(It was Saturday, but still.)This came from White House deputy press secretary in response to Buzzfeed’s stultifyingly dumb piece suggesting that the Obama campaign was using a font similar to Cuban revolutionary propaganda (you read that right) and calling for the head of the kerning vetter. Jayzuz.
Anyway, here’s the WH reaction:
“Your GOP operative should have had the courtesy to stay sober before noon, and BuzzFeed should go back to labeling cat slideshows.”
I was going to remark upon this shocking Morning Joe segment with Harold Ford and others, but Glenn Greenwald does it so well, I’ll just excerpt a piece and link to him:
You just have to watch the reaction of Ford, neocon Dan Senor, and Mike Barnacle to appreciate the soulless rot that leads people so cavalierly to defend and dismiss the continuous killing of innocent Muslims by the U.S. But it’s Ford’s smirking, self-satisfied, effete ignorance — from a warmonger whose delicately manicured hands have never been and will never be near any of the carnage he reflexively defends — that is particularly nauseating. Like most mindless defenders of U.S. violence, Ford just repeatedly utters the word “Terrorist” over and over like a hypnotic mantra.
Even after Junod describes the heinous death of the indisputably innocent American teenager, Ford just smirks and pronounces that it’s better to Kill The Terrorists than to capture them. There’s nothing unique about Harold Ford, Jr. — as I said, he’s just the personification of the standard Beltway sicknesses, and the vacant “arguments” he makes to justify drones (“THE TERRORISTS!”) are the typical ones offered up — but there’s something about the way Harold Ford, Jr. speaks here, and who he is, that really vividly conveys what motivates this mindset:
Here’s the segment. And I have to agree that Ford is the most sinister of the group although they’re all horrifying:
President Obama will begin pushing for a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for Americans making less than $250,000, reports the New York Times. The announcement from the Rose Garden Monday will signal the president’s emphasis on tax fairness as a major issue just four months from the election. Pushing the issue is also meant to make House Republicans look unreasonable as they move this month to vote on a full, permanent extension of all of the Bush tax cuts.
I don’t think there’s really a downside to calling for only the middle class cuts to be extended. This economy still sucks for most people making less than a quarter of a million dollars a year so raising their taxes isn’t a good idea. But damn, I will never in a million years understand why they didn’t extend them for say, five years, when they passed the stimulus and take them out of the negotiating equation. Battling over cutting taxes on the wealthy is much friendlier turf for Democrats. (Maybe they tried, but I’ve never heard word of it …)
It’s good that they’re doing it now, but it’s a lot less clean than it could have been.
Governor Nikki Haley, a Tea Party-backed Republican, was among the first state leaders to oppose expanding Medicaid after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can’t make states do so. Caught between poverty and pressure to curb government’s power, South Carolina illustrates the forces at play in the nation’s capitals amid the broadest changes to the health care system since 1965. […] In South Carolina, the law would add about 500,000 people to Medicaid, said Tony Keck, whom Haley appointed to head the Health and Human Services Department.
“We simply can’t support this,” Haley and Keck said in a July 3 statement. “We are not going to jam more South Carolinians into a broken program, a program that stifles innovation, discourages personal responsibility, and encourages fraud, abuse and overuse of services — and that, by the way, costs us billions of dollars.”
Republican governors of Louisiana, Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, and Texas also oppose the plan to boost the scale of the health-care program. Texas Governor Rick Perry said today he won’t do anything to implement the president’s law. In his state, about 25 percent go without health insurance, the nation’s highest rate, according to Census Department figures.
“I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab,” he said. […] The state where the Civil War began also long been suspicious of ceding power to the federal government, said Bruce Ransom, a political scientist at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina.
One of the state’s U.S. senators, Jim DeMint, is a founder of the Tea Party Caucus. In 2009, then-Governor Mark Sanford sparred with the Obama administration and his own Legislature, seeking to use $700 million from the stimulus program to pay down debt instead of spending on the economy.
“Federal aid, federal programs — unless it’s for the military — are not good things,” Ransom said, summarizing voters’ views. “That plays here. The conventional wisdom says that’s a winning hand.”
Keck, South Carolina’s top health official, said the state’s illnesses are driven by poverty and that money poured into Medicaid would best be used elsewhere. Keck said he and Haley favor block-grant funding that would hold the state accountable for set outcomes, such as lowering obesity.
“We should spend our money getting more people jobs with health insurance,” said Keck, the state’s top health official. “If we’re going to talk at all about targeting the uninsured, it has to be with a completely different system than Medicaid.”
Well at least he agreed to spend money on something, although I have no doubt that if you suggested they spend some money to hire people directly his head would revolve on his shoulders and he’d start spitting pea soup.
The only way they can resolve this is to repeal this law:
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is a U.S. Act of Congress passed in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). It requires hospitals to provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay. There are no reimbursement provisions. Participating hospitals may only transfer or discharge patients needing emergency treatment under their own informed consent, after stabilization, or when their condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.
Until they are able to do that — also known as letting them die — someone’s going to be footing the bill for people who are sick and have no insurance. I’m just surprised they haven’t worked up the moxie to formally propose it.
The irony here is that the Reagan era law that requires basic human decency has long been decried as an “unfunded mandate.” Here you have the Federal Government paying for 100% for the first years and then 90% thereafter and they still won’t take yes for an answer. So I think we can feel fairly confident at this point that it isn’t really about the funding at all, can’t we? It’s about their belief that “those” people who don’t “deserve” medical care shouldn’t get it.
A Democratic state rep is quoted in the story saying he believes he will be able to bring some Republicans along once they see how much it could help people in their own districts. Let’s hope they have enough humanity to put that before their ideology, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Something truly insidious has taken over the collective conservative subconscious and I’m not sure they’re quite sane anymore.
“They refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”
by David Atkins
Robert Draper describes the results of focus groups done a few months ago by Democratic groups attempting to define Mitt Romney:
Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.
That’s really how bad the Ryan budget is: voters don’t believe that real politicians would actually do such a thing. The plan to gut Medicare in order to make room for tax cuts for the rich is egregious and embarrassing that groups like Politifact have to go out of their way to cover for them.
And then there’s Mitt Romney, a vulture capitalist responsible for mass layoffs and outsourcing, who supported the Ryan budget and continues to advocate for tax breaks for millionaires and austerity for everyone else. As Jonathan Chait says:
The basic theme of Romney as a super-rich guy who sees the world through the lens of his own class seems like a powerful and roughly accurate one. The attacks on Romney’s business career fit with the theme. I’m sure there will be more attacks on Romney’s secretive finances — Obama’s campaign keeps dropping the phrase “Swiss bank account” because, I would wager, focus groups find it a little suspicious.
Once they’ve established that frame for voters to understand Romney, then they have set the stage for a closing attack that focuses on the policy contrast. (Or so I have argued.)
One odd thing is that Romney has done so little to insulate himself against this line of attack. George W. Bush framed his entire campaign persona in 2000 so as to protect himself from charges of looking out for the rich — he called himself a compassionate conservative, he falsely claimed his tax cuts disproportionately benefitted the poor, he surrounded himself with cultural symbols of the middle class. Romney is a very rich man running on a platform of helping other rich people and doing almost nothing to deflect the most obvious political attack.
It’s almost as if the Republicans are planting gigantic targets on their backs, standing in the middle of the street and daring Democrats to hit them. It’s such openly flaunted evil that even the most jaded voters refuse to believe it’s actually real.
But then again, maybe they figure they’ll have so much money to tell lies with that it won’t matter how obvious the iniquity:
There was, however, one fundamental difference between Priorities and its conservative counterparts. According to Politico, Rove’s organization had vowed to raise $300 million for the 2012 election — which, when coupled with Restore Our Future ($100 million) and the outside groups of oil and chemical billionaires Charles and David Koch ($400 million), would amount to an $800 million war chest. Burton and Sweeney’s stated goal was $100 million.
$800 million of secret slush donations will buy calumnies galore. It will be interesting to see if voters can make heads or tails of anything remotely resembling the truth by the time November rolls around. The fact that they refuse to believe the Ryan budget is a real document isn’t a good omen.
The LA Timesreports from the Romney Koch fundraiser:
The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman’s estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman’s property — the Creeks — checked off names under tight security.
They came with high hopes for the presumed Republican nominee, who is locked in a tight race with President Obama. And some were eager to give the candidate some advice about the next four months.
A money manager in a green Jeep said it was time for Romney to “up his game and be more reactive.” So far, said the donor (who would not give his name because he said it would hurt his business), Romney has had a “very timid offense.”
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
Right. What’s the impact for these people again?
Now maybe that very nice rich lady who said that the lower orders are too stupid to understand that Obama is hurting them is donating to Romney because while she’s doing well, she’s truly concerned about the poor and for some reason thinks he’ll be better for them. That makes her pathetically dumb herself, but at least her heart would be in the right place. But I’m going to take a wild shot and say that I would guess she’s just another self-centered moron who thinks that Obama is ruining everything because he’s taxing everyone too much — especially her.
They look very happy, just as you should on your wedding day:
Mr. Frank, 72, and Mr. Ready, 42, were married in Newton, Mass., part of Mr. Frank’s district, on Saturday in a low-key ceremony on the banks of the Charles River. Gov. Deval L. Patrick of Massachusetts officiated. The guests included Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, as well as Senator John Kerry and Representatives Dennis J. Kucinich and Steny H. Hoyer.
Mr. Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, became, in 1987, the first sitting member of Congress to volunteer that he was gay. He is now the first to be married to a partner of the same sex. Both bridegrooms said they recognized the historical significance of the ceremony, which lasted less than five minutes. Gov. Patrick told the guests that Mr. Frank had requested that the service “be short and to the point.”
And in vows written by the couple, Mr. Frank and Mr. Ready pledged to love each other “on MSNBC or on Fox” and “in Congress or in retirement,” a reference to Mr. Frank’s decision not to seek another term.
It was yet another signal moment for Mr. Frank, born into a blue-collar family in Bayonne, N.J., whose debating skills and legislative prowess made him one of the most powerful lawmakers in Washington. He maintained that stature despite a 1989 scandal that threatened to derail his career when an ex-boyfriend’s activities led to an 11-month ethics investigation.
“Some 1,500 people voted under dead people’s and prisoners’ names from 2008-11, according to Michigan’s auditor general. Many might be clerical errors, but this illustrates the need to ensure accurate voter rolls.”
Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson wrote this in a July 2 Times-Herald column, and she lied.
Johnson is a member of a fifteen-state consortium of right-wing elections officials that’s hellbent on purging voters. And her dishonest jousting in Michigan this week offers a window into how that consortium works—playing fast and loose with facts in order to create the impression of a problem that would justify their hardline solutions, and flouting the law themselves when necessary…
Despite Johnson’s constant refrain on dead people voting, her own Bureau of Elections has already established that there was no actual voter fraud in the auditor general’s report she referenced in her July 2 column.
While it’s true that the auditor general initially found close to 1,500 cases in which a dead or imprisoned person appeared to vote, the Department of State’s Bureau of Elections (BOE) said the auditor general was mistaken on all 1,500 counts (pdf; page 17). The auditor general reports that BOE informed investigators “that in every instance where it appears a deceased person or incarcerated person voted and local records were available, a clerical error was established as the reason for the situation. In addition, the Department [BOE] informed [the auditor general] that in some cases, voters submitted absent voter ballots shortly before they died. The Department informed us that the examples provided did not result in a single verified case that an ineligible person voted.” (My emphasis.)
Despite this, Johnson is determined to press forward with her original intentions. And regardless of Governor Snyder’s veto of the citizenship reaffirmation bill, Johnson said she will require that ballot application forms have a citizenship checkbox anyway.
Johnson will also continue this work through membership in the Interstate Cross Check Project. The architect of that consortium is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who gained notoriety when he led a national movement to copycat Arizona’s immigrant profiling law. The consortium allows member states to share voter registration information in a database to find ineligible voters.
Kansas has the most restrictive, active voter ID law in the nation. That law, which is also called the Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, is the model for what Kobach would like to see happen around the country, where state cabinet officials are sent on missions looking for dead people, dogs and “illegals” attempting to vote. The project claims it has discovered people who are registered in multiple states, and who may have even voted in multiple states during one election.
If there is nothing else that can convince thinking people that the Republicans are a malevolent, anti-democratic Party, this should. There is no evidence, none, that there is any ,election voter fraud, much less a systemic enough problem to turn elections, but there is ample evidence that if you make people go through ridiculous hoops to vote, a lot of them will give up. That’s the point, that’s what they’re trying to do, everyone knows it.
Now maybe it’s true that vote suppression doesn’t amount to anything and we needn’t worry. But we can prove that “vote fraud” doesn’t — the evidence is clear — so there’s no reason to take that chance.
You have to hand it to the Republicans. They are drowning that government baby in the bathtub. But they are taking down a whole lot of average working people with it.
Amid Scranton’s ever-deepening financial crisis, Mayor Chris Doherty said his administration is going forward with a plan to unilaterally slash the pay of 398 workers to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour with today’s payroll, insisting it is all the city can afford.
That will likely earn administration officials an appointment with Judge Michael Barrasse, who granted the city’s police, fire and public works unions a special injunction temporarily barring the administration from imposing the pay cuts after a brief hearing Thursday.
As Think Progress points out, this doesn’t have to happen:
Congressional Republicans repeatedly blocked efforts to extend aid to the states that would have helped shore up their budgets and keep these workers on payroll. In the case of Scranton, such aid may have helped the city actually pay its workers a living wage instead of a federal minimum that hasn’t been raised since 2006 and has less buying power than it had in 1968.
On the other hand, this will undoubtedly make people hate government even more than they do, so there’s a silver lining. For GOP sadists.
I think this kid provides a real insight into conservatism: they are emotionally and intellectually stunted. This kid was smarter than most, so he was probably a little ahead of the curve. I would suppose that the usual conservative mental age is around 15:
Four years ago, at the age of 13, I gave a speech at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). To be honest, I had no idea how big a deal it was to make a two-minute appearance on a B-list panel. But the speech blew up, and I became the child star of the right wing — like the conservative Macauley Culkin, except I’ve never had a drug problem or dated Mila Kunis, unfortunately.
My involvement at such a young age happened for manifold reasons: I always enjoyed writing (I had gotten my first paid writing gig when I was 9), I enjoyed politics (or at least the theory of politics), and I grew up in Georgia, where conservative ideologues dominated the radio and the populace. Mix those things with the naïveté of a kid and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a fresh, right-wing pundit. My star role worked out well for a while. I didn’t have to question any of the talking points I’d made in my speech, and I got to drone on and on about them at numerous Tea Parties and other conservative gatherings. I felt justified in my beliefs if for no other reason than no one actually told me I was wrong. Instead, men like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich hailed me as the voice for my generation and a hope for America.
But then, earlier this week, Politico released an interview in which I announced I wasn’t a conservative anymore — and the proverbial crap hit the fan. Since then, I have been treated by the political right with all the maturity of schoolyard bullies. The Daily Caller, for instance, wrote three articles about my shift, topping it off with an opinion piece in which they stated that I deserved criticism because I wear “thick-rimmed glasses” and I like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Why don’t they just call me “four-eyes”? These are not adults leveling serious criticism; these are scorned right-wingers showing all the maturity of a little boy. No wonder I fit in so well when I was 13…
Smart kid.
He’s currently in the mode of “a pox on both their houses” and perhaps he’ll stay that way. If I had just been through his experience I’d think that too. But at some point this smart kid is going to decide that some political things really do matter to him and he’ll look around and try to figure out the best way to make or preserve those things. And, like most of us, he’ll decide what political tools are available to achieve that goal. Without knowing how that will go, I think it’s fair to assume that tool will not be the Republican Party.
