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Lauren McGlinn receiving the Excellence in Education Award. Her significant educative, Magistra Felkel(Latin teacher) and Mr. Houtrow (computer science teacher).

By Johann Hari, Independent UK
Posted on April 29, 2011, Printed on April 30, 2011

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” – but that wasn’t enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay”, and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN’s polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: “I would go in and take the oil… I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” On Iraq, he says: “We stay there, and we take the oil… In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.” It is a view that the world is essentially America’s property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to “stop what’s going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.” The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn’t born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody “ever comes forward” to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he’d “heard” the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: “I’m very proud of myself.”

The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He’s not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump’s apparent fortune comes from “stiffing his creditors” and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur “of genius”.

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party’s campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump’s recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

Sam Stein stein@huffingtonpost.com

Feingold and Obama don’t see eye to eye on campaign finance.

WASHINGTON — The announcement on Friday that two former top White House aides were forming a non-government group underwritten in part by secret donors has sparked pointed disagreement over the strategic direction and moral compass of the Democratic Party.

Former Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Burton and former senior adviser Sean Sweeney have launched two political fundraising groups. The first, Priorities USA Action, is a political committee organized primarily for influencing elections — 527 groups, according to the tax code. The second, and more controversial group, is Priorities USA. It is a new type of organization with a 501(c)4 tax status that does not require donor disclosure.

For weeks if not months, the Burton and Sweeney had hinted that they would be spearheading such an effort to aid the president’s reelection campaign. But the formal debut still managed to stir emotional responses from within the party. One faction hailed them as scale-eveners; another bemoaned their ethical surrender.

“I’m not going to endorse playing with the devil. I’m not going to endorse becoming just another corporate candidate,” former Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, a longtime campaign finance reform advocate, said in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. “I know a lot of Democrats in D.C. don’t agree with me on this. And I, of course, understand the desire to do everything possible to win. But, essentially what you’re doing by this is, you’re trying to become corporate-lite, in effect. And we’ll lose that battle, because [Republicans] are going to have more money.”

To say that Democrats in D.C. are in mere “disagreement” over the development is to understate the fissures. Since their sobering losses in 2010, a number of top Democratic strategists — who once argued the same principles as Feingold — have gone on to involve themselves in secretly funded outside groups of their own.

“People are entitled to their opinion,” Burton told HuffPost. “We are Democrats, so of course we disagree on things … But if the Koch brothers are going to spend $100 million promoting their agenda, we have to do things immediately to stem their influence,” he said referring to the major conservative bankrollers, who have became boogeymen to progressives since the last election cycle.

Burton and Sweeny aren’t alone in their influence-stemming scheme. Since the Obama administration declared that secretly funded organizations were potentially subverting democracy, at least five high-profile groups have nevertheless formed to help advocate on behalf of Democratic candidates, the administration, or Democratic issues. Each of these 501(c)4 organizations will, at least in part, depend on donations from benefactors who will not be disclosed. And each is also pledging to spend tens of millions of dollars heading into the next cycle; some, as much as $100 million.

“It’s not hypocritical to follow the rules, even though you disagree with them,” said Chris Harris, communications director for American Bridge 21st Century, a new non-government, pro-Democratic group spearheaded by Media Matters’ founder David Brock. “Penn State football coach Joe Paterno came out against the [Bowl Championship Series] and in favor of a playoff system. Is he a hypocrite for still trying to win games and make it to the Rose Bowl? Of course not. He just wants his team to do the best it can within the system as it currently exists. Democrats are the same.”

The question remains: Will mimicking the opposition work?

As Feingold sees it, there is no upside. “If we play the unlimited money game, they’ll win,” he said. “If we draw a contrast, saying that we, in fact, are opposing this kind of domination of the political process, I think we have the ability to overcome it.”

But coming from one of the many 2010 casualties in what was a brutal election cycle for Democrats, such sentiments strike even defenders of the Senator as foolishly idealistic — if not dangerously naive.

“Nothing like election advice from those who lost,” said Eddie Vale, the communications director at Protect Your Care, a new 501(c)4 health care advocacy outfit that will, in part, rely on secret donations. “In a perfect world … [full disclosure] would be a fine thing to do, but we operate in reality. And if one side is going to use these tactics, I would say it is campaign malpractice to not fight back on an equal playing field.”

Feingold, for his part, said it was unfair to attribute his election loss to outside money. There was a clean sweep of Democrats from “Lake Superior down to the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “I don’t think my race is a good example, because we had one of those sweep years.”

Even for some campaign finance reform advocates, however, the notion of purity being a campaign selling-point strikes hollow.

“How do can you engage in these types of campaigns with hands tied behind your back?” asked David Donnelly, national campaigns director of the Public Campaign Action Fund. “In the end, I want as many reformers as possible to be elected. We need more allies in office to change the rules.”

Donnelly is intimately aware of the paradox. Despite bemoaning the influence of 527 organizations, his group operates one in hopes of electing “reformers.” He is, he stresses, “completely comfortable engaging in the fight in order to get more people in office who are interested in structural reforming government.”

Not everyone is as pacified. After all, when Obama abandoned public financing in order to tap into a much larger pool of private donors during the 2008 presidential campaign, it was done with a pledge that — at a later date — he would strengthen system to make it more enticing for future candidates. More than two years in, campaign financing has grown only more special-interest-driven. While this is in large part due to decisions made by the Supreme Court, there is little evidence that structural change is in the offing.

“I think there is a certain chunk of the promises made on the campaign that can be pardoned by the distinction between campaigning and governing,” said Sheila Krumholz, the Center for Responsive Politics’ executive director. “Certainly there was a high expectation based upon the central platform of changing transparency, accountability, and the way Washington works… There is, I think, a pretty vocal minority but certainly still a big group that is extremely disappointed” about those promises being broken, she said.

Part of the problem is structural. If Democrats opt out of public financing or rely on secret donors to win elections, what would compel them to turn around and abandon those tools?

“That would be a down-the-road concern,” said Feingold.

But there is, of course, another side of that coin: Without self-committed reformers even making it to office, there isn’t even the possibility for those systematic changes to be considered.

“The only way we can change the system is seize control of the system. You can’t change the direction of the bus if your hands aren’t on the wheel,” said Burton.