Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford must appear in court two days after running for a vacant congressional seat to answer a complaint that he trespassed at his ex-wife’s home, according to court documents acquired by The Associated Press on Tuesday. > more ... (0 comments)
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The predictability of this makes my already bleeding mind bleed:
Remember those warnings about how instead of welcoming President Obama’s adoption of Chained CPI, Republicans would continue to deny him a budget deal and attack him for proposing to cut Social Security?
Well Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) — who also happens to be chairman of the House GOP’s re-election committee — just showed how it’s done, saying Obama’s budget “lays out a shocking attack on seniors.”
“I’ll tell you when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taken $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country,” he said on CNN Wednesday afternoon.
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You really should read the new GOP report on why they suck so much ass (via). It’s pretty good. It contains lovely gems like this:
Jack Kemp used to say, “No one cares what you know until they know you care.” … The perception, revealed in polling, that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates. …
Our policies and actions must take into account that the middle class has struggled mightily and that far too many of our citizens live in poverty.
Our job as Republicans is to champion private growth so people will not turn to the government in the first place. But we must make sure that the government works for those truly in need, helping them so they can quickly get back on their feet. We should be driven by reform, eliminating, and fixing what is broken, while making sure the government’s safety net is a trampoline, not a trap.
If it wasn’t so sad, you could almost be amused by the one-dimensional infantile thinking in there.
“Gee whiz, if we just go in there and (a) help plutocrats become more rich, and (b) reform [i.e., gut] some of that hateful socialism safety net, all those capable, upwardly mobile wage-earners will bounce right off the public dole in a few weeks and go on to make enough middle class money to support a family.”
Oh right, I guess they forgot that the hyper-financialization of our economy over the past few decades has driven a huge share of corporate earnings into executive pay and gargantuan piles of hoarded cash that no one knows what to do with. In a period of never-ending record corporate profits, employment rolls remain frozen (or contracting) – driven largely by employers taking advantage of the financial crisis to squeeze existing workers even harder to make them do more work for the same (often inadequate) pay. Why hire more moochers when you can just add 5 more tasks to everyone else’s job description? After all, they should be thanking Jesus that they even HAVE a job, amirite??
Perhaps Republicans might want to ruminate on the millions of hard-working families who work three or more jobs and still have to collect food stamps because their wages, in real terms, have continued to decline year after year. Maybe they want to ponder the Sophie’s Choice millions of people have to make between relying on public assistance or going to work at a shitty job that pays hardly anything and (naturally) offers no health insurance – in many cases because someone in the family is sick, and the loss of health care coverage would be too financially devastating.
But no, Republicans. Keep on keeping on with your heartless “All people need is a kick in the ass to get them out of poverty and make them stop sucking off the government teat.” Never stop believing that larding up corporate balance sheets will trickle down largesse upon the little people. Continue to have faith that tearing down government will result in the private sector choosing to do the right thing all by themselves.
Because eventually even the idiots who don’t know it yet will catch on.
An oldie but always a goodie:
Reagan’s electorate was 88 percent white, and Romney’s was only 72 percent white, but [South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan] hinted at a solution for that. Get more whites to show up! “In Florida, 350,000 white Republicans did not show up on Election Day.”
There was a brouhaha at CPAC when some rednecks asserted that slaves had it good cuz their owners put a roof over their heads – but this bit in particular stood out for me, from a presenter opining on Frederick Douglass’s upbringing:
Douglass was “born below poverty”. What does that mean? “Slavemaster-run health care,” Smith says. “Slavemaster entitlements.Continue reading »
A truly bizarre North Korean propaganda video posted on YouTube … shows a North Korean man dreaming of his country’s coming dominance in space, North Korean space shuttle and all. It then switches to a scene of New York, apparently under attack by North Korean missiles. But the New York scenes are clearly lifted directly from content in MW3.
The captions that scroll across the screen over the lifted Call of Duty footage read, “Somewhere in the United States, black clouds of smoke are billowing… It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze with the fire started by itself.”
Details here. My guess is that this is Democrats being more afraid of losing the Senate next year (and the White House in 2016) than of Republicans blowing up the Senate, since they didn’t exactly do it last year after Obama’s tyrannical exercising of powers specifically delimited to him in the Constitution (i.e. recess appointments). Republicans’ attempts to blow up the Senate after the Cordray appointment petered out to just being Mike Lee voting no against all uncontroversial Obama judicial nominees for eight months to send a signal, until he stopped bothering. Admittedly, now that we have Lee-sympathetic ideologues like Ted Cruz and Tim Scott in the Senate, there’s a decent possibility that real filibuster reform might mean winning those votes 97-3, which certainly is something to worry about. What puzzles me is this:
The emerging accord is a major step away from the Merkley-Udall “talking filibuster” plan which would have required a filibustering minority to occupy the floor and speak ceaselessly until one side gives in. It’s also more modest than Reid’s middle-path proposal to McConnell, which would have shifted the burden from a majority seeking to advance legislation and nominations to a minority seeking to block them.
The problems here are obvious: primarily, that this strategy is flawed on a conceptual level. Obviously, McConnell isn’t going to have any interest in making it harder to obstruct things, so if he agrees to anything, it will be because it doesn’t make it much harder to obstruct things. Otherwise, it’s better from his perspective to be able to play the victim and have Reid use the nuclear option to force a rules change, a far better play for a Republican than striking generous deals as that will get talk radio and usually the MSM all up in a lather. About the only thing you can learn from this is that McConnell is less interested in obstructing appointments, and is willing to give some on that since it doesn’t really matter to the interests he represents, and he can just obstruct legislation all the time anyway. Statesmanship, I suppose. But the point of filibuster reform is, presumably, to stop obstruction. The idea that you could strike a deal to do this with the chief obstructor is similar to believing Democrats can compromise with Republicans on…any area of policy, I suppose.
THE GRAPEVINE
