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The SGNews Blog is a frequently-updated list of Canadian and international news links of interest to progressive readers.

Sep 042012
 

by Kurt Eichewald

The GOP must be stopped in 2012. The future of America’s ideals of democracy – and of the Republican Party itself – could well be at stake.

Contrary to how it might seem, I am not a partisan bomb thrower. Throughout most of my adulthood, I have been just as likely to vote for a Republican as for a Democrat – in local, state and national contests. I have cast my ballot in presidential races for both Republicans and Democrats. But in the last four years, the GOP has transmogrified into something ugly and vicious and, more important, something wedded to the politics of fantasy and ignorance. It has rushed so far from its moorings that I cannot conceive of voting for members of this party until, hopefully, they pull themselves back from the precipice of self-destruction, paranoia and delusion.

Today, for Republicans, up is down and front is back. Lying has become so ingrained into the conservatives’ national dialogue that they are now dangerously demagogic or, worse, severely unhinged. Blind rage at the election of Barack Obama has wrecked a once great political party. Its leaders have made so many deals with the devil in their almost pathological obsession with unseating Obama that they have pushed the GOP into its own version of political hell – unable to speak truths to their now-rabid and conspiracy-addled base and unable to right the party back onto a path of responsibility.

Only through the disinfectant of defeat can the Republicans, and the two party system, be preserved. And so, the campaign of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan must be consigned to the ash heap of history. Defeat must not only be decisive, it must be crippling. Here are five reasons why…

http://kurteichenwald.com/2012/09/the-five-reasons-why-romneyryan-must-be-defeated-in-2012-and-why-conservatives-should-hope-they-are/

Sep 042012
 

WHY have so many teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public workers been laid off since the financial crisis hit ­ and why are so few being offered new jobs now?…

from The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/your-money/framing-prevents-needed-stimulus-economic-view.html?emc=eta1

Sep 042012
 

From Democracy Now

Republicans are mounting increasing pressure on Missouri Rep. Todd Akin to end his bid to unseat Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill after he claimed that women’s bodies can prevent pregnancies in cases of what he called “legitimate rape,” a comment he later apologized for. The controversy is spilling in the presidential race due to Akin’s close ties to Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan. In 2011, Ryan and Akin co-sponsored the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which attempted to redefine rape by introducing the term “forcible rape.” We speak to Michelle Goldberg, senior writer for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Her latest article is titled “Todd Akin’s Rape Comment Was Bad, but His Abortion Views Are Much Worse…”

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/21/todd_akins_legitimate_rape_comment_sheds