When most mainstream media outlets discuss conspiracy theories, it is usually to debunk the views of dissenting and critical thinkers who are routinely denounced as simplistic, paranoid or worse. You have frequently seen the mantra questioning the motives and conclusions of these thinkers as if the idea of people or officials acting together covertly to advance their interests in illegal ways is something new in history.

Until recently, U.S. press outlets characterized conspiracy arguments as rants that lacked any factual basis, engaged in guilt by association and stretched the facts. The only conspiracy charges they tended to look at uncritically were criminal complaints against the Mafia under anti-racketeering statutes like the RICO statutes. Prosecutors loved these cases because normal concerns with protecting the rights of defendants didn’t apply when hearsay evidence was permitted.

Daily Kos sent an email on December 6 promoting a strategy to eliminate the "Bush" tax cuts on the wealthy:

This will really make John Boehner cry

David, please send an email to your member of the House of Representatives, telling him or her to sign the discharge petition that would force an up or down vote on ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. Click here to send an email.

House Republican leaders are refusing to hold a vote on ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. However, there is a way we can get around them and force a vote to take place.

NEW YORK – After the massacre of 28 people at a Connecticut school– 20 of them children – Americans are bitterly asking themselves what has gone wrong in their country. School and work place shootings have become almost as common as sports events. What can be done to halt this plague?

Not very much, at first glance. Americans love firearms: there are some 150 million in circulation. Half of all Americans own weapons. Welcome to Dodge City. In Puritanical America, it’s ok to show people being sawed in half and skinned alive on TV but illegal to show the nude human body.

Attacks on schools are not just an American problem: they have occurred in Europe, Canada, Pakistan, and, last week, China.

The Republicans have put themselves in a holy mess with this Plan B debacle. They now have less than zero leverage. They are a national laughingstock. A majority of the country now thinks they are "too extreme." They just got walloped in the election. And with the tax cuts set to expire the laws are rigged against them as well.

There is only one person who can rescue the Republican Party now -- Barack Obama. And he will. I have been saying for over two years now that President Obama is dying to do the Grand Bargain. He will do it at any cost. In fact, he actively wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. He can't wait for that pat on the back from the establishment when they finally call him post-partisan, above party politics, and a statesman for screwing over his own voters. This is by far his greatest wish.

The so-called 'fiscal cliff' was never real. Congress and the President invented it during last year's negotiations, apparently to persuade voters that unpopular budget measures were needed to avoid a crisis. With the collapse of John Boehner's 'Plan B,' that gambit has failed. What now?

That's easy: The moving finger of Washington, having writ, can unwrite.

The 'fiscal cliff' was never real. It was virtual reality. Now it's time for our leaders to take off the goggles and get back to work.

Another unfolding American gun massacre has produced an avalanche news coverage, but it's coverage that continues to omit crucial context about gun violence and the rash of often public shooting sprees that plague the country. It's a troubling journalism trend, and one that seems to be getting worse. As America recoils from new shootings, the news media are casting the gun horrors in less context, not more.

It's true that the press is moving away from presenting shooting sprees as isolated incidents. The coverage of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., has been rich with references to the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre from this summer. Then again, how can reporters not connect the dots from those two rampages to a sweeping cultural and criminal problem, and one that continues to worsen and extends to all corners of the country.

While Americans were horrified by the murders of 26 innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, many believe we lack the will to curb gun violence. Two years ago a crazed gunman severely wounded Representative Gabrielle Gifford and killed six others; we grieved for a few days and then returned to business as usual. Most Americans hope President Obama's speech at the Vigil for Sandy Hook Shooting Victims portends real change.

What was noteworthy was the way Obama framed gun violence. Instead of railing against it in the abstract, he linked it to "caring for our children." "Can we honestly say that we're doing enough to keep our children - all of them - safe from harm?"

The President named each of the 20 murdered first-graders and asked, "Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?' He shifted the terms of the gun violence debate from restriction of second-amendment rights to protection of our children.

— originally published at WhoWhatWhy

There once was a country where the leaders enjoyed playing tricks on the public, and could always count on its friends in the “media” to play along. The joke was to tell the public the same old lie again and again, and see if anyone ever stood up to protest. The government knew that the public would put up with almost anything unless it involved pulling away the plate in front of them or shutting off their television.

Right-wing resistance to meaningful gun control is driven, in part, by a false notion that America’s Founders adopted the Second Amendment because they wanted an armed population that could battle the U.S. government. The opposite is the truth, but many Americans seem to have embraced this absurd, anti-historical narrative.

The reality was that the Framers wrote the Constitution and added the Second Amendment with the goal of creating a strong central government with a citizens-based military force capable of putting down insurrections, not to enable or encourage uprisings. The key Framers, after all, were mostly men of means with a huge stake in an orderly society, the likes of George Washington and James Madison.

In the wake of the Newtown Massacre, the Asheville (North Carolina) Tea Party is conducting a “Great Gun Giveaway,” raffling off “two guns, an AR-15 assault rifle and a .22 magnum handgun. The raffle is moving forward “apparently in response to talk of gun control by ‘the Left’ in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shootings,” Salon’s Jillian Rayfield recently reported.

“We have given the Federal Government permission to disarm school officials by force of law and threat of imprisonment. They are now incapable of defending the children under their care. This is the reality. Does this not need to be changed?” the Asheville Tea Party said in a letter posted on its PAC website.

“We refuse to allow the Left and the Liberal mindset to once again hijack the conversation as they have and allow the political hacks to pass laws that continue to limit our inalienable right to protect ourselves and the most defenseless among us,” the group said.

Just how radical and extreme are the Republicans today? Republicans didn’t oppose Boehner’s radical “Plan B” because it would devastate American families and small businesses and destroy government — that was OK, in fact that wasn’t even enough destruction for them. They opposed it because it would raise taxes a small bit on the billionaires who grease their wheels. In other words, they opposed it because it was not extreme and radical enough.

To understand just how radical and extreme today’s Republicans are, it is worth looking at what was in the “Plan B” that Speaker Boehner tried to bring before the House. They hate government and they mean it. Plan B cut off unemployment benefits for 2 million Americans. It actually raised taxes on most Americans while cutting taxes on the billionaires. It moved every cut onto the backs of domestic discretionary spending, dramatically gutting government all at once. This would literally destroy the government and certainly plunge the economy into recession.

I've been grumbling to peace activists that they should stop presenting Chuck Hagel as a force for peace and an "Iraq war critic" or an "Iraq war skeptic." It makes it sound as if he opposed a war that he voted for, voted repeatedly to fund, and never took any radical action to end. "Iraq war opponents" in the U.S. Senate routinely voted to fund what they opposed. Funding war is not what comes to mind when one first hears "war opponent."

I've been objecting to depictions of Hagel as a man of great integrity. It disturbs me that Hagel won stunning upset surprise election victories when most of the votes were counted on machines owned, installed, programmed, and run by a company owned and run by Hagel. That seems to me indecent even if the votes were accurately counted. But, of course, the way these machines work there is absolutely no way to tell -- even if you own them -- whether the votes were accurately counted. And that seems to me even more indecent.

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Now that a crazed gunman has slaughtered 20 white kids in an upscale Connecticut suburb where a lot of media live, the gun lobby is ready to negotiate gun control legislation. But they’re not offering much.

Okay, so nobody wants to come out and say it, but what NRA leader Wayne LaPierre said today about having an armed police officer in every school along with an armed voluteer force to protect children from future nightmares like the one we all lived through one week ago today at Sandy Hook Elementary School was flat out stupid.

Yes, stupid, that's right.

As the LA Times reports, Mr. LaPierre said, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre said.

The big wig of the national gun cabal even has a congressman lined up, ready to shoot the ball through the loop, and lobby for federal funds to implement his idea. Rep. Hutchison will reportedly head a program to help develop a paradigm for LaPierre's brainy notion.

John Boehner's next job could be as a safety buoy bobbing gently in the waters of the Fiscal Shoals, warning off the unwary. ("These are not tears," he will say with a sad little smile; "it's only the life-giving waters of the sea in my eyes.") If he falls, he'll likely give way to one among the group of 40-something white guys who call themselves The Young Guns, which right there gives you multiple insights into some of the things troubling the Grand Old Party.

House and Senate staff members will take an 8.2% pay cut if their bosses don't get a tax and deficit deal done before the end of the first federal pay period in 2013. Collectively, the staff are looking at more than $100 million in cuts for the year. Possibly this will have an impact on the negotiations. Their bosses, who included themselves among America's Warriors and others so valuable or vulnerable as to warrant protection from any budget reductions, face a 0% cut (although their foreign currency conversion allowance will take a brutal hit). Even John Boehner will still get paid despite demonstrating live on national television that he can't do the job for which he draws a larger pay check than anyone else in the House.

Could the Republicans be missing an excellent opportunity to make new inroads in the gun debate by politicizing Santa Claus and advocating that the only safe and sane way to prevent an invasion robbery at Santa’s toy factory, which would spoil an incalculable number of children’s Christmas celebrations, is to provide the elves with guns and give them firearms training and require them to spend time on the firing range every month.

Would it be politicizing freedom of speech to maintain that no topic on God’s Green Earth is so sacred that it merits an automatic exemption from the tendency of politicians to turn every possible subject of conversation at the local pub to their own advantage?

When hundreds (thousands?) of Santa’s Elves turned out on a cold rainy day in San Francisco to participate in the 2012 Santacon pub crawl, wasn’t the absence of any political activists supporting their about to become illegal right to be naked in public just a matter of common sense and not a verdict on the issue itself?

We are all grieving for our lost children, lost to senseless violence even before getting a chance to make their mark in the world. How can we honor them and make their short lives meaningful for longer than just a few years after which they will be forgotten?

Right now, most of us realize that we are much too violence oriented in our culture and in our foreign policy. Creating “band aid” solutions like stricter gun controls and harsher penalties and even warehousing mental patients and other short-term measures will not get to the root of our problem.

Our problem evolved with the industrial revolution. When we had enough consumer goods for everyone produced, our industrialists evolved into a situation where producing guns and weapons for continuing violence and wars became a norm for sustaining us.

This is not an easy problem to solve.

This is a moment of moral clarity. Right now there are only two sides in the Social Security debate: the side that says it's acceptable to cut benefits - in a way that raises taxes for all income except the highest - and the side that says it isn't.

It's time to ask our leaders - and ourselves - a simple question: Which side are you on?

Nancy Pelosi says she can convince most Congressional Democrats to "stick with the President" as he pursues his gratuitous and callous plan to cut Social Security benefits as part of a deficit deal - even though Social Security does not contribute to the deficit.

Excuse me: Stick with the President? What about sticking with our seniors and our veterans? What about sticking with our disabled fellow Americans? What What about sticking with the more than 4,000 children on Social Security who lost a parent in the Iraq War?

Christian Right leaders continue to insist that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which took the lives of 26 people, including 20 six and seven-year-old children, happened because Americans have turned their backs on God.

The list of prominent Religious Right leaders spewing this unholy venom now includes Dr. James Dobson, the founder and former head of Focus on the Family, Bryan Fischer, a popular American Family Association talk-show host, and Franklin Graham, the president and CEO of the tax-exempt Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

These men are bound and determined to look every which way – abortion, same-sex marriage, video games – for reason for the massacre, except at the one staring them in their faces; the uncontrolled and widespread accessibility of guns in this country.

— from Truthout

An 11-year old boy in Utah brought a .22 pistol to school with him on Tuesday. His parents apparently gave it to him "for protection" in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre. His teacher found out he had it after he put the gun to the head of a classmate at recess and threatened to kill her.

Only two weeks ago, on December 4th, 11 people were shot in one night in Chicago, but that news barely jiggled the wires, because at the time everyone was encompassing the murder-suicide perpetrated by NFL player Jovan Belcher, who shot his girlfriend to death in front of her mother before killing himself in front of his coaches in a parking lot. At the time, everyone said it was terrible, something that really makes you think, and Bob Costas went so far as to lament the deadly nature of America's gun culture during the national broadcast of a football game. He was roundly attacked for speaking out of turn, for "not having all the facts," and for generally intruding upon everyone's enjoyment of the game.

By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks

You might want to think twice about streaming that “subversive” documentary about the Weather Underground on Netflix. If Republicans have their way, you just might end up on a watch list somewhere.

This week, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the 1988 Video Protection Privacy Act, which forbids movie rental companies from sharing or selling their customers’ viewing history. The Senate is expected to take up the amendment soon.

If this passes, what you watch on Netflix may soon become public information that your friends, employers, and even the government will have access to. Are you regretting streaming the latest Harold and Kumar yet? Or all those soft-porn chick-flicks?

The bells rang for the lost: Charlotte Bacon, Olivia Engel, Ana Marquez-Greene, Dylan Hockley, Madeline Hsu, Catherine Hubbard, Jesse Lewis, James Mattioli, Emilie Parker, Jack Pinto, Noah Pozner, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Avielle Richman, Benjamin Wheeler, and Allison Wyatt. All were six years old.

Daniel Barden, Josephine Gay, Chase Kowalski, and Grace McDonnell were 7.

Six adults died with them: Mary Sherlach, Anne Marie Murphy, Dawn Hochsprung, Lauren Rousseau, Rachel D’Avino, Victoria Soto.

— from Truthdig

Where is Phil Gramm hiding? The former Republican senator from Texas, who wrote the radical banking deregulation of the 1990s and was rewarded for his efforts to enrich the banks with a plum job at Switzerland-based UBS, has not been heard from since his bank got nailed by the G-men. Or, as The New York Times put it, UBS now has the distinction of being “the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud.”

Surely Gramm, who retired from the bank last year, must know something about the nefarious activities conducted over a timespan when he was helping to manage the firm. This latest scandal, involving the rigging of a major trusted banking interest rate, might finally test the theories that he has long written into law that assume banks are best when regulated by themselves—a now obviously dumb idea.

The year 2012 has been a rough one for Washington’s arrogant neocons. Their political influence has waned since they threw in their lot with presidential loser Mitt Romney and then witnessed the ignominious resignation of their ally David Petraeus as CIA chief. But they are now mounting a fierce counterattack to reestablish their relevance by demonizing former Sen. Chuck Hagel.

Hagel has become the neocons’ new target of opportunity after emerging as a likely choice to become Defense Secretary. He is a bête noire to the neocons because he is viewed as disturbingly independent of Israel’s preferences for what U.S. foreign and military policy must be.

When CODEPINK, MoveOn and representatives of other organizations marched into Senator Harry Reid’s DC office on Tuesday, December 18, they wanted a simple answer to a simple question: Does the Senator support a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity clips, such as the legislation proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein and supported by President Obama and Vice President Biden? It would seem like a no-brainer for the Senate Majority Leader to fall in line with the leadership of his party in backing a modest bill that would ban the sale of weapons that are only good for mass murder. Unfortunately, Reid’s senior policy advisor Kasey Gillette was unable to give an answer.

While there is a lot of talk in Democratic circles about Republicans standing in the way of sensible gun laws, a hidden secret is that the Democratic Senator leader from Nevada, who is key to getting gun control legislation passed in this country, has been as pro-gun as most Republicans.