The Deadline

Posted on 11/20/2011 at 6:45 pm by JM Ashby


Artist – Daryl Cagle

In other news, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden were booed during their appearance at Homestead-Miami Speedway today. The pair attended to honor military families and promote the employment of veterans.

Stay classy, NASCAR fans.

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Birtherism Just Won’t Die

Posted on 11/20/2011 at 5:00 pm by JM Ashby

It may no longer be receiving the media attention it once did, but Birtherism is still alive and well and it showed its ugly face in the state of New Hampshire yesterday.

The birther wars continue. Orly Taitz, birther queen of California, personally filed a complaint in New Hampshire on Saturday that challenged President Obama’s U.S. citizenship and argued for his removal from the state’s ballot, reports the Concord Monitor.

New Hampshire’s electoral governing body, the Ballot Law Commission, turned down the complaint in a public hearing via 5-0 vote. It got pretty ugly shortly thereafter.

“Traitors!” screamed the members of the attending public. “Treason!”

“You have no decency! You have no honesty! You’re committing treason!”

The group of birthers, which included several New Hampshire state representatives, erupted after the decision, shouting at the commission attorneys as they tried to exit the hearing room. Another state representative apparently suggested committee members should cover their face with a mask if they ever found themselves in his district.

New Hampshire! Thought to be a bastion of moderate and independent-leaning conservatives. The state Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have staked their entire campaigns on.

If the members of the public in attendance are any indication of primary voter sentiments, that may have been a big mistake.

Conservatism is a mental illness.

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The Change We Believe In

Posted on 11/20/2011 at 3:00 pm by JM Ashby

Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, President Obama’s much-maligned former chief of staff, spoke last night in Iowa regarding the current state of the Republican field and President Obama’s accomplishments during his first few years in office. The entire speech is easily quotable, but I’ve selected just a portion to share here.

I just want you to think about this for a second. Think of our field in 2008. At our debates in Iowa, we had Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Senator Chris Dodd, and President Obama.

Now think about their field: Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum …

I’m beginning to feel sorry for Republican primary voters.

Four years ago, at this very dinner — and many of you were in attendance — a young senator from Illinois, who was 23 points down in the polls, spoke to you in words you will never forget. With the promises he made in that speech, he began a journey that would change history — and he did it with your help. [...]

He stood on this platform, and promised to end “a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged.”

Republicans didn’t want to let it happen, and Democrats didn’t believe it could. Yet, tonight, the last of 170,000 of America’s finest are on their way home. The war is over.

That is the change we believed in. That is the change we worked for. That is the change our president delivered.

Four years ago, at this very dinner, President Obama promised he would take the fight to Al Qa’eda, those who were actually responsible for 9/11. He said he would bring justice to Al Qa’eda’s leaders.

Tonight, Osama bin Laden is history. Al Qa’eda has been decimated. Thanks to the bold, determined leadership of our President, justice has been done. And America is safer for it.

Typical of the person I know, President Obama did not brag. He thanked our troops and intelligence services for their excellent work, and he moved on to the next terrorist who was threatening America and brought him to justice.

He didn’t hang a banner and he didn’t pretend the mission was accomplished. He got the job done.

That is the change we believed in. That is the change we worked for. That is the change our president delivered.

Suffice to say the change we believe in, and the change we received, is competence.

You can read the full speech made by Rahm Emanuel last night at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa here.

For me, President Obama’s Iowa victory speech is still the most memorable speech he has ever given.

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Newt Gingrich is a Shitty Historian

Posted on 11/20/2011 at 1:37 pm by Bob Cesca

Benen reports on Gingrich’s claim that America wasn’t founded as a secular nation.

Newt writes a lot of historical fiction — one of his books fantasizes about the Confederates winning at Gettysburg. Perhaps in his old age he’s conflating his fiction with his facts.

The quote came from Newt Gingrich, who condemned the very idea of a secular state. “A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have,” the thrice-married, serial adulterer said. “Because we’ve in fact attempted to create a secular country, which I think is frankly a nightmare.”

By every respectable account, the American government was always intended to be a secular one. This has nothing to do with rejecting religion as a personal choice, and, in fact, the Constitution explicitly notes freedom of religion, but the U.S. was formed as a direct rejection of British style government which imposed a state religion (The Church of England). This is a fact.

So there was never any effort to “create” a secular government beginning in 1963. The secular government was already established.

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I Really Hope This Is True

Posted on 11/20/2011 at 1:16 pm by Bob Cesca

It sounds like there might not be a deficit reduction deal in the Super Committee.

The leaders of a special deficit reduction panel signaled Sunday that they will fail to strike a deal to reduce the deficit before their Wednesday deadline.

Republican opposition to taxing the rich is the main obstacle, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“There is one sticking divide, and that is the issue of what I call shared sacrifice, where everybody contributes in a very challenging time for our country,” Murray said. “That’s the Bush tax cuts. In making sure that any kind of package includes everybody coming to the table and the wealthiest of Americans, those who earn over a million dollars every year, have to share, too. And that line in the sand, we haven’t seen any Republicans willing to cross yet.”

Naturally, this would be great news. The deficit and the debt have nothing to do with our current economic crisis, but austerity would certainly exacerbate the crisis. I hope they fail.

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Morning Awesome

Posted on 11/20/2011 at 6:00 am by Bob Cesca

“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”

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Unprepared

Posted on 11/19/2011 at 7:00 pm by JM Ashby


Artist – Joe Heller

In other news, according to 2010 census data, one in five American children now live in poverty. The child poverty rate rose by one million between 2009 and 2010.

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan’s plan to address inequality would actually increase inequality. The man is a genius.

Another GOP debate took place today in Iowa. The focus of which will be “social issues,” which means god, guns, gays, and abortion. Expect a highlight reel tomorrow.

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Made in the USA

Posted on 11/19/2011 at 5:45 pm by JM Ashby

You can call this a shameless plug if you want, but I find it to be very amusing.

The Obama Campaign is now offering up their limited edition Made in the USA mug in exchange for a $20 donation to the campaign to re-elect President Obama.

The amusing part is the mug has the president’s birth certificate imprinted on the side.

You can’t say he doesn’t have a sense of humor. All of the Wingnuts who were hoping to find the president’s birth certificate can now obtain one for just $20.

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They Aren’t Even Trying

Posted on 11/19/2011 at 4:30 pm by JM Ashby

This isn’t exactly shocking, in fact it was all too predictable, but it turns out the Republicans on the Super Committee aren’t even trying to work with Democrats or even meet the goals set forth when the Super Committee was formed.

Having concluded that the parties could not agree on a far-reaching plan to raise taxes and restrain social spending, Republican members of the supercommittee worked with House Speaker John A. Boehner to develop with a smaller “Plan B” that would stop far short of the panel’s goal of $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade.

Instead, Republicans proposed to achieve $640 billion in savings, primarily through cuts to domestic agency budgets, a pay freeze and bigger pension contributions for federal workers, cuts in farm subsidies and an array of other spending cuts and revenue raisers.

The offer, delivered Thursday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, included no cuts to the Pentagon and just one small tax increase, focused on owners of corporate jets, failing two key tests for Democratic negotiators.

The “one small tax increase” included alongside the $640 billion in spending cuts only accounts for $3 billion.

The Republicans also proposed the sale of federally owned land and frequencies to increase revenue, but the sale of those frequencies has already been planned by the Obama Administration and the FCC, and the sale of federally owned land would require reversing a law already passed congress to purchase $3 billion of land each year for the next 30 years.

If the Republicans are willing to dial back the requirements of the Super Committee and propose less cuts than the $1.2 trillion originally targeted, then surely they would be willing to eliminate the triggers entirely. Either eliminating the triggers or passing the buck to the next congress was, as I predicted, the goal of the Democrats all along. And the Democrats, for their part, are openly mocking this latest proposal from the GOP with the deadline for an agreement only four days away.

President Obama claims that he will not accept a bill that fails to meet the goals agreed to during the debt-ceiling showdown, but I’m not entirely convinced he isn’t bluffing. After all, as long as this Super Committee charade continues, the American people continue to witness the intransigence of the GOP.

Allowing the triggers to become law and re-writing them during the next session of congress before they take effect in 2013 may be the best scenario for both sides, which also makes it the most likely scenario.

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Beyond Batshit

Posted on 11/19/2011 at 2:50 pm by JM Ashby

In what ThinkProgress has dubbed “Two Minutes of Crazy,” Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann managed to lie about immigrants, create a children’s story, and recall her childhood incorrectly while speaking to a group of supporters last night in Iowa.

Whether she actually believes all of this nonsense or is deliberately misleading voters is anyone’s guess. Personally, I would lean toward her actually believing it.

– “Under Obamacare illegal aliens don’t have to pay for Obamacare. Only American citizens pay for Obamacare. [...] Illegal aliens have the possibility of getting the care, but they have no requirement to pay for the care. Only the citizens do.”

– “One man stood up, he was over 7-feet tall. He was a physician in the community. And he said, ‘I had a little lady in my office and because of Obamacare, I had to call the IRS and I had to get a number to put on a form before I could see her.’”

– “When I was a little girl…There were people who could not pay [for health care]. I mean they just did not have any money at all. And so the doctor would just write it off. [...] It’s very different today. Now, doctors don’t feel like they can do that…they worry about liability.”

Judging by Bachmann’s “tall tale” of the 7-foot doctor who was forced to contact the IRS before he could treat a “little lady,” you would think Bachmann was speaking to a kindergarten class, but sadly she was not.

Did Bachmann miss her true calling?

In a throwback to Congressman Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” moment, Bachmann once again trotted out the idea that illegal immigrants will receive “Obamacare” for free. And despite that being completely debunked and incorrect, I have no doubt that she really believes that. I have no doubt she believes all of it.

Here’s to hoping the next video of her is that of straitjackets escorting her off the stage of the GOP debate tonight.

Adding… no one inform Bachmann that unions covered most people’s healthcare when she was a child. She just might jump.

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Police Brutality on Videotape

Posted on 11/19/2011 at 1:16 pm by Bob Cesca

There is simply no excuse for pepper-spraying peaceful demonstrators like this. The University of California Davis police were clearly incapable of handling a nonviolent demonstration, and so in lieu of proper use of authority they behaved like sadistic power-drunk thugs.

WASHINGTON — On Friday, a group of University of California, Davis students, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement on campus, became the latest victims of alleged police brutality to be captured on video. The videos show the students seated on the ground as a UC Davis police officer brandishes a red canister of pepper spray, showing it off for the crowd before dousing the seated students in a heavy, thick mist.

This incident recalls the earlier infamous pepper spraying by a New York Police Department official of several women who were seated and penned in. The UC Davis images are further proof that police continue to resort to brutal tactics when confronting Occupy activists. One woman was transported to a hospital to be treated for chemical burns.

The UC Davis goons responsible for this need to be immediately suspended and a the department should take full responsibility for any physical damage caused be being pepper-sprayed at point-blank range.

Adding… As Ashby noted on Twitter last night, almost everyone has a video camera or handheld device in the crowed. Obviously the police didn’t give a shit who witnessed their brutality and went ahead with it anyway. Welcome to YouTube, assholes.

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A Pretty, Pretty Goose For You

Posted on 11/19/2011 at 9:58 am by Bob Cesca

Bad Lip-Reading takes on Ron Paul:

This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

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Morning Awesome

Posted on 11/19/2011 at 6:00 am by Bob Cesca

MST3K Saturday – “Attack of the Eye Creatures”

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Selecting a Candidate

Posted on 11/18/2011 at 8:00 pm by JM Ashby


Artist – Dave Granlund

In other news, a major Republican donor filed a lawsuit today in South Carolina accusing Governor Nikki Haley of illegally lobbying while serving as a lawmaker, failing to disclose income in excess of 150,000 dollars that she earned from said lobbying, and of failing to recuse herself from voting on legislation benefiting the companies she was illegally lobbying for.

Very serious charges.

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Fail of the Day

Posted on 11/18/2011 at 7:00 pm by JM Ashby

New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran, for this.

New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran came into office saying her state had a vote fraud “culture of corruption” and pointed to 64,000 voter registration records that she claimed were probable cases of fraud. Now here report is out and her office managed to find 19 people in the entire state which she alleges voted illegally.

Meanwhile, voter ID laws are being concocted across the country under the guise of similar accusations. The accusation that voter fraud is rampant. And in each case, fraud is either several limited or statistically non-existent.

If you want to know why voter ID laws are often referred to as simply a poll-tax, look no further. Justifying these laws with claims of fraud is a misnomer. The real justification is voter suppression, because when voter turnout is high, Democrats tend to win.

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‘No Connection Between Assassin and Occupy DC’

Posted on 11/18/2011 at 5:16 pm by Bob Cesca

Fox News and right-wing media have been lying to their listeners — reporting that the White House shooter, Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, was part of the Occupy DC protest.

He wasn’t.

In trying to determine why he recently traveled to the nation’s capital from the western part of the country, investigators searched the Occupy D.C. campground near the White House but have found no connection between him and the Occupy protesters, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case.

They’re utterly desperate to project their own eliminationist gun-toting tendencies onto a crowd that’s made up of mostly left-wing pacifist types.

Fox Nation ran the headline: “Man Linked to ‘Occupy’ Protest Charged With Attempted Assassination of Obama.” However, the only “link” they found was that Ortega-Hernandez blended into the crowd so he wouldn’t be immediately noticed. That’s not a link — a link is defined as a bond, connection or tie. In other words, an ideological supporter, activist and participant in the Occupy protest. The shooter was none of those things.

Scanning right-wing talk radio, nearly every host has been scaring his or her audience by suggesting that Occupy Wall Street is becoming a violent uprising. Yesterday, host Rusty Humphries compared the Occupy movement to Nazi stormtroopers.

Meanwhile, it’s not a stretch to note that right-wing gun check loopholes likely allowed Ortega-Hernandez to buy an AK-47 assault rifle in the first place. Reporting has indicated that the assassin has severe psychological disorders which may or may not have been diagnosed. If his mental health was ever recorded, it should have been posted to the gun check database and, during a background check, Ortega-Hernandez would never have been allowed to buy a gun. Unfortunately, states are failing to report mental health records to the gun check system. Ortega-Hernandez might have slipped through the loophole. Or he might have purchased the firearm at a gun show where dealers don’t have to conduct background checks.

Also, Ortega-Hernandez’s conspiracy theory about President Obama wanting to implant children with microchips signifying the “mark of the beast” is an extreme far-right Alex Jones style theory. Therefore, according to the shooter, President Obama is The Beast.

Yeah, that sounds like a liberal.

(This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.)

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Gingrich and Romney Tied in New Hampshire

Posted on 11/18/2011 at 4:19 pm by Bob Cesca

The Gingrich surge continues…

In the shock poll of the day, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has pulled into a statistical tie with Mitt Romney in the former Massachusetts governor’s backyard, New Hampshire.

The poll of likely Republican primary voters by Magellan Strategies for the online New Hampshire Journal shows Mr. Romney with 29% in the Granite State, within the poll’s 3.6-percentage-point margin of error over Mr. Gingrich’s 27%. Texas Rep. Ron Paul has 16% support, with former pizza company executive Herman Cain at 10%.

But can this man with an exotic name and controversial background close the deal?

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Likability Challenged Continued

Posted on 11/18/2011 at 3:45 pm by JM Ashby

Among the questions included in a recent Bloomberg poll was the question of whether or not caucus goers would support a candidate who is on their third wife and had multiple affairs. A question which was obviously aimed squarely at Newt Gingrich.

The results of that question do not bode well for Mister Gingrich, but the same Bloomberg poll posed similar questions directed at the other candidates, and none of them faired well. Dave Weigel elaborates.

In Iowa, 48 percent of caucus-goers say yes, “they would rule out” such a candidate; only 49 percent say they wouldn’t. In the Live Free or Die state, it’s 40 percent who rule such a candidate out, and 58 percent who don’t. Bad news for Newt Gingrich.

Except… well, Bloomberg asked a bunch of questions, and found that every potential winner has a huge liability. “If the candidate has been accused of sexual harassment,” 30 percent of Iowans and 43 percent of New Hampshire voters say they’d rule the candidate out. (Do note that discomfort with sexual harassment falls as obsession with personal marital status rises.) Sorry, Herman. In Iowa, 58 percent of voters rule a candidate out if “the candidate has favored a mandate to buy health insurance.” In New Hampshire, it’s 46 percent. Sorry, Mitt. In Iowa, 42 percent of voters rule a candidate if he “has supported in-state college tuition rates for American-born children of undocumented immigrants.” In New Hampshire, it’s 51 percent. Sorry, Rick. No, the other Rick.

In a primary environment where every candidate is equally disliked for various reasons, it would seem almost impossible to predict a winner.

I’m not sure if it even matters who wins the primaries and goes on to become the Republican nominee, though. Because whoever the nominee is, they will have so much baggage the Obama Campaign won’t have to lift a finger to discredit them.

Or as President Obama says, “maybe we’ll just run the Republican debates verbatim, and let the voters make up their own mind.”

via Slate

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Likability Challenged

Posted on 11/18/2011 at 2:20 pm by JM Ashby

Jon Stewart chronicles the rise and fall of the GOP presidential hopefuls in a way only The Daily Show can.


“It’s amazing what paying attention to a candidate can do to their candidacy.”

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There Was Never a Deal to Kill the Public Option

Posted on 11/18/2011 at 12:19 pm by Bob Cesca

Back in 2009, I recall fighting with fellow progressives when they accused the president of cutting a back-room deal to kill the public option. Their sources were unnamed and augmented by a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies that President Obama was out to screw progressives.

Jonathan Bernstein, writing for Greg Sargent’s Plum Line blog, calls this conspiracy theory “a myth.”

But some liberals believed that the White House was also out to get the public option from the beginning. This first arose when problem comes when one HuffPo blogger decided that a David Kirkpatrick story in the New York Times and a later Kirkpatrick interview on MSNBC proved it. It’s those two items that the links trail lead back to.

However, Kirkpatrick, as I read it, only confirmed that there was a deal (on costs) with the hospitals, not that it included the public option. He wrote in the original story that there was a belief that a public option would not wind up in the bill.

There were a lot of bloggers, including a former podcast partner of mine, who really wanted to believe that President Obama was killing the public option through a cloak and dagger deal with corporate healthcare boogie men. So they jumped to conclusions based on poorly sourced stories and conflated various aspects of a very, very complicated process until they came up with their ridiculous theory.

I also believe that many liberals wanted desperately to believe that President Obama was going to be a disappointment, and they still do. For whatever reason, be it leftover resentment from the primaries or a calculation to oppose the president no matter what, they were preparing themselves for disappointment, so they sought out reasons to feel let down.

Bernstein concludes:

There simply was no reported deal to kill the public option. If you want to blame someone for killing the public option, blame marginal Democrats, who opposed it, and marginal Republicans (especially Olympia Snowe), who initially backed a version of the bill with the public option before deciding that pretty much all of Obamacare was unconstitutional. There’s no reason to believe that Barack Obama sold out liberals on this one.

If liberals like Jane Hamsher, who struck her own deal with right-wing demagogue Grover Norquist in order to “kill the bill,” are intellectually honest, they’ll concede to Bernstein’s reporting and admit their theories were misguided. But I doubt they will.

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