Gingrich also blasted Obama as “the most successful food stamp president in modern American history.”
He also has a knack for sounding like a megalomaniac:
Republican Newt Gingrich told a Georgia audience on Friday evening that the 2012 presidential election is the most consequential since the 1860 race that elected Abraham Lincoln to the White House and was soon followed by the Civil War.
Of course it is. Newtie wouldn’t have been called to run if it weren’t.
After all, he’s the “idea man” of the Republican Party, the leader of the Republican Revolution and he’s brimming with bold new plans to bring the country back:
He outlined a jobs plan that would eliminate the estate and capital gains taxes and lower the corporate tax rate, which he said would infuse the nation’s sputtering economy with new investment.
And, by the way, he’s Abraham Lincoln in case you were wondering.
Wouldn’t you think that someone could do something with this?
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee killed an amendment by Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) that would have closed the so-called “terror gap” — preventing firearm sales to suspected terrorists. GOP members want to protect the right of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list to purchase firearms, arguing that preventing sales would “steal the Second Amendment rights of those placed on the list by mistake.”
The Second Amendment is literally the only one of the Bill of Rights they really care about. The rest are to be used a conveniences when necessary and ignored when not.
Imagine if they were this hard core about the Fourth Amendment? Imagine if anyone was?
One of the fun things about having Rand Paul elected to the Senate is that the country gets to see a hardcore libertarian unapologetically argue his beliefs. Here’s Rand giving a classic freshman dorm room “men with guns” argument in a hearing yesterday:
With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.
Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.
I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.
If there’s anyone arguing for free health care, point me his way. That sounds good to me! But I don’t actually think that’s happening. I think Rand got a little bit overexcited.
Certainly, none of this has happened with Medicare, which every American over 65 has a right to already. In fact, I think that even in places that have universal single payer, physicians are allowed to practice outside of it. Rand could simply say he doesn’t accept insurance of any kind and only treat wealthy people who can pay out of pocket. Or he could only accept certain kinds of patients with particular illnesses. Just because people have a “right” to health care doesn’t mean that every physician would be required to treat every patient. It sounds as though he’s confusing health care reform with Good Samaritan laws.
Of course he knows how the system works since he always collected several hundred thousand dollars a year in Medicare reimbursements. Which is fine. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean you can’t make a profit at it. People do it all the time. But it’s a little bit smarmy to launch into lectures about “slavery” when you’ve made millions off the cotton crop over the years.
The point is that nobody forced him to take those Medicare patients. But when he did, he willingly signed a contract that required him to give a service for the fee he collected. The “men with guns” only appear when you fail to fulfill your side of that contract, and even then it’s after you’ve killed someone maliciously or committed fraud. (Or if you’ve lost a law suit and failed to pay up, a no-no even in libertarianland.) The “men with guns” do not show up if you refuse to sign the contract in the first place.
Moreover, most of the regulation in the medical industry comes from peer review not the “men with guns.” Of course, Rand didn’t believe in that either, so he started his own personal medical society to accredit himself. Unsurprisingly, no men with guns came after him for that either. What’s surprising is that he had any patients.
BTW: I do think people should have a right to water and food. (And no I don’t ant to get into any arguments about how water and air are commodities like anything else — been there done that.) Using that as his examples of outrageous usurpation of individual rights tells you a lot about how he thinks. .
Republicans have already launched an ad against Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Ca.), a Democrat representing a Northern California swing district, Politico reports. In the television ad, Republicans claim that “McNerney and President Obama’s Medicare plan empowers bureaucrats to interfere with doctors, risking seniors’ access to treatment. Now, Obama’s budget plan lets Medicare go bankrupt: That’d mean big cuts to benefits. Tell McNerney to stop bankrupting Medicare.”
The first sentence of the ad refers to a new Medicare payment advisory panel created by Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The ACA empowers an independent, Senate-approved group of experts to reduce Medicare costs—so long as their actions don’t ration care, increase premiums, or decrease coverage. In terms of keeping wasteful spending and costs down, it’s one of the most important pieces of the federal reform—and one of the most widely misunderstood, reviled by the GOP as the new “death panel.” House Democrats were wary of supporting the panel to begin with, and concerned about its ability to bypass legislators. (Congress can still vote to override the panel’s decisions, but the panel doesn’t need advance approval to act.)
Democratic credo: when in doubt, go on defense
Now a small but growing number of Dems have signed on to a GOP effort to scrap the panel, known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). So in response to the message that Republicans would end up placing seniors at the mercy of rapacious, private-hungry private insurers, the GOP will contend that faceless, unelected bureaucrats will be trimming Medicare instead. Democrats, of course, could argue that they’re just trying to set fairer ground rules for the health-care market, which has victimized consumers through sky-high costs and unjust practices. But some Dems’ willingness to sign on to the bill that would repeal IPAB shows that they may not be entirely confident in that argument.
The Democrats once had decades and decades of credibility to rely upon when it came to protecting the safety net and seniors in particular. The Republicans would launch an attack from time to time and every time the Dems would roll it back. The GOP trying something like this would be the equivalent of the Dems accusing the Republicans on not caring enough about religion or being pacifists who are unwilling to fight America’s enemies. It just doesn’t scan and people know it.
However, the Democrats seem intent upon changing all that — or at least helping the Republicans muddy the waters enough to confuse people about which side they are on. It couldn’t be dumber.
This should be a slam dunk for the Democrats but only if they take an exceedingly hard line and don’t waver. If they start capitulating and wavering, they’ll lose the most valuable political advantage they’ve built up over 60 years. Dems should just say “we created social security and Medicare, we protected it when the Republicans tried to end them over and over again, and you can trust us to keep them strong now.” Seniors are old enough to remember that history.
According to Mike Huckabee in the 1970s the US was an urban nightmare overrun by gay, black muggers (disco shirt?) until Reagan the Magnificent came along to save us all:
Alex Pareene explains that this is part of a series you can order for your children:
The videos are about some teenagers who travel through time, learning about American Exceptionalism. So it’s sort of like the popular U.K. series “Doctor Who” except it’s cheaply produced political propaganda. (Instead of cheaply produced science fiction.)
If you order “The Reagan Revolution” now, for just $9.95, you’ll also receive “The History Exploerer Shoulder Sack” (a $15 value!) and “The History Explorer Quick Focus Binoculars” (a $26 value!) — free! (Also, if you order now, you will automatically be signed up to purchase all future videos in the series, “for just $11.95 plus $3.95 s/h billed conveniently to your credit card.”)
In case you’re curious, there is no hint of Franklin Roosevelt in the World War II video.
There was a time when this sort of crude Leninist propaganda would disqualify someone for president. People used to call it a “lie”, a concept that is no longer operative in American life.
I know it’s funny and stupid, but I have to say that it creeps me out. If kids are being home schooled with this garbage it’s going to be very hard to de-indoctrinate them. It’s a type od sick political cultism that leads humans in very ugly directions. Seriously, it’s Kim Jong-Il stuff.
Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.
Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.
“The gentleman that’s the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger,” Nichols said. “He’s a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman.”
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
“They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community,” Nichols said, “the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate.”
But Nichols wasn’t buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?
“They talked like they didn’t have any doubt they could fill it,” Nichols said.
That’s because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law.
Behind-The-Scenes Effort To Draft, Pass The Law
The law is being challenged in the courts. But if it’s upheld, it requires police to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof they entered the country legally.
When it was passed in April, it ignited a fire storm. Protesters chanted about racial profiling. Businesses threatened to boycott the state.
Supporters were equally passionate, calling it a bold positive step to curb illegal immigration.
But while the debate raged, few people were aware of how the law came about.
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.
Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, pictured here at Tea Party rally on Oct. 22, was instrumental in drafting the state’s immigration law. He also sits on a American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) task force, a group that helped shape the law. The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.
Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce says the bill was his idea. He says it’s not about prisons. It’s about what’s best for the country.
“Enough is enough,” Pearce said in his office, sitting under a banner reading “Let Freedom Reign.” “People need to focus on the cost of not enforcing our laws and securing our border. It is the Trojan horse destroying our country and a republic cannot survive as a lawless nation.”
But instead of taking his idea to the Arizona statehouse floor, Pearce first took it to a hotel conference room.
It was last December at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC.
It’s a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association. Another member is the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country.
It was there that Pearce’s idea took shape.
“I did a presentation,” Pearce said. “I went through the facts. I went through the impacts and they said, ‘Yeah.'” read on…
Who says America doesn’t know how to innovate anymore?
That sheds some light on this odd story I got from one of my wingnut emailers. At the time it it struck me a strange. Now I get it:
The Border Patrol’s practice of detecting but not apprehending illegal immigrants — known as “Turn Back South” — is in effect far north of the U.S.-Mexico border, Arizona Sheriff Larry Dever claimed in congressional testimony Tuesday morning.
“It appears, according to numerous reports from current and former border agents, that this practice has gravitated many miles north of the border. That means that, regardless of proximity to the border, people who are detected but not caught are considered to be “Turned Back South,” Dever said in his written testimony before the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security.
Last month, FoxNews.com first reported that Dever said he’d been told by Border Patrol officials, including at least one senior supervisor, that they have been ordered to reduce and to sometimes stop arresting people attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally.
Homeland Security officials, including Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher, have repeatedly denied these claims, but a flood of current and retired Border Patrol agents from across the country continue to come forward with details of their own that support Dever’s initial remarks.
Dever leveled another new charge: That TBS-ing is going on within the American judicial system.
You see, this is the right’s idea of a jobs program — building prisons for illegal immigrants and charging the taxpayers for it. And the Feds are ruining it by shipping their “product” back to Mexico.
Update: I can hardly believe it, but that same hardcore authoritarian Sheriff, Larry A. Dever, has an op-ed in the NY Times today. I wonder how much he expects to make from this scam?
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told President Obama on Thursday that he must agree to cut spending on federal agencies over the next two years and make significant changes to Medicare and Medicaid as part of a deal for raising the legal limit on government borrowing.
During a White House meeting with the entire Senate Republican caucus, McConnell (Ky.) told the president that the battle over the debt limit is a critical opportunity to overhaul the popular health-care entitlement programs, which are projected to be the biggest drivers of future borrowing.
Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that ole Mitch was writing op-eds about Medicare that had a significantly different angle:
[P]ollsters also caution Democrats to reassure seniors that Medicare will not be cut. But that too will be a tough sell, since the new law takes more than $500 billion from Medicare to pay for an entirely new government program and since we already know that millions of seniors will be forced from Medicare Advantage plans they already have and like.
These cuts are so severe, Medicare’s own actuary warns, “providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program.”
In other words, the law could jeopardize access to care. Maybe that’s why the pollsters warn their liberal allies, “Women in particular are concerned that health law will mean less provider availability — scarcity an issue.”
Yes, there was a time when Mitch was the big protector of Medicare, falsely warning that the president was snatching money from the ancient hands of the elderly to give them to gawd knows who. Six months later, without missing a beat he’s now demanding cuts to the program or he’ll bring the economy down.
And if that isn’t enough chutzpah for you, get a load of this:
A bipartisan agreement to curb entitlement costs would reassure financial markets concerned about the nation’s ability to rein in its spiraling debt, McConnell told reporters after the meeting. Doing it now, he said, would neutralize the issue for the 2012 presidential campaign.
“If there’s a grand bargain of some kind with the president of the United States, none of it will be usable by either side in next year’s election,” McConnell said. “That is the importance of this debt ceiling moment.”
Hahahaha! Whew, that’s a good one. That Mitch is quite the comedian. He said “neutralize the issue for the 2012 campaign!”Yeah, we know all about that.
And by the way, Karl Rove and David Koch haven’t signed on to this “neutralize” pact so I wouldn’t count on them. I don’t think they have the quite the same definition of “neutralize” as the rest of us. The Republicans may want Democratic cover to destroy the safety net, but considering recent history I think the Democrats probably should be a teensy bit skeptical that they will get the same benefit in return.
Update: It’s looking as if the progressive position is inching toward a Grand Bargain on this — meaning cuts to entitlements in exchange for tax hikes and defense cuts. Uhm, no. That’s not a bargain, that’s a suckers play. The entitlements will stay cut while the tax hikes and defense cuts will be reversed the first time the Republicans gain the power to do it. That’s always their first order of business.
These politicians have to raise the debt ceiling or their pals on Wall Street will have a fit. You know and they know it. There is zero reason to give even one inch in this ridiculous, unnecessary negotiation.
You may have noticed that Blogspot wasn’t working for the past 24 hours. It’s back up now, but it apparently had to wipe out the posts from yesterday. I’ve replaced them, but the comments are gone. I’m sorry about that.
A 43-year-old man from the Lake Arrowhead area died after San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies used a Taser to subdue him after a traffic stop, authorities said Wednesday.
A deputy attempted a traffic stop on Allen Kephart, a local DJ and teacher’s assistant from Crest Park, after he allegedly ran a stop sign Tuesday on Highway 189 in Blue Jay, said Cindy Bachman, a Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman.
Kephart pulled into a Valero gas station parking lot about a quarter mile away, got out of the car and “became combative and uncooperative” with the deputy, Bachman said. Additional deputies arrived at the scene to assist, she said.
“The deputy attempted to place him under arrest, at which time he was Tased,” Bachman said. “He became unconscious, and medical aid was immediately provided — CPR.”
Kephart was taken to a local hospital, where he was declared dead.
Kephart’s father, a member of the Sheriff’s Department’s volunteer mounted Rangers unit for decades, called his son’s death a senseless use of excessive force. The incident happened when his son was returning to the family home after filling up his car with gas in Crestline.
“To me, it’s not just a traffic stop. It’s murder. You don’t kill a person for running a stop sign,” said Jack Kephart, also of Crest Park. The father said witnesses told him that the deputy slammed his son to the ground. His son was Tased about eight times by two deputies, said Jack Kephart, who dismissed assertions that his son was combative with the deputies.
“He’s never raised a hand in 43 years. He goes to church three times a week. He does the audio for the church in Crestline,” Jack Kephart said. “He works three jobs. He’s never had a drink. Never done drugs. Never smoked. Never done nothing.”
I have no idea what precipitated the tasering, but since there were witnesses and possibly video I’m sure we’ll find out. The victim was heavy, weighing about 350 pounds, so I’m sure they’ll say that was what caused his death rather than the multiple electrical shocks delivered by the police. After all, if you take the risk of running a stop sign while being fat, the police can’t be responsible for what might happen.
I don’t know the statistics, but I would imagine that it was unusual for an otherwise upstanding citizen to be killed as a result of a traffic stop prior to the use of tasers. Police relied on their psychological training and had the patience to talk down an irate citizen (if he was in fact irate) rather than escalating the situation by introducing the threat of and then delivering excruciating pain. Because the police aren’t held accountable for this, citizens are being killed.
Perhaps this fellow really was so out of control that they had no choice. But I’ve seen enough of these things at this point to believe that the onus is on the police officers to prove it. Nobody should die because they ran a stop sign unless they pulled a deadly weapon on the police who stopped them and the officer had no choice but to defend themselves. That is not the usual situation with these taser killing.
Here are the talking points fthe Andrea Mitchell Reports (with Norah O’Donnell guest hosting) this morning.
John Boehner: Democrats want a free pass to continue to spend more. We’re in a hole and Democrats won’t give up the shovel. Doing nothing is not an option, the American people won’t tolerate it and neither will we.
DebbieWasserman-Shultz: He has some nerve not sitting around the table with Democrats, hammering out some compromise and striking a balance. What President Obama called for a few weeks ago was that we needed to strike a balance. We need to make sure that we engaged in shared sacrifice. So Democrats aren’t just calling for revenue increases and tax increases. What we are calling for is that the wealthiest among us and the middle class and even people who can’t bear any more pain all share the sacrifice to fix our deficit and make sure that we can continue to create jobs and turn this economy around.
I’m sure people are very impressed with the Democrats’ maturity and sobriety with all that talk about “balance.” But it is really a good idea to characterize a tax hike on the wealthiest people in this country a “sacrifice?” What exactly are they sacrificing, an extra couple of days in St Barts? A new Bentley every two years instead of one? Is that really the same thing as asking a family member to quit work because someone needs to stay home to take care of grandma when Medicaid’s been cut off and there’s no money for skilled nurrsing care? Is it really “shared sacrifice” when wealthy hedge fund managers are asked to pay the same tax rates as your average office worker while teachers, firefighters, cops and state workers lose their jobs and homes? Really?
I’m sure there are plenty of people who think this is a terrific way to show that the Democrats are “serious” about deficit reduction and God knows there’s nothing more important than that. But I will just remind them that actual human beings’ lives are at stake in this and that the last time a president proved that Democrats were responsible fiscal stewards they impeached him for his trouble and gave the money to their rich friends the first chance they got.
You can see by the two comments that the parties are approaching these negotiations in completely different ways. The Republicans are standing their ground and pushing to the limit and the Democrats are appealing to swing voters by promoting themselves as the party willing to compromise just about anything in the hopes that they will sour on the GOP for its intransigence. Maybe that will even work. But the cost is going to be high for the Party in the long run as they willingly help the Republicans systematically destroy their institutional base. And in the short run, millions of those “people who really can’t bear any more pain” as Wasserman Shultz calls them, will be sacrificed on the alter of the Democratic image of rectitude.