Rand Paul-- delusional son of a delusional man?

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Rand Paul on the Supreme Court: The dumbest political quote of the week
By Taylor Bigler, June 29, 2012
[snipped]

After the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday, Republican Congress members flocked in droves towards media outlets in order to get their two-cents worth in.

Most of the statements and interviews were relatively similar; most GOP congressmen were “disappointed” or even “sad” about the ruling.

But Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul had quite a different take on the matter:

“Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional,” Paul said in a statement.
Sure, a couple of people declaring something constitutional doesn’t make it constitutional. But five Supreme Court justices declaring something constitutional does, actually, make it constitutional.
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Rand Paul to Supreme Court: Drop dead
By Sandra Hernandez, June 28, 2012[snipped]

The senator is right, of course, about "a couple people" deciding.  But in this case, five people, who happen to be justices on the Supreme Court, declared the law constitutional. Those five individuals constitute a majority on the high court and thus are empowered to decide whether something is constitutional or not.

Perhaps Paul’s beef, though, isn’t with this court but with the 209-year-old landmark decision in Marbury vs. Madison that established the basis for judicial review under Article III of the Constitution and cleared the way for federal courts to declare laws unconstitutional.

[snipped]

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Oh Canada......our home our native land....

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/06/28/hilarious-alert-americans-angry-about-supreme-court-ruling-on-healthcare-threaten-to-move-to-canada/

You can't make stuff like this up

Ask, ye shall receive!

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Repealing "Obamacare" would take a triple GOP victory this fall

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Could the Republicans really repeal Obamacare?
By Chris Moody, June 29, 2012

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of key provisions in the Affordable Care Act, the health care law commonly known as Obamacare, on Thursday, but on Capitol Hill, Republicans are vowing to press on with plans to fully repeal the law.

Repealing the law won't happen before January 2013. It would be dependent on a triple Republican victory this November: Mitt Romney would need to defeat President Barack Obama, Republicans must hold their majority in the House, and they must also gain enough seats in the Senate so they have at least 50 of their own in the upper chamber.

What about the filibuster? Don't you need 60 votes to do anything in the Senate?

Not in this case. Because Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion ruled the individual mandate a "tax," a Republican-led Senate could repeal that provision--and others--using what is called "budget reconciliation," a procedural tactic that requires only a simple majority vote. The Republican vice president, in this hypothetical scenario, would break the tie. (Democrats used the same method in 2010 to pass the health care bill.)

Budget reconciliation is at least one option that Senate Republicans are considering.

"There are a lot of ways to protect the American people from this horrible law, and Republicans are looking at all of them," John Ashbrook, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told Yahoo News when asked if the party's congressional leadership was open to repeal using that process.

In the meantime, House Republicans are scheduling their own vote to repeal the law on July 11, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced Thursday. The vote would be symbolic because it would never pass the Democrat-controlled Senate. Also, the same House already voted to repeal the law in January 2011, during the same Congress that is up for re-election in November.

Speaking outside the Senate floor Thursday, Senate Democratic leaders criticized Republicans for moving forward with another repeal vote after the Supreme Court ruled its key provisions constitutional.

"Now that all three branches of government have ratified the law, the time for quarreling is over," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. "The time for disputing its validity is over. Congress should now return to its full time focus: The issue of jobs and the economy in America."

"If you ask people what they want us to focus on," he added, "it's not rehashing health care."

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The details of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare")

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What exactly is "Obamacare" and what did it change?

An article explaining the US health care changes in the order of when the changes go into effect: includes citations to pages in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare").

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Oops! Fingers were flying faster than reading comprehension!

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‘Mandate struck down’: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ moment for CNN, Fox News
By Dylan Stableford, June 28, 2012

The Supreme Court upheld the individual insurance mandate of President Obama's "Affordable Health Care Act" in a 5-4 decision on Thursday, sending cable news and Twitter into a frenzy.

Moments after the 193-page ruling was released by the court, several media outlets--including CNN and Fox News--erroneously reported on-air that the mandate had been struck down.

"BREAKING NEWS: INDIVIDUAL MANDATE STRUCK DOWN," CNN's on-screen scroll blared. "Supreme Court finds measure unconstitutional."

It was a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment for the 21st Century, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage tweeted, pointing to a screengrab of CNN's premature scroll.

CNN.com's homepage mirrored the on-air report--inspiring at least one timely photo illustration: President Obama, as Harry Truman, proudly displaying the CNN homepage on his iPad.

CNN and Fox News were among the news outlets that committed health care ruling gaffes. (Y! News)

An anonymous Twitter feed--@BreakingCNN--was quickly launched to chronicle CNN's gaffes both real and imagined.

The network later apologized:

In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts initially said that the individual mandate was not a valid exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause. CNN reported that fact, but then wrongly reported that therefore the court struck down the mandate as unconstitutional. However, that was not the whole of the Court's ruling. CNN regrets that it didn't wait to report out the full and complete opinion regarding the mandate. We made a correction within a few minutes and apologize for the error.

CNN, though, was not alone in its rush to report the news.

"Fox News was so eager to see the healthcare mandate fail they forgot to read past the 1st page of the ruling," Jason Keath wrote, pointing to a screengrab of the network's breaking news stumble.

Fox News executive vice president Michael Clemente issued a statement explaining the flub:

We gave our viewers the news as it happened. When Justice Roberts said, and we read, that the mandate was not valid under the Commerce clause, we reported it. Bill Hemmer even added, be patient as we work through this. Then when we heard and read, that the mandate could be upheld under the government's power to tax, we reported that as well—all within two minutes. By contrast, one other cable network was unable to get their Supreme Court reporter to the camera, and said as much. Another said it was a big setback for the President. Fox reported the facts, as they came in.

And late Wednesday, the Chicago Sun-Times accidentally published the shell of what their front page story would've looked like had the voted against the individual mandate.

On Twitter, Roberts, who joined the liberal wing of the court in upholding the mandate, began trending both in the U.S. and worldwide.

"Judging by my Twitter feed," Buzzfeed's McCay Coppins wrote, "Chief Justice Roberts is now conservative public enemy number one."

"Roberts is the Severus Snape of the Supreme Court," Jezebel.com's Erin Gloria Ryan tweeted.

Conservatives on Twitter expressed their outrage in tweets.

"Obama lied to the American people. Again," former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin tweeted. "He said it wasn't a tax. Obama lies; freedom dies."

An alarming number of Twitter users, Buzzfeed noted, declared their intent to move to Canada.

"Don't worry," former head Onion writer Joe Garden wrote on Twitter. "Despite the health care ruling, America will still find a way to crush its poor."

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The beginning of the end for the Tea Party?

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Hatch’s Victory Blueprint and the Tea Party’s Limits
By Alex Altman, June 27, 2012

Orrin Hatch’s win in the Utah Republican primary Tuesday night — a triumph that all but ensures he’ll add another term to his 36-year tenure in the Senate — was a tribute to Hatch’s textbook strategy for rebuffing an upstart challenge and a testament to the limits of the Tea Party‘s clout. This is not, for obvious reasons, the way the folks who labored to engineer his ouster are spinning it.

“We would have liked to have seen Senator Hatch replaced. Short of that, we’re pretty pleased with what  happened in the race. Senator Hatch moved as far to the right as he possibly could to get reelected, and that to us is a victory in itself,” says Russ Walker, the national political director of the Tea Party advocacy group FreedomWorks. Dave Weigel buys it. The logic here is simple: If the goal of the Tea Party is to force RINOs to toe the line, well, Hatch did that. The last two years, Hatch amassed a 100% rating from the American Conservative Union. If this was a purity test, he passed.

But if this is what now counts as a win in Tea Party circles, the movement has lowered its aspirations dramatically since its heady giant-slaying days of 2010. FreedomWorks spent about $1 million to oust the dogged septuagenarian. They knocked on 120,000 doors, made over 280,000 phone calls, and put up 10,000 yard signs — all in the four weeks leading up to primary. And yet Hatch won going away.

Walker says the group was at a sizable disadvantage: facing an entrenched incumbent with a sizable war chest in a state where Mitt Romney, a Hatch backer, is political royalty. “You had an alignment of the stars” in Hatch’s favor, he said. But Utah, as Bob Bennett’s 2010 loss proved, is in many ways a perfect laboratory for the Tea Party experiment — ruby red, with a convention process that gives a small universe of some 3,500 delegates (who tend to be conservative activists) the power to dump a sitting Senator. Without a mighty effort, Hatch was in trouble, and he knew it. He’s been furiously fundraising, scrambling to sideline local opponents and crisscrossing his state for three years, an effort that intensified after his fellow senator became the Tea Party’s first major scalp in the summer of 2010.

Hatch assiduously courted local opponents, and when it became clear that if he couldn’t win some over, he kept calling anyway. “I have never in my life seen anybody work so hard. He deserves to win,” says Utah Tea Party founder David Kirkham. As I reported last year, when Hatch showed up at the first meeting of Kirkham’s group in the spring of 2009, the Tea Party “basically told him to drop dead,” according to Kirkham. And yet Hatch persisted, phoning Kirkham regularly, even after the Provo businessman announced he would not support the Senator. Hatch called three times between the state convention, when he nearly took out challenger Dan Liljenquist, and the primary runoff. After Hatch won, Kirkham sent a congratulatory text message. “He ran a brilliant campaign,” Kirkham says. “They started early, worked very hard reaching out to Tea Party groups and constituents across the state…that goes a long way to mitigate angst, which is certainly what Senator Bennett didn’t do.”

FreedomWorks encouraged its activists to take heart with the success it achieved. “The limited-government movement is largely responsible for the 180-degree change in Senator Hatch’s votes and rhetoric over the past two years,” it said in a statement. But it’s not like Hatch did a total about-face. He’s always been a conservative senator, with an 89% lifetime rating from the ACU. In 2010, when every Republican began talking about imminent tyranny like Mel Gibson in “The Patriot,” merely conservative didn’t cut it. Hatch had on his record black marks like TARP and the Dream Act and votes from liberal judicial nominees, and that was enough to guarantee a challenge from his right.

In March, FreedomWorks’ Walker gave an interview to the website Red Alert Politics in which he warned that Hatch would edge back toward the middle if he won. “The problem with politicians is that they swing to the right when it is election time,” Walker said then. So why should we give the Tea Party credit for spending a $1 million to force that process, if the smart money is on the pendulum swinging back now that he’s won?

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STILL bought and paid for!

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Supreme Court Reaffirms Citizens United Ruiling [sic]
By Rob Tornoe, June 25, 2012

While we will have to wait a couple more days for the Supreme Court’s ruling on President Obama’s health care reform, today we found out that the court’s five conservative justices see no problem with unlimited or campaign spending.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, struck down Montana’s long-standing ban on corporate money in elections. The decision reversed a ruling by the Montana Supreme Court which had upheld the 1912 law. As Think Progress notes, the [i.e. there] were no oral arguments in the case, meaning that the five conservative justices were not even open to hearing arguments that their election-buying decision in Citizens United might have been wrongly decided.

The ruling forces the 2010 Citizens United decision onto state campaign finance laws, allowing corporations and labor unions the right to spend freely in local elections.

Here’s what it comes down to – the conservatives on the Supreme Court just doubled down on the ability for a single billionaire or corporation to overwhelm the contributions of millions of citizens. Or as Antonin Scalia calls it, “free speech.”

According to NPR, the conservative majority turned away pleas from the court’s liberal justices to give a full hearing to the case because “massive campaign spending since the January 2010 ruling has called into question some of its underpinnings.”
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Buffett's thoughts

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Buffett: Obama beats Romney on economy

CNN video: click on title to open video.
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Hand-to-hand legal combat in a struggle over voter eligibility

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Republicans’ Voter Suppression Project Grinds On
By Jonathan Alter, June 21, 2012

Mitt Romney was in Michigan this week trying to make it competitive in the presidential election. It’s a steep climb for the native Michigander because President Barack Obama’s auto bailout, which Romney opposed, has helped bring the state’s unemployment rate down by 5.7 points since 2009.

But Romney has a strong ally there: legislation being pushed this month by his fellow Republicans aimed at preventing the nonpartisan League of Women Voters from undertaking the voter-registration drives it has sponsored for nearly a century.

Across the country, the Republicans’ carefully orchestrated plan to make voting harder -- let’s call it the Voter Suppression Project -- may keep just enough young people and minorities from the polls that Republicans will soon be in charge of all three branches of the federal government.

Yes, both sides try to change voting laws to favor their team. The 1993 “motor voter” law that made voting more convenient by extending registration to the Department of Motor Vehicles helped mostly Democrats. That was at least in the long American tradition of expanding the franchise.

The Republican effort to restrict voting isn’t just anti- Democrat, it’s anti-democratic. No fair-minded person believes the tall tales of voters pretending they were someone else, which have been debunked by the Brennan Center for Justice and others. What fool would risk prison or deportation to cast a single vote?

Rigging System

This isn’t about stopping vote-stealing and other corruption, for which there are already plenty of laws on the books. It’s about rigging the system to keep power.

First we saw the efforts during the George W. Bush administration by Karl Rove and Justice Department officials to get rid of U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue bogus voter- fraud cases. When Republican prosecutors complained, Rove and company ran for cover.

Then came Crawford v. Marion County, the 2008 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory photo-identification laws were constitutional on the basis of ballot protection. The evidence presented included not a single case of in-person impersonation fraud -- the only fraud that photo ID laws can prevent. And the millions of Americans -- mostly less-affluent seniors -- without driver’s licenses? Good luck.

The big Republican victory in the 2010 election was essential to the Voter Suppression Project. With the help of ALEC -- a conservative lobbying outfit that spreads cookie- cutter bills to state legislatures -- Republicans moved with lightning speed to implement their scheme. Since 2011, 18 states have enacted voter-suppression bills, with similar ones pending in 12 more.

In the presidential race, it’s hand-to-hand legal combat, with almost every battleground state embroiled in a struggle over voter eligibility.

Michigan’s bills attack the League of Women Voters by requiring some volunteers to attend state-approved training sessions before they can register voters. The catch is that the bill makes no provisions for such sessions. Ha! It does threaten them with penalties for registration offenses that aren’t specified.

The bill is modeled on Florida’s, parts of which a federal judge invalidated May 31 because he said they had “no purpose other than to discourage” constitutionally protected activity.

Witch’s Broomstick

In Ohio, the Obama campaign helped collect enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot repealing restrictions on absentee voting. Preferring not to face the voters directly on voter suppression, the Republican-controlled legislature repealed its own law, although it left intact a related measure that prohibits early voting on the three days before an election. That’s designed to discourage the tradition in black communities of busing worshippers from church to the polling place.

Several battleground states have new photo-ID requirements. Pennsylvania’s law allows valid student ID, but with a number of restrictions. Same in Wisconsin, which attached a series of bring-me-the-witch’s-broomstick demands for students looking to use a school ID. Fortunately, a state judge ruled against the Wisconsin law, although it’s being appealed.

Virginia’s legislation allows multiple forms of photo ID but restricts registering for an absentee ballot in person. A New Hampshire bill that required those without photo ID to fill out an onerous affidavit was thankfully just vetoed by Governor John Lynch.

The Obama campaign is obviously concerned about these ballot-access issues for political reasons. But even those with no dog in this fight should recognize that a great democracy doesn’t sully itself by suppressing the precious right to vote.

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Serves the SOB right!

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Talk about getting ahead of yourself!

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Oops! Candidate videos respond to healthcare ruling before ruling
By Morgan Little, June 23, 2012

 Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, preparing for the upcoming Supreme Court decision on healthcare reform, covered all of his bases in preparing four videos to respond to various potential verdicts — but his cover was blown when his campaign accidentally uploaded all four to his YouTube account.

Oh, that simple-to-use technology. In what can be described as a contingency plan gone wrong, Mourdock’s YouTube channel was meant to host one video depending on next week’s ruling: If the court ruled in favor of President Obama’s healthcare reform law, if it struck down some provisions but preserved others, if it ruled the entire law unconstitutional, and if the court’s ruling is inconclusive.

The Republican’s preference? Strike it down.

“Well, we’ve had our brief moment of celebration, because the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is, in fact, unconstitutional. It’s what many of us argued all along," Mourdock says in that video. "But don’t sit back and think the fight is over, because it isn’t.”

All four were available to watch for a brief time before being removed from the site, though as with all things online, they've since been preserved elsewhere.

Mourdock’s Democratic opponent portrayed the videos as evidence that “tea party, partisan politics is what Richard Mourdock cares about,” in a statement released by Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) campaign spokesman Christopher Conner.

“Like the vast majority of Hoosiers, Richard hopes the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare, which our opponent Joe Donnelly dutifully supported. But as the Boy Scouts say, 'Be prepared,’ ” Mourdock spokesman Chris Conner said in a statement following the release.

Mourdock, who defeated longtime Sen. Richard Lugar in a May primary this year, is just one of several tea party-backed candidates who have challenged favorites of the GOP establishment.

All three of Mourdock’s videos can be seen below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJyQLyf5JJw&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQAtASnQNf0&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf3zRgyOv3w&feature=player_embedded

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Wish the GOP would make up their minds about Reagan!

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Oh, the HORROR of speaking "that" word!

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Silenced Mich. lawmaker does 'Vagina Monologues'
By Kathy Barks Hoffman, June 19, 2012

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — A state lawmaker who says she was barred from speaking in the Michigan House because Republicans objected to her saying "vagina" during debate over anti-abortion legislation performed "The Vagina Monologues" on the Statehouse steps — with a hand from the author.

Eve Ensler, whose groundbreaking play about women's sexuality still packs theaters 16 years after it debuted, oversaw Monday night's performance by Democratic state Rep. Lisa Brown, 10 other lawmakers and several actresses.

Capitol facilities director Steve Benkovsky estimated about 2,500 spectators — women and men — watched the play in downtown Lansing from lawn chairs and blankets. Billed on Facebook as the "Vaginas Take Back the Capitol!" event, the combination play and protest included political signs and chants of "Vagina! Vagina!"

Ensler, who flew in from California, where she's overseeing production of her new play, said she was thrilled to be involved and likened the punishment meted out by the Republican leadership of the state House to "the Dark Ages."

"If we ever knew deep in our hearts that the issue about abortion ... was not really about fetuses and babies, but really men's terror of women's sexuality and power, I think it's fully evidenced here," Ensler told The Associated Press by phone Monday before arriving in Lansing.

"We're talking about the silencing of women, we're talking about censoring people for saying a body part," she said. "Half of these people who are trying to regulate vaginas, they can't even say the word."

Brown made her comments during debate last week on legislation that supporters say would make abortions safer but that opponents say would make it much harder for women to get abortions. While speaking against a bill that would require doctors to ensure abortion-seekers haven't been coerced into ending their pregnancies, Brown told Republicans, "I'm flattered you're all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no."

Brown was barred from speaking in the House during the next day's session. House Republicans say they didn't object to her saying "vagina." They said Brown compared the legislation to rape, violating House decorum. She denies the allegation.

"Her comments compared the support of legislation protecting women and life to rape, and I fully support Majority Floor Leader Jim Stamas' decision to maintain professionalism and order on the House floor," GOP Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons, of Alto, said in a statement last week.

Democratic Rep. Barb Byrum, of Onondaga, said she also was barred from speaking last Thursday because she referred to vasectomies during the debate.

"I'm overwhelmed by how much attention we're getting around the world," she told Monday's crowd.

Before the play began, Ensler joined Brown and Byrum on the Capitol steps and called for an apology from the Republicans who barred them from speaking.

"These women stood for our rights," Ensler said to applause. "The vaginas are out. We are here to stay."

The speaking ban lasted only through Thursday, when lawmakers left for a five-week break. But the incident has garnered attention internationally and on social media, where the hashtags (hash)vaginagate and (hash)sayvagina are attracting a flurry of posts.

Susie Duncan, 68, watched the play while holding a placard handed out by the American Civil Liberties Union reading, "Vagina. Can't say it? Don't legislate it."

"I hope this will spur people to go vote," the East Lansing resident said. "We've got to change this."

Brown says it isn't just women who are upset with the House GOP leaders' actions.

"I've heard from a lot of men. It's not just women who are speaking out," she said. Her father and mother attended the play.

The Women Lawyers Association of Michigan — whose 650 members include men — criticized taking away Brown's and Byrum's right to speak. The group said it wasn't taking a position on the bills in question, but on the lawmakers' free speech rights.

"Representatives Brown and Byrum had a right to have their constituents' 150,000 voices recognized on June 14, 2012. They were neither vulgar nor disrespectful," the group wrote in a Monday release. "When the minority is silenced, justice cannot prevail and democracy suffers."

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GOP demands changes that have already taken place but aren't working!

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Austerity Roulette
By Jason Stanford, June 18, 2012

Are Republicans trying to filibuster the economy into a double-dip recession just to prevent a second term for Barack Obama, or do they really believe Greek-style austerity is the way to fix the economy?

The real answer is, of course, “yes.” The modern Republican Party wants nothing more than to defeat Barack Obama, and you don’t even need to take my word for it. According to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-19th Century), “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Even with McConnell’s bald-faced admission of obstruction at all costs, surely only hard-core Democrats, Bill Maher, and Occupy Wall Street campers believe Republicans were capable of such perfidy, right?

Wrong. According to a recent Democratic poll, 49 percent of all registered voters believe the Republican Party is “intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy,” down a tick from when they asked the same question in November.

This doesn’t preclude the possibility that Republicans sincerely believe in austerity, the belief that the way out of a famine is to plant fewer seeds. It’s possible that Senate Republicans—who are effectively controlling our economy by abusing the filibuster—believe that government spending is impeding our recovery from a recession caused by the private sector. As dumb as it sounds, Republicans might really think that the way to fix a jobs crisis is to eliminate government jobs.

If that were true, then Mitt Romney would have said it, which of course he did. Speaking about Obama’s evil Keynesian intentions, Romney said, “He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.” And you know that he meant it, because Romney later went on Fox to deny he meant what he said. In fact, he claimed that to interpret his words literally was “completely absurd.” Romney might have a point about judging him by what he says. The man opens his mouth, and Mitt happens.

Instead, we could judge Romney by what he did in Massachusetts. As Governor, Romney tried to strip firefighters of their collective bargaining rights, putting him to the right of Scott Walker, the union-bashing Governor of Wisconsin.

Or we could listen to Romney’s surrogates. Former Hew Hampshire Gov. John Sununu defended the Republican nominee by saying, “The taxpayers really do want to hear there will be fewer teachers.” And former Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich summed up the sacrifices required by Romney’s education policies with this comforting ditty: “Does that mean there will be fewer teachers? The honest answer is yes,” he told CNN’s John King. So maybe it’s not “completely absurd” to take Romney literally.

And then there’s R. Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia Business School professor and Romney advisor, who didn’t let a little thing like the water’s edge stop him from attacking the President’s call for stimulus spending on jobs. Hubbard wrote in a German newspaper that Romney preferred to focus on “long-term confidence in solid government financing” at the expense of “short-term business promotion”—in other words, more real pain now for the ephemeral gain of confidence later.

The funny thing about Republicans calling for austerity is their obstruction has, in effect, given us austerity. Already 600,000 public sector jobs have evaporated, including thousands of teachers, firefighters, and police officers, as well as garbage collectors, park rangers and other Socialist bureaucrats. As a result, federal spending under Obama is rising at a slower rate than at any point in the last 60 years. We’ve slashed government jobs by the hundreds of thousands. Spending has ground to a halt. And still the economy stalls.

The GOP has a gun to our heads, demanding changes that have already taken place but aren’t working, making it more likely Romney will win and further implement what has already failed. God bless America. Republicans might think that protecting tax cuts for the rich and cutting spending for the rest of us will both help the economy in the long term and hurt Obama in the short term, but Americans are the collateral damage in their game of austerity roulette.
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To all our readers who are FATHERS!

From the Founder

ThurstonBlog was initially, as most blogs, a place for me to put my thoughts and share them with whoever wanted to read them.  In late 2009, The Olympian lost control of their comments feature (something that hasn't changed) and threads began being shut down, primarily by people using the "report" feature.  They determined that if you clicked "report" three times (with three monikers) you would effectively eliminate that comment.  The result was that The Olympian's moderator, Tammy McGee, claimed the only thing she/they could do was shut down threads.  Interestingly, this became a tool for right wing agitators who didn't want discussion of certain subjects or want certain readers to comment.

ThurstonBlog had set idle, so I revived it, and with the help of a few others we turned it into a viable discussion place that The Olympian and right wing detrators can't control.

During the past few years, we've only had to moderate a few comments (mostly during the open posting days).  This goes to show the value of a membership system where people are held accountable for violations, but moderators will allow free speech, because we have no commercial interests, unlike The Olympian.

"Anonymous" has been a great "editor in chief and has contributed heavily to the content.  No one knows more about the value of Anonymous' work than me, during the time that Anonymous needed some respite.  So this brings me to my plea.

We have a great group of members who have contributed in the past.  I'd like to see more voices and a sharing of the workload to keep ThurstonBlog alive.  Our readership is about the same, on average, as it's been since 2009, but it would be great to see more contributions.  I purposefully have limited myself, just to make fools of the assholes who call this "Larry's Blog".  Since the 2009 revival, I never intended to be anything more than one contributor and one of two moderators.  I will stand on this principle indefinitely.

This is not The Olympian, masquerading as community news and comment, all the while exercising personal vindictiveness on some of its readers.  This isn't sondrak.com (or whatever it's called this week) who is pretending to be Michelle Malkin and participating in the "I Suck Your Ass" Blog Awards.  ThurstonBlog is truly a membership media that provides a format for adult discussion.  Make it happen for yourselves.

Ok, I'm going back to sleep.

FLAG DAY, June 14th

And another leaves the GOP

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Why I Gave Up On Being a Republican
By Michael Stafford, June 12, 2012

I’m a life-long Republican. My political affiliation has been woven intrinsically into the very fabric of my being.


When I was young, Ronald Reagan bestrode the world like a colossus. I grew up watching the Cold War end-game play out as Reagan faced down the Soviet Union- which really was evil- and helped break the long night of communist repression in Eastern Europe. He was my hero.

Indeed, my first political act was passionately lobbying my fourth-grade classmates to vote for Reagan over Walter Mondale in a mock election in 1984. As an adult, I continued to be a rock-solid Republican- I helped run my law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society and its Republican club. And after the election of President Obama in 2008, I served as an officer in my state Republican Party. For the next two years, I devoted substantial amounts of my time, my talent, and my treasure to supporting local candidates running for office and to building the Party organization.


Today, however, I am a registered Republican no longer.

I came to the decision to leave the GOP not with a heavy heart, but with a broken one.

I reached this point through a long series of awakenings and realizations- a path marked by literally years of wrestling with, and finally accepting, the political implications of a number of difficult truths. It involved ever-increasing levels of cognitive dissonance, as I tried to square my experiences, concerns, and knowledge, with my continued loyalty to the GOP.

As a local GOP official after President Obama’s election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies.

In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change- a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world- is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans- the notorious birthers- believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them.

Republican economic policies are also indefensible. The GOP constantly claims that its opponents are engaged in “class warfare,” but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose- one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget to see that.

As Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have written, “the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically  extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the  legitimacy of its political opposition.” Its reckless behavior helps drive the political dysfunction crippling our nation.

In the end, it offers a dystopian vision of our future- a harsher, crueler and more merciless America starkly divided between the riders, and the ridden.

From the moment the Tea Party emerged on the scene, I had a premonition that I would eventually have to leave the GOP. But my mind conjured innumerable reasons for delay- for putting off the day of reckoning in the desperate hope that some game-changing miracle would occur, such as a victory by Governor Jon Huntsman in the Republican presidential primary.

But no miracle happened. Among all the difficult truths I’ve had to face, perhaps none has been harder than the realization that I, and those dissidents like me, are unrepresentative outliers far removed from, and largely unable to influence, the main currents of opinion within the GOP.

Ultimately, leaving the GOP was necessary in order to maintain my own integrity. Leaving is also a public act of personal protest. I am under no illusions about its broader significance- it will have no impact on the trajectory of the political narrative in this nation. But that does not make it futile. On the contrary, as the shadows lengthen, such minor individual acts of defiance and dissent are more critical now than ever before.

Perhaps, one day, a reformed and responsible Republican Party will reemerge.

But until then, the GOP and I have reached a parting of the ways. In the poignant words of “Kathleen Mavourneen,” an old Irish ballad: “It may be for years, and it may be forever”
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Why? Because the GOP is vindictive!

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Why Did the Paycheck Fairness Act Get Voted Down?
By Lylah M. Alphonse, June 5, 2012

On the surface, it seems like something on which both Democrats and Republicans could agree: There's a gender gap in the workforce, and it needs to be addressed. Women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn -- 64 cents for African American women and 56 cents for Latinas -- which adds up to a loss of about $431,000 over the course of their professional lives. No one, on either side of the aisle, wants women to be discriminated against in the workplace. 

 And yet, the Paycheck Fairness Act failed in the Senate on Tuesday. The procedural vote was along party lines, with 46 Republicans voting against it, 50 Democrats voting for it, two independent senators joining the Democrats, and Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois not voting at all, The Hill reported. The bill needed 60 votes in order to pass; Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada changed his vote to "no" in order to bring the bill up again later. 

 "It is incredibly disappointing that in this make-or-break moment for the middle class, Senate Republicans put partisan politics ahead of American women and their families," President Barack Obama said in a statement after the vote. "Despite the progress that has been made over the years, women continue to earn substantially less than men for performing the same work. My Administration will continue to fight for a woman's right for equal pay for equal work, as we rebuild our economy so that hard work pays off, responsibility is rewarded, and every American gets a fair shot to succeed." 

 Republicans have pointed out equal pay issues were supposed to have been taken care of with the Lilly Ledbetter Law, which Obama signed in 2009, and argued that Paycheck Fairness Act represented massive government overreach. 

 "Let me be clear, pay discrimination based on gender is unacceptable," Republican Senator Dean Heller of Nevada said Tuesday, before the vote. "Despite the political rhetoric around here, everyone agrees on this fact. The question is, will the Paycheck Fairness Act actually address workplace inequality? And the simple answer is no." 

 Under the Paycheck Fairness Act, businesses would have had to prove that a wage gap was job related, rather than gender based, and women who sued for discrimination could be awarded punitive damages. Businesses also would be prevented from punishing employees who discussed their salaries with their colleagues. Heller has introduced his own bill, the End Pay Discrimination Through Information Act, which, unlike the Paycheck Fairness Act, does not include a provision that would allow the federal government to collect salary information or provide federal grants to help women learn better salary-negotiation skills, The Hill reported. 

 The Obama administration has spent days wooing women before Tuesday's vote, calling the Paycheck Fairness Act "commonsense legislation that strengthens the Equal Pay Act and would give women the tools they need to fight pay discrimination." 

 "I don't have to tell you how much this matters to families across the country," the President said during a conference call on Monday."This is more than just about fairness. Women are the breadwinners for a lot of families and if they're making less than men do for the same work, families are going to have to get by for less money." 

 Democrats expected the bill to fail, so what did Tuesday's vote really mean? Not much. As the Washington Post points out, it was part of an increasingly common strategy: voting on legislation mainly to prove a political point. For Democrats, that means focusing on women's rights and the so-called "war on women"; for Republicans, it's the budget, fiscal responsibility, and the economy. 

 Comments made after the vote seemed to underscore the tactic. 

 "We've got a lot of problems," Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said. "Not enough lawsuits is not a problem." 

 "It is a very sad day here in the United States Senate, but it's a sadder day every day when paycheck day comes and women continue to make less than men," Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland countered. "We're sorry that this vote occurred strictly on party lines."
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Politically independent

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Poll: Political independents largest share of public in 75 years as party polarization grows

By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, June 4

Call it a pox on both the Republican and Democratic houses.

More Americans now call themselves politically independent than at any point in the last 75 years, according to a new poll. The survey also shows that those who do align themselves with a party are more ideological and have become more polarized than at any point in the last 25 years, particularly on issues important in this year’s presidential and congressional campaigns.

Party loyalty, however, only goes so far; neither Republicans nor Democrats say their own party is doing a good job standing up for its traditional positions.

Five months before the November elections, the Pew Research Center poll released Monday sheds light on how the electorate feels about the nation’s two major political parties. And sour seems to be an understatement.

The results indicate a collective thumbs down to both the Democratic and Republican Party, showing that an unprecedented 38 percent of adults rejected both parties and call themselves independents. Only 32 percent now say they are Democrats and 24 percent now call themselves Republicans.

This flight away from the two major political parties began in 2008, a time of intense partisanship as President Barack Obama battled Republican Sen. John McCain for the White House.

Then as now, independent voters are a critical constituency that candidates must win over to prevail in competitive general elections.

Exit polls show these voters have sided with the winning candidate in all but two of the past 10 presidential elections. Independents broke for Obama, 52 percent to 44 percent for McCain four years ago. And recent polling suggests independents are about evenly divided now between Obama and Mitt Romney, his likely Republican rival.

Independent voters also have been on the winning side in congressional contests eight out of nine times since the 1994 election, when Republicans took control of the House for the first time in 40 years.

So both Republicans and Democrats are making serious plays to win them over.

The survey found that the face of the independent voter also is changing, posing challenges for Democrats.

More Hispanic and younger voters — key Democratic voting blocs — say they are politically independent and Republicans are aggressively courting them.

Hispanics who describe themselves as independents have jumped from 31 percent in 2006 to 46 percent now. And nearly half of Americans born since 1981 now say they are independents.

To be sure, 56 percent of Americans still identify themselves as a member of either the Democratic or the Republican parties.

But the parties are pushing out those in the ideological middle.

The vast majority of Republicans, 68 percent, say they are conservative, up from 60 percent in 2000. And the conservative Democrat has become scarce as the share of self-described liberals in the party has grown 10 points since 2000, from 28 percent to 38 percent. As the moderates abandon both parties, the poll finds partisans’ views on the major issues in this year’s campaign have become more deeply polarized since the Pew Center first measured those views in 1987.

The poll measured opinions on 48 different questions about basic political values, and found Democrats and Republicans farther apart than at any point since 1987.

The sharpest differences between partisans fall mostly on the issues at the core of this year’s campaign regarding government’s role and effectiveness: whether regulation helps or hurts business, how involved government should be in people’s lives and whether government programs are effective or wasteful. Sharp differences also centered on the question of how much of a “social safety net” government should provide — whether government should make sure every citizen’s basic needs are met or take care of those in need even if it means more debt.

Shifting opinions on these issues are not limited to core partisans: Independents who lean toward either Republicans or Democrats are also more sharply polarized from each other than they were 25 years ago, particularly on how much government should do and how effective it is.

Obama holds a slim edge over Romney in the poll, 49 percent to 45 percent, among registered voters, and the results suggest the sharpest divides between Romney and Obama supporters are over the role and effectiveness of government.

About one-fourth of voters are “swing voters,” or those who are not firmly committed to a candidate. Ideologically, this group is closer to Romney on the social safety net, but closer to Obama on social issues and questions about labor unions. They fall about evenly between the two on the role of government.

The poll also found a liberal shift on social issues in recent decades, with fewer saying they hold old-fashioned values about family and marriage, or the role of women.

The Pew Research Center 2012 Values Survey was conducted by telephone April 4-15 among a random national sample of 3,008 adults. Interviews were conducted by live interviews and respondents were reached on landline and cellular telephones. The margin of sampling error for results based on all interviews is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

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Congressional dumbness?

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Who’s dumber: Congress or Martin Luther King Jr.? The dumb report on congressional dumbness
By Virginia Heffernan, Thu, May 24, 2012


Are conservatives stupider than liberals?

That’s one way to read the lively parlor-game data released this week by the Sunlight Foundation, a 6-year-old educational concern that attempts to make government more transparent. Sunlight’s report—which assigned grade levels to how members of Congress talk—revealed that the most right-wing of our representatives express themselves, on average, at the lowest grade level in Congress. 

“No abortion,” you can imagine these simple-minded conservatives saying. “It is bad.”

According to the report, Democrats have a more sophisticated way of expressing themselves. Democrats evidently use multi-syllabic words—like “moreover”—and more complex sentence structure than their colleagues on the right. Replete with internal clauses—the ones that can throw off listeners and muddy a point—the rococo stylings of Democrats evidently go hand-in-hand with the promotion of their pet causes, like universal health care and of course their longstanding war on antidisestablishmentarianism.

Republicans dominate the extremes of the list—both the speaker at the highest level and the one at the lowest are members of the GOP. Their average grade level is 10.4; that of Democrats is 10.8. Sunlight has also made a point to say that eloquence, or verbal complexity, anyway, is on the wane among lawmakers. Congress as a whole now apparently speaks like high school sophomores, one grade level lower than it did in 2005.

I like the foundation’s freestyle, groundless and yet stirring account of why this might be so: “Perhaps it reflects lawmakers speaking more in talking points, and increasingly packaging their floor speeches for YouTube. Gone, perhaps, are the golden days when legislators spoke to persuade each other, thoughtfully wrestled with complex policy trade-offs, and regularly quoted Shakespeare.”

If you skim Sunlight’s findings, and bring to them a sporting quotient of party prejudice, you might conclude that Republicans are, say, “idiots” and Democrats are, oh, “showoffs.” To use the pre-K-level idiom preferred by the biased twerp in each of us.

If, however, you listen to a sampler of speeches by various congresspeople at a range of oration grade levels, you might find something completely different. I listened to Daniel Lungren, whose speech at grade 16.01 (first week of summer school after college graduation?) outranks every other congressperson, give a Memorial Day greeting in 2009. (The Sunlight report analyzes each figure’s speeches since 1996.)

Lungren, a Republican from California, sounded low-key and didn’t stutter, but he repeatedly used the euphemism “fallen” instead of “died.” Trying to get choked up and earnest about the Civil War dead—the Civil War “fallen”—he sounded fakey and insincere.

I also listened to John “Mick” Mulvaney, a Republican from South Carolina, who is the low man on the grade-level totem pole. He is said to speak at a seventh-grade level.

Like many English Ph.D.s who have taught writing to undergraduates, I was ready to condescendingly award this kid points for “clarity” and “forthrightness” while privately calling him illiterate. But no such condescension occurred to me once he started to talk. Mulvaney is terrific—a natural orator who toggles nimbly between irony and seriousness, doesn’t miss a note and—unlike most seasoned politicians—never goes on rhetorical autopilot. He stays in the room; his emotions in the moment color his speech; and he responds to his audience.

After thanking the organizers of the June 8, 2011, town hall meeting in Lake Wylie, S.C., Mulvaney—in a deceptively casual and even self-deprecating way—elegantly prevented boredom by setting the stage for a short, engaged talk with a clear timeframe. He sowed anticipation in the audience for a spirited Q&A. He set people thinking about their questions and set up a reward system for attention-paying. And he unobtrusively laid out the topics of his speech. That is rhetoric.

“Basically, it’s about half an hour’s worth of information that we’ll go over. And then at the end I’ll shut up and answer questions for pretty much as long as you all want to sit around. I think when we did this in Rock Hill, we did questions for almost an hour and a half, maybe two hours. And I will take all of the questions. There are folks here who want to talk today about Medicare and Medicaid. There’s folks who want to talk about defense spending. I will answer all the questions that I can possibly answer.”

Mulvaney was an honors scholar at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, he attended Harvard Business School and he got a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is the man who the Sunlight Foundation now says uses the diction and syntax of a seventh-grader? The least evolved speaker in Congress?

Something is flawed here. I’m beginning to think that the Flesch-Kincaid test, which invented the “reads at an nth-grade-level” metric, is a crock. 

Rudolf Flesch was an Austrian who immigrated to the United States, advocated phonics in the teaching of English and published “Why Johnny Can’t Read” in 1955. In the 1970s, he and J. Peter Kincaid, a psychologist and Navy scientist, first created their readability test for the military’s use with technical manuals.

The notoriously opaque U.S. Constitution merits a whopping 17.8 grade level, and the Federalist Papers come in at 17.1. Oh well, sorreeee you fancy founding documents of the Republic!

On the other end of the scale, the Gettysburg Address lands at an 11.2 grade level. “I Have a Dream” gets the grade of a freshman: 9.4. 

Feeling as though I could now face the test myself, I plugged this column into a Flesch-Kincaid readability index calculator. It came in at grade 11—slightly below Lincoln at Gettysburg but safely above Martin Luther King Jr. and “I Have a Dream.”

I’m better than King. Somehow I’m not convinced.

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