to the disaffected and frightened white Americans who see the nation changing right before their eyes.

Changing how? Our nation is becoming browner as racial minorities emerge as a greater percentage of the population. Demographers estimate that by the year 2050, the United States will no longer be a majority white nation. In contrast, those who attended last weekend’s Tea Party rally and demanded to “take back” their nation were overwhelmingly white.

Try as Beck might with his turn toward religious rhetoric and populist sleight of hand, his teary yelping is a tin-eared imitation of King’s prophetic voice. Indeed, the idea that Tea Party activists embraced Beck as the second coming of King—at a time when the nation is becoming increasingly multicultural—demonstrates why this religion gambit is doomed to fail.

Until Beck, Palin, and Tea Party believers link their national aspirations to an inclusive, affirming, and forward-looking view of the nation, the Tea Party will remain a murky mess, deeply mired in the right-wing’s crack-pot fringe.

###

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 examines the impact of polices on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

This post originally appeared on Daily Kos.

Since the Great Recession began in December 2007, significant percentages of Americans have been been added to the already ample roster assisted by anti-poverty programs. Currently, 17 percent of the population gets help from one or more of these. Most such programs wouldn’t even exist had it not been for Democratic majorities pushing them through Congress and Democratic Presidents signing them into law. None of them would exist if today’s Republicans had been around to put up obstacles when the programs were first proposed. If they had their way now, they’d be cutting the remaining guy-wires to the safety net tomorrow.

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This post originally appeared on the Washington Monthly.

Republicans will need a net gain of 10 Senate seats if they hope to control the upper chamber next year, and by most assessments, it’s a tall order. Some pick-ups, however, almost look like sure-things.

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Written by Dr. Carolyn Suffrin for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Late one night during my first months as a physician, I was helping a woman deliver her baby. I was a first year resident in obstetrics and gynecology, training at a hospital in Pennsylvania. It was already a familiar scene to me: the mix of excited anticipation for the beautiful and messy arrival of new life, and of nervous anticipation for the possible complications which any doctor-in-training fears. It was, by all accounts, a typical delivery room scene. Except by one account: the mother-to-be was shackled to the bed.

She was incarcerated at a nearby prison, and though I had no idea what alleged offense got her there, I had some idea that the pangs of labor and the numbing effects of her epidural seemed to override the need for any kind of restraints; how could she possibly flee in between painful contractions? I watched the baby’s heart rate on the monitor dip with each contraction, hoping desperately the mother would push her little one out soon. What if we needed to do an emergency cesarean section, I thought? How would we quickly transfer her from the labor room into the operating room with metal chains attaching her to the bed? As it turns out, she did push her baby out, and we welcomed new life into the world. I handed mom her baby, which she cradled in her one unshackled arm.

That moment in the delivery room troubled me so deeply that it has started me on a path to caring for incarcerated women in California. Read more

Focus on the Family is targeting anti-bullying efforts in schools, claiming that they actually push the so-called “gay agenda.” According to The Denver Post:

As kids head back to school, conservative Christian media ministry Focus on the Family perceives a bully on the playground: national gay-advocacy groups.

School officials allow these outside groups to introduce policies, curriculum and library books under the guise of diversity, safety or bullying-prevention initiatives, said Focus on the Family education expert Candi Cushman.

“We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled,” Cushman said.

This stance against anti-bullying efforts seem to be part of a larger campaign by Focus on the Family to push the inaccurate notion that “homosexuals are indoctrinating children in America’s schools.” This effort is led by Cushman by way of the site, TrueTolerance.org

The following article in the American Family Association’s One News Now goes into more detail about Cushman’s claims and efforts:

With the new school year starting up, many parents are concerned about homosexual promotion in public schools, so a prominent pro-family group is informing parents about what they can do to protect their kids.

Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink, tells OneNewsNow that one simple way to stay on top of the issue is to go to the school’s online library catalog.

“Enter key terms in the search function like ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ ’sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’…and if you start pulling up a lot of books with homosexual themes, that’s a real red flag to you because technically, the library should reflect the school curriculum,” Cushman explains. “It’s also a place teachers can go to pull out resources for use in the classroom.”

It also seems that a major bone of contention of Cushman and Focus on the Family is a booklet which was put out by GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) to be distributed to school officials entitled Just the Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth.

The contention by Cushman and Focus on the Family is that this booklet is wrong and “one-sided.” Eliza Byard, head of GLSEN, told The Denver Post that while GLSEN thought up the idea, the booklet was actually written by a coalition of 18 medical, mental-health and education organizations.

Now to combat this, Focus on the Family has a piece on the True Tolerance site called  Just The Real Facts Please which supposedly gives a refutation of the GLSEN booklet. Just The Real Facts Please is a part of a packet that parents are encouraged to give to school officials.

But it’s obvious that Focus on the Family didn’t research its facts well. Three errors stick out greatly.

On page 22 is this claim:

According to a scientific article published in the journal Pediatrics, nearly 26 percent of 12-year-olds are unsure about their sexuality. The study showed that this uncertainty diminished significantly in older age groups. So pushing a particular sexual agenda onto children during this vulnerable time period is irresponsible, and can even amount to taking emotional advantage of youth.

The article in question is from Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. And on more than one occasion, Remafedi has complained about how it was being distorted.

Another distortion is the following on page 17:

Dr. Robert Spitzer, a pro-gay ally and former APA (American Psychiatric Association) Fellow—as well as a Professor of Psychiatry and Chief of Biometrics at Columbia University—published his study of 200 men and women who had reported some change “from homosexual to heterosexual orientation that lasted at least five years.” He found that “almost all of the participants reported substantial changes in the core aspects [of] sexual orientation, not merely overt behavior.” He also noted that “participants reported benefit from nonsexual changes, such as decreased depression.”

The problem with this citation is that Cushman omitted the fact that Spitzer later continuously complained that his work was being distorted. In addition, in a 2006 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Spitzer said that he now believes that some of those he interviewed for his study may have been either lying to him or themselves. – Ex-Gays Seek a Say in Schools, Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2006

But the most egregious error in Cushman’s piece, and it’s an error that says a lot not only about her mindset but that of Focus on the Family, is the following:

According to the medical and psychological experts writing in the Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems, “The consequences of choices made with the advantage of developmental maturity are preferable to those consequences resulting from decisions made impulsively, in the absence of adequate knowledge, or without the moderating benefit of maturity. The latter choices will, of course, be imperfect, but the former regularly result in personal and social consequences that are painful, destructive, and not fully reversible.”

And just who are these experts? A quick look at the endnotes tells us the following:

Lundy, M.D., M.S., Michael S. and George A. Rekers, Ph.D., Fellow of the Academy of Clinical Psychology. “Homosexuality: Development, Risks, Parental Values, and Controversies,” Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems, Ed. George A. Rekers, New York: Lexington Books, 1995, p.290.

You read that right. Our “beloved” solicitor of “luggage lifters,” George Rekers.

Even after the scandal involving the rentboy and the knowledge that his very presence at anti-gay judicial cases almost ensures victories of the lgbt community (due to the fact that judges don’t find him credible), Cushman and Focus on the Family still think of him as a credible source when it comes to lgbt issues.

The big irony is that Cushman contends that Focus on the Family wants to establish an anti-bullying program to help all students. I find that hard to believe on so many levels. The citation of Rekers as a reliable source is one reason. The entire campaign in general is another.

If they don’t want schools to acknowledge lgbts, how can they talk about protecting lgbt youth?

Author’s note – Focus on the Family isn’t the only right-wing group seeking to influence America’s schools through inaccurate information on the lgbt community. In March, the American College of Pediatricans, a shell group of phony anti-gay data, sent out information to school officials about a website featuring junk science and legitimate studies taken out of context. The organization received numerous rebukes for the false data.

This post originally appeared on Think Progress.

In April, two students at Cal State Stanislaus found a partial copy of a speaker’s contract for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The partial copy revealed that Palin, who was due to speak at the university in June, has “more demands than an opera diva when she hits the road,” as the New York Post put it. It revealed Palin requires a chauffeured black SUV to get her to and from the airport, first class airfare or a private jet, a pre-approved “deluxe hotel” suite, and two bottles of water placed next to the lectern with “bendable straws.”

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By Chuck Collins and Sam Pizzigati

Today marks the 100^th anniversary of the most ‘radical speech’ an American ex-President has ever delivered.

Ex-Presidents almost always follow a small number of well-worn scripts. Some rush to cash in on their celebrity. Some do charitable good deeds. Some just lay low.

Exactly one century ago, on August 31, 1910, we had an ex-President who took a brash and bold leap that took him far beyond these narrowly circumscribed roles. On that day, in the middle of Middle America, a former President — Theodore Roosevelt — essentially called on his fellow citizens to smash the nation’s rich down to democratic size.

We need, Roosevelt told a massive assembly of 30,000 listeners, to “destroy privilege.” Ruin for our democracy, he warned, will be “inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few.”

Those listeners — in Osawatomie, Kansas — roared their approval. Back East, apologists for grand fortune would be aghast. Editorial writers would label Roosevelt “frankly socialistic,” even “anarchistic.” A later historian, George Mowry, would call TR’s talk, soon to be known as his “New Nationalism” address, ”the most radical speech ever given by an ex-President.”

Time hasn’t dimmed that radicalism. Indeed, TR’s speech speaks powerfully to us today, mainly because we confront, a hundred years after he spoke in Osawatomie, the same concentrated wealth and power that TR so feared.

As President, between 1901 and early 1909, Roosevelt had taken on a plutocracy just as entrenched as ours today. He won some battles and ducked many others. But he left the White House feeling the nation, under his successor William Howard Taft, would be headed in the right direction.

But Taft disappointed Roosevelt and outraged the progressive wing of Roosevelt’s Republican Party. TR saw a burning need to spell out a clearer vision for his nation’s future, and he jumped at the invitation from Osawatomie to help dedicate the historic small city’s John Brown Memorial Park.

The event quickly figured to be the biggest in Kansas political history. Roosevelt had just finished a triumphal global tour. He ranked, observers agreed, as the “world’s most popular citizen.”

Kansans would pull out all the stops to set the stage for a memorable speech. By the appointed day, Osawatomie had never looked better. Bands and dignitaries would be everywhere.

“We are ready for plutocrat and peasant,” wrote one local editor, “to honor the ground where John Brown made his decisive stand for freedom.”

Plutocrats never did show. But average Kansans did. They started coming the day before TR’s scheduled appearance, in a driving rain, via “foot, bicycles, motors, buggies, wagons, trains.”

The rain, fortunately, would stop before the mud became too deep. Roosevelt would have open skies when he stepped up onto his podium, a kitchen table, to begin his address. The “surging throng,” says historian Robert La Forte, “continually cheered” for the next hour and a half.

Most Americans today would cheer, too. Are you outraged by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? Our national resources, Roosevelt pronounced, “must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few.”

Think corporations wield too much clout?

“The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good,” Roosevelt noted. “But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.”

We must “prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes,” TR enunciated, and hold corporate officials “personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.”

Again and again, Roosevelt urged his listeners to demand state “and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting.” The absence of that restraint, he noted, “has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”

But TR didn’t stop there. Restraining fortunes based on “unfair money-getting” had to be only a first step. A fortune “gained without doing damage to the community,” he added, deserves no praise. Americans needed to set a higher standard. We should permit fortunes “to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

And even those fortunes, Roosevelt added, needed to be checked, because the “really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities” that “differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means,” qualities that help ensure the “political domination of money.”

To check the growth and limit the power of these fortunes, Roosevelt called for a progressive income tax and an “inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the sizes of the estate.”

Three years after TR’s Osawatomie speech, we would have an income tax in the United States. Six years later after Osawatomie, we would have an estate tax. By the middle of the 20^th century, many of the corporate regulatory reforms that Roosevelt demanded on that August day a century ago would be the law of the land.

By that mid century, the plutocracy that Roosevelt decried had essentially disappeared. The United States had become a middle class nation where average workers, as TR envisioned in 1910, had “a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough” to leave them “time and energy” to bear their “share in the management of the community.”

Now that mid 20^th century middle class has disappeared. We live amid plutocracy once again. In fact, 2010 marks the first year since 1916 that we don’t even have an estate tax on the books. The heirs of the super rich can this year inherit billions in inheritance totally tax-free.

A hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt refused to accept these sorts of concentrations of enormous wealth. At Osawatomie, he helped inspire a generation-long struggle to break up these concentrations. That struggle succeeded.

Our struggle has only just begun. We can succeed, too.

***

Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, is the co-author, with Bill Gates Sr. of Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes. Sam Pizzigati, an Institute associate fellow, edits Too Much, an online weekly on excess and inequality.

This post originally appeared on Campus Progress.

Cross-posted from Food Politics.