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Okay, so I’ve long known Republicans are quite adept at dirty tricks and “misspeaking”...but I never realized they were apparently born without even the concept of conscience or morality. I’m getting quite an education lately:

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Senate Bill 5, which will limit most collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, bar all strikes under penalty of law, and ban binding arbitration, just passed the Ohio State Senate by one vote, 17-16. Republicans have a 23-10 hold on the State Senate, and six of them dropped off this anti-union bill.

In order to make it work, Ohio Republicans had to shuffle two committees to ensure they had the votes to pass the bill out. They had to take Bill Zeitz off the Insurance, Commerce and Labor Committee to get the bill out of there. Then, they had to yank Scott Oelslager off the Rules Committee to avoid a deadlock there.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/03/02/sb-5-passes-ohio-senate-after-r
epublicans-reconfigure-committees.

So they had to switch to of their own who were against the measure with two who were FOR the measure to get the votes they needed in two committees. Yeah, it’s legal under the rules, but THEY wrote the rules. I call foul.

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Okay, so I’ve long known Republicans are quite adept at dirty tricks and “misspeaking”...but I never realized they were apparently born without even the concept of conscience or morality.

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Reading comment threads on the Guardian’s sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there’s little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.

Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it’s a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible – which appears to be the point(10).

The second pattern is the strong association between this tactic and a certain set of views: pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Both traditional conservatives and traditional progressives tend be more willing to discuss an issue than these right-wing libertarians, many of whom seek instead to shut down debate.

So what’s going on? I’m not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I’m suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be organised, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to respond.

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”(11). This is what he told them:

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say “one star, one star, one star”. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

Over 75% of the funding for American Majority, which hosted this training session, comes from the Sam Adams Alliance(12). In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m(13). A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.

The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We’re in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained. The question for all of us – the Guardian, other websites, everyone who benefits from this resource – is what we intend to do about it. It’s time we fought back and reclaimed the internet for what it does best: exploring issues, testing ideas, opening the debate.

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The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

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A detective is the lowest, meanest and most contemptible thing that either creeps or crawls, a thing to loathe and despise. ... That you may know how small a detective is, you can take a hair and punch the pith out of it and in the hollow hair you can put the hearts and souls of 40,000 detectives and they will still rattle. You can pour them out on the surface of your thumbnail and the skin of a gnat will make an umbrella for them.
When a detective dies, he goes so low that he has to climb a ladder to get into Hell— and he is not a welcome guest there. When his Satanic Majesty sees him coming, he says to his imps, "Go get a big bucket of pitch and a lot of sulphur, give them to that fellow and put him outside. Let him start a Hell of his own. We don't want him in here, starting trouble."

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Eat the rich, yeah eat the rich, don't you know that life is a bitch!
-Krokus

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Okay, so I’ve long known Republicans are quite adept at dirty tricks and “misspeaking”...but I never realized they were apparently born without even the concept of conscience or morality.

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I’m getting quite an education lately:

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Conservatives want what they want when they want it and when they don't get it they cry loudly. They are often incapable of caring for their own basic needs, food, clothing, etc. They take little or no resposibility for the messes they make, but in as loud a voice as possible demand other clean their "enviroment".

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Originally posted by Niki2:
It’s a real attitude of “no holes barred” against him, and it sickens me. I may not agree with him, but this kind of personal vendetta is unconscionable.

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Originally posted by Niki2:

Okay, so I’ve long known DEMOCRATS are quite adept at dirty tricks and “misspeaking”...but I never realized they were apparently born without even the concept of conscience or morality. I’m getting quite an education lately:

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Originally posted by Niki2:
You may believe it’s okay to say all these things publicly and incite people to think like this; I do not.

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