Thanks to the Supreme Court and their Citizen's United decision - corporations in America are considered people - but it didn't used to be like this. The first modern corporations began forming the 1880's - and after realizing the power these corporations had on society and the danger they could pose to our democracy - Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907 - which outlawed corporations from donating to politicians. But - fast forward a century - and corporations are now donating to politicians without any limits - because the Supreme Court decided to blow up the sensibility of the Tillman Act, and replace it with the mind-boggling idea that corporations are people, and money is speech. And - if corporations are people - and we follow that logic to its final conclusion - then corporations should be allowed to marry - right? Well - King County, Washington - the county that Seattle is in - followed the Citizen's United logic and showed how absurd it is - and they issued a marriage license for a living, breathing woman to marry an inanimate, all-powerful corporation. In a beautiful and heartfelt wedding ceremony in King County, Washington - Ms. Angela Marie Vogel married Corporate Person - a Washington State Corporation. The wedding ceremony was attended by roughly 100 guests - and was presided over by Pastor Rich Lang - who presided over a brilliant ceremony that was also brilliant political theatre. Pastor Lang told the crowd that, "For Angela, dear, sweet victim of ...

Dean Baker, Economist, Center for Economic joins Thom Hartmann. It's been ten years since the infamous Bush tax cuts were created - and except for millionaires and billionaires - the tax cuts haven't helped anyone. What would America's economy look like without the Bush tax cuts - and would the average American be in better financial shape today without them?

From the smallest of small businesses - to the largest of corporations - success is not achieved alone - but with help from society and from the government. Why are Republicans so afraid to admit this - and why can't they give up on the self-made myth? So here's the simple reality. None of us made it on our own. And those of us who have been successful in business have made it because we can use the infrastructure of our court system to enforce our contracts, have workers who had good public educations, and are protected by our fire and police departments, among others. For Takers like Romney to claim that he's a completely self-made man and government had nothing to do with his success is, quite simply, another one of his lies.

According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center - "Conservative" was the second most positively viewed political term in America - right behind "Progressive." Heck - Republicans love the label so much - their biggest political conference of the year is CPAC - The CONSERVATIVE Political Action Conference. But - I'm trying to figure out why exactly that is. I'm trying to figure out why anyone - given our nation's history - would want to call themselves a Conservative today in America. They say that "Conservative" means someone who embraces traditional values, limited government, moderate change, and fiscal restraint. But those are just weasel words, the velvet glove over the brutal fist of an autocratic, authoritarian, and oligarchic form of governance. Here's the reality of what Conservatives have ACTUALLY done to this nation in it's 230-year plus history. First off, it was Conservatives who opposed the American Revolution, and many of them joined the British in fighting against George Washington's army. Then, conservatives, at the birth of our nation, pushed to restrict voting rights at the federal level to only white men who owned property - although progressives like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison blocked those efforts - so conservatives at the state level picked up that cause. It was Conservatives who wanted to keep the "traditional American value" of slavery and fought progressive Abraham Lincoln so fiercely it led to an incredibly bloody and horrific Civil ...