The Real News Network has the article Wilkerson on GOP Convention.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”

JAY: And I don’t think you could find it in most undeveloped countries.

WILKERSON: No way. This is part of the American mystique, it is part of our heritage, to from time to time become, essentially, speared on our own devices. We use religion, we use finance and economics. You ask about the division in the Republican Party. If I were the Koch brothers, if I were some guy making billions of dollars off a hedge fund and paying absolutely no taxes or very little taxes, I’d go after Romney, too; I wouldn’t vote for Obama. Obama at least looks like he might be slightly interested about the vast majority of poor people in this country. He looks as if he might slightly be interested in revenues through taxes. He might slightly be interested in things that impact the majority of people in America. Romney’s interested in the richest people in the country. And so if I were they, I would be out there like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers and others; I’d be funneling that money out there for Romney; I want an idiot in there who believes in predatory capitalism the way I do, so that I can continue to rape the world.

It is interesting how the word “rape” comes up in so many different contexts when talking about Republicans. Maybe this is why Republicans have such a fixation on sex. They think about and dream about it, but don’t have much scientific or practical knowledge about its affects on society.

This is another of the articles recommended to me by RichardH. The Last Bipartisan by Bill Keller about Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon.

I once asked a Wyden aide whether the senator ever showed signs of despair at the increasingly toxic climate. “You know,” the aide replied, “I’ve been trying to figure the guy out for about six years now and I honestly think that while the stuff that goes on here makes the rest of us tired, angry and cynical, it just makes him that much more determined to find a way to fix it. Seriously, after taking a three-year beating trying to push bipartisan health reform, he walks into my office and says, ‘Great, now we’re going to do bipartisan tax reform.’ I admire the hell out of him for it, but sometimes I want to throw things at him.”

As a resident of Oregon from 1994 to 2006, I voted for Ron Wyden a number of times.  So I have been trying to figure him out for more than just 6 years.  As his aide says, “but sometimes I want to throw things at him.”

Ron Wyden wants to win some minor battles while slowly giving up enough territory to lose the war.  It didn’t take President Obama quite as long to figure out (I think he might have figured it out), that giving an inch to the opposition is a losing strategy.  It is not even a winning tactic anymore.

For Ron Wyden to come up with a bill that he and Paul Ryan could agree on required Wyden to accept the false Ryan premise that the problem is in the level of social benefits and not in the tax and regulation give-aways to the wealthy.  If you start with the wrong premise, you will inevitably lose the war.

RichardH has been sending me links to articles from The New York Times.  Here is the first one The Comeback Skid by Paul Krugman.

But as I said, Mr. Christie talks a good (and very loud) game about his willingness to make tough choices, making big claims about spending cuts — claims, by the way, that PolitiFact has unequivocally declared false. And for the past year he has been touting what he claims is the result of those tough choices: the “Jersey comeback,” the supposed recovery of his state’s economy.

Strange to say, however, Mr. Christie has told reporters that he won’t use the term “Jersey comeback” in his keynote address. And it’s not hard to see why: the comeback, such as it was, has hit the skids. Indeed, the latest figures show his state with the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Strikingly, New Jersey’s 9.8 percent unemployment rate is now significantly higher than the unemployment rate in long-suffering Michigan, which has had a true comeback thanks to the G.O.P.-opposed auto bailout.

Why does reality seem to have a liberal bias?

The Washington Post has the opinion piece Extremism in defense of Gilded Age privilege by Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Romney has sought to distance himself from the Republican extremes on abortion. But he is the leading advocate of the other aspect of new age Republican extremism: its Gilded Age economic policies.

For all the zealotry of the Christian Coalition or the tea party, the Romney-Ryan ticket is most notable for its fierce defense of privilege. Consider:

At a time when the top 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 93 percent of national income growth in 2010, Romney advocates both extending the extra Bush tax cuts for the rich and another round of tax cuts that would offer those making a million or more another $175,000 annual tax break.
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“Extremism in defense of liberty,” conservative icon Barry Goldwater once said, “is no vice.” But extremism in defense of privilege is no virtue. In Tampa, the tea party gets its anti-government, anti-immigrant planks in the platform, and the Christian Coalition its war on women; but the big money is pouring in to support the praetorian guard of privilege at the top of the ticket.

It is amazing that 50% of the voters still don’t get it.

Motherboard has the article Congress’s Science Committee Doesn’t Get Science.

According to its charter, the Science committee holds “Legislative jurisdiction and general oversight and investigative authority on all matters relating to science policy and science education.” Created in 1958, after the launch of Sputnik, the committee was responsible for launching NASA and laying the foundation for the U.S. space program. While science-related legislation can come from anywhere, whether it’s the president or a congressman under the sway of drug company lobbying, the science committee, like other committees, is meant to filter and rule on that legislation.

Its credentials wouldn’t bowl over many scientists. Rep. Akin has a degree from Worcester Polytech in Engineering Management and worked for IBM as an engineer, while Rep. Paul Broun is an M.D., with a background in chemistry. On the Democrat side, Rep. Paul Tonko is a mechanical engineer by training and helped lead New York’s energy R&D authority. Roscoe Barlett of Maryland was once director of a Space Life Sciences research group at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Donna Edwards of Maryland once worked for Lockheed Corporation at the Goddard Space Flight Center during the Spacelab program. But many have no scientific expertise at all.

Is this kind of governance what you expect when you vote Republican? No matter what you expect, this is what you get. We didn’t surpass the Russians in space exploration in the 1960s with this kind of science. We are dependent on the Russians in space now that we do have this kind of science. As I have said before, the Republican motto ought to be, “Government does not work. Elect us, and we will show you what we mean.”

Thanks to RogerG for giving me a clue as to where to find this article.

This is from the Democratic National Committee Rapid Response Team. It isn’t rapid, but it is a good response.

Mitt Romney’s reinvention convention is starting with the theme “We Built It.” Mitt Romney will try to sell himself to the American people as a “Mr. Fix It” who knows how to turn a business around. Of course, once you examine his record, it’s clear Mitt Romney knows less about turning businesses around and more about running them into the ground.

Mitt Romney made millions of dollars bankrupting companies, shuttering factories, offshoring jobs and putting profits before people. The theme of the Republican National Convention paints a rosy picture, but the theme of Mitt Romney’s time as a corporate raider is less flattering. Mitt Romney didn’t build that — he destroyed it.

“Mitt Romney: You Didn’t Build That — You Destroyed It”