enlarge

I'll be damned if the conservatives on the Supreme Court weren't getting jealous of all the congressional and state-level battles in the war on women and decide that they needed to take up arms themselves. Is there no area that these conservatives won't try to mess up for most Americans?

State workers who are denied unpaid sick leave required by federal law cannot sue the states, the Supreme Court said in a victory for states' rights that some liberal advocates saw as a bad omen for President Obama's healthcare law.

The 5-4 decision is a setback for millions of employees of state agencies and state colleges, and it voided in part a provision in the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Among other things the act said that employees had a right to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to recover from an illness or childbirth.

The rights of employees of private companies are unchanged by the ruling.

So let me see if I have this straight: first, conservatives want to make sure you get pregnant by limiting access to birth control, then force you to have the baby by limiting access to abortions, then if you get fired for taking time off to have the baby, you have no right to recourse for being fired. Great. All these things that have been litigated decades ago and established as basic rights have been inverted. The very notion upset Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enough for her to make an unusual step:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, on behalf of Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, took the rare step of reading her dissent aloud in court. She called the result “regrettable” and observed that the Kennedy opinion “pays scant attention to the overarching aim” of the law, which was “to make it feasible for women to work while sustaining family life.” Ginsburg said that the law was a reasonable effort by congress to ensure the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment for public employees facing discrimination.

The Jets have Tebow now ... I am NOT amused

Angry Black Lady Chronicles - Arizona pulls ahead in the GOP sociopath sweepstakes;

Hullabaloo - conservatives say freedom's just another word ....

Joe. My. God - conservatives flock to Iowa to return it to 19th century;

Sadly, No! - RedState sociopath gives Arizona a run for its money;

The Mudflats - Alaska: soon to require permission slip from your rapist.

blogenfreude blogs at Stinque.com. uses foul language, and may have to ditch the Jets now that they've acquired Tebow.

enlarge

Credit: Blue Gal

I predicted everyone would be photoshopping Mitt Romney etch-a-sketches -- for more examples see Bildungblog and the Etch-a-Sketch Mitt Romney, which allows you to refresh the page for a new flip flop.

Open Thread below...

Got a favorite by a band named after an animal?

And in other music, our sister site Newstalgia has ProgRock from Caravan. Enjoy!

Best of
	Artist: Animals Price: $6.20 (As of 03/22/12 04:24 am details)

DOWNLOADS: (125)

PLAYS: (3623)

Embed

Gotta' love it -- Right Wing Journalism Fail: Breitbart.com Interviews ‘Bono’:

This is just classic. Last night, the geniuses at Breitbart.com were trumpeting a HUGE EXCLUSIVE STORY, in which their ambush specialist Jason Mattera scored an EXCLUSIVE interview with U2 singer Bono.

Only problem with this BOMBSHELL: it wasn’t Bono. Apparently, Mattera encountered a guy with an Irish accent wearing sunglasses who looked sort of like Bono, and conducted an EXCLUSIVE BOMBSHELL INTERVIEW that blew up in his face: ‘DC’s Bad Boy Reporter’ Ambushes Bono Impersonator by Accident:

When the mini-Breits realized that they had been bamboozled, they just 404ed the page, with no retraction or statement of any kind, and marked the video “private” at YouTube to hide the evidence of their hilarious screw-up. But of course, the Internet never forgets, and now the heirs of Andrew are stuck in a moment they can’t get out of.

Charles has the transcript posted as well and the original video which I've posted above. Media Matters has more and I'm not holding my breath for us to get any kind of retraction from Sean Hannity, who was pushing this on his radio show -- Jason Mattera Still Hasn't Found What He's Looking For:

Continue reading »

enlarge

Credit: Tom Tomorrow

For full cartoon, go to link

Throughout American history, some of our greatest political thinkers have understood that at the end of the day, democracy works better when average Americans rather than elites run things, because regular people instinctively get the truth of what is going on in the real world — on Main Street — more than out-of-touch elites. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine got this; as did Abe Lincoln, who believed in a government of, by, and for the people. So did the reformers and organizers of the 20th Century like Saul Alinsky and Walter Reuther. They all knew that the people might get things wrong some of the time, but that ultimately it was better to trust and empower regular folks because the elites generally messed up a lot more of the time than democracy did.

When I read the great memos and reams of data that Stan Greenberg and James Carville at Democracy Corps put out, and read focus group and polling reports from other pollsters I respect, I am reminded of that truth once again. It is striking how much better regular folks understand, than most of the elites in this country, what is really going on with this economy. They aren’t following the moment-to-moment blips in the job or GDP numbers so much as they know deep in their guts that the American middle class is in real danger, that it is on a long downhill decline, and that there needs to be big fundamental changes. This has big implications for the 2012 election.

The swing voters swing because they go back and forth on whom to blame more — Wall Street and big business or the government — and what then to do about it. They think both sides of that equation are bad: that Wall Street screwed up the economy, and that government can’t succeed because it is bought off by Wall Street and other wealthy special interests. They think both political parties are bad. And they for the most part aren’t feeling like the economy is getting much better, or that, as President Obama put it in his State of the Union address, “America is back!” They are pessimists (at least in the short term), populists, alienated from the establishment. That is why I continue to fear a more upbeat message on how the economy really is getting better from the Obama team will cause him to lose. Stan and James reminded me recently of the last ad we ran in the 1992 Clinton campaign, the single most effective ad we ran that fall. I wish I could find the video for you, but I haven’t been able to. It was a 15-second ad that had a clip of George Bush talking about how the economy really was getting better and jobs were starting to pick up again (both of which were technically true), and then the screen just cut to lettering and a voice saying “How ya doing?” People responded strongly to it, feeling in their gut that the economy the last four years had not been getting better, and that Bush was out of touch for saying so. It turned a race that had been tightening into an easy six-point win.

Continue reading »

enlarge

WASHINGTON -- The progressive movement lost one of its biggest primary battles in the 2012 cycle Tuesday. Ilya Sheyman, a 25-year-old community activist, was defeated by businessman Brad Schneider, who will now face Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill.) in the November election for Illinois' new 10th Congressional District.

Schneider received 47 percent of the vote, with 99 percent reporting. Sheyman received 39 percent, and the other two candidates -- John Tree and Vivek Bavda -- received a combined 14 percent.

Sheyman conceded shortly after 9 p.m. CT to a full room at an election night party at the Ramada Inn in Waukegan, Ill., according to a source at the gathering. He told his supporters that he already had called Schneider and conceded.The progressive movement threw all its muscle behind Sheyman, who had a team of 600 volunteers participating in a get-out-the-vote effort. He told The Huffington Post Tuesday, before the polls closed, that in the past couple days his campaign had knocked on more than 12,000 doors and made more than 15,000 phone calls.

"We have 15,000 MoveOn members on the ground in the 10th Congressional District," he said. "We have thousands in the American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America," Sheyman said. "So these are literally the people who are the boots on the ground, who have worked in campaigns in the past, who are fired up to elect a progressive. They're the ones who have built the backbone in the district with their volunteer army."

And as Paul Blumenthal reported, USAction, MoveOn.org and the Communications Workers of America united prior to Tuesday's election to paper primary voters' houses with negative mailings about Schneider.

Continue reading »

The American Bridge 21st Century PAC has launched a new video showing the hypocrisy of Mitt Romney's current stances on energy and oil exploration. While Romney's campaign web site is somewhat vague on energy, using phrases like "Open America’s energy reserves for development," in interviews he has been more candid:

“Well, the best thing we can do to get the price of gas to be more moderate and not have to be dependent upon the cartel is drill in the gulf, drill in the outer continent shelf, drill in ANWR, drill in North Dakota, South Dakota, drill in Oklahoma, and Texas.” [Fox and Friends, 3/16/12]

But in his book released not even a year earlier, Romney was much more accurate in his assessment of the value of oil exploration:

“We consume roughly 24 percent of the world’s oil but possess only 2.4 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Even if we were to begin to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the continental shelf, it wouldn’t be enough to appreciably have an impact on our dependence on other nations for oil. And if we were to open the domestic oil spigot too wide and drain our last fields, we would risk leaving America even more vulnerable twenty-five years from now than it is today. But there should be no objection to preparing the energy infrastructure to tap known reserves and to discover more reserves: This is a vitally important insurance policy against future energy shocks or threats to national security. And it is always possible that new, very large discoveries could surprise us.” [No Apology, 2011, Pg. 247]

In addition to that massive short-term flip-flop, Romney's web site is loaded with false claims:

The Obama administration’s energy policy has been simply incoherent. For instance, it has blocked off-shore drilling in U.S. waters while applauding increased drilling off the coast of Brazil. Similarly, it has blocked construction of a pipeline that would bring Canadian oil to the United States, knowing full well that the result would be Canadian oil flowing to China instead. And it has pursued numerous regulations that would drive up energy prices while destroying millions of jobs.

As the Obama administration wages war against oil and coal, it has been spending billions of dollars on alternative energy forms and touting its creation of “green” jobs. But it seems to be operating more on faith than on fact-based economic calculation. The “green” technologies are typically far too expensive to compete in the marketplace, and studies have shown that for every “green” job created there are actually more jobs destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this costly government investment has failed to create an economic boom.

The first claim is that Obama blocked off-shore drilling in U.S. waters. The reality is that he temporarily blocked Gulf drilling after the BP oil spill, but has consistently championed expanded drilling in other circumstances:

Continue reading »

The Young Turks, March 20, 2012

This is your basic "rock and a hard place" dilemma. For months now, I've warned of Obama's dream of a Grand Bargain and his attempts to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Some people still insisted he was merely playing eleventy-dimensional chess to back Republicans into a corner. Not only is that not what happened, the Washington Post story shows it was even worse than we thought.

And why do I bring this up now? Not to discourage you from voting, but because the time to apply maximum leverage is before you've given someone your vote, not after. Now Rep. Paul Ryan is pushing another plan to cut Medicare, and this time, he's got Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) supporting his concept. Uh oh, bipartisanship! (As Dave Dayen points out, the most dangerous time that this could happen is during the lame duck session.) The Post reports:

White House officials said this week that the offer is still on the table.

It is absolutely necessary that you tell every single person who asks for your vote that you don't want any cuts to these programs. That includes these Groupon deals - "premium support," as they call it.

You paid for these programs, you expect them to be there when you need them, and you need to let these politicians know that. (Reminder: Medicaid is not only the base program for poor people under the Affordable Care Act, it's also the program that pays for nursing home care for the disabled and elderly.)

Even if it's just your local town council member, you need to send politicians the message to carry back to their state committee meetings that if they and their party aren't there for you, they shouldn't expect you to support them in November. And when someone from the Obama campaign calls and asks, "Are you in?", tell them it depends - on whether the president will protect these earned benefits in their current form.

Via Jonathan Chait in New York magazine:

Last summer, President Obama desperately attempted to forge a long-term deficit reduction deal with Congressional Republicans. The notion that he could get the House GOP to accept any remotely balanced agreement was preposterous and doomed from the start, but Obama responded to the increasingly obvious reality by reducing his demands of the Republicans to virtually nothing.

The Washington Post has a long narrative report about the negotiations between Obama and the House Republicans. The narrative frame of the Post’s account is that Obama blew the potential deal at the last minute. That’s a story that people close to Obama’s fired chief of staff, Bill Daley, have been peddling for a long time. But that conclusion is utterly belied by the facts in the Post’s own account. But let’s put that aside for now, because the facts in the Post’s account support a different and far more disturbing conclusion: Obama was even more desperate to cut a deal than previously believed — dangerously desperate, in fact.

Continue reading »

Cenk Uygur called out the ever-annoying Erin Burnett for her latest "all sides are equal" false equivalencies game on CNN and with trying to ignore which party is actually waging a "war on women" with the legislation they've passed.

'War On Women' False Equivalency by Erin Burnett On CNN:

CNN host Erin Burnett is "annoyed" over Republicans and Democrats accusing each other of a "war on women," the latest attack coming in the form of a Republican National Committee ad titled Obama's War On Women (a video that includes comments from comedian Bill Maher). The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur calls out Burnett for her false equivalency on the issue.