"The Koch brothers are willing to take away the only means of transportation that some of America’s poorest have ..."

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Koch-Funded Groups want Congress to Cut All Funding for Walking, Bike, Transit Projects
By Amy Eddings, february 4, 2015

A collection of 50 groups, including the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners, and the Club for Growth, recently sent a letter to Congress calling for the federal government to cut what little funding goes to walking and biking transit projects, StreetsBlog USA (SB) reported.

The groups argued that, instead of raising the gas tax which has not risen to meet inflation rates over the past two decades, these programs should lose the miniscule federal funding as a means to fix the federal transportation budget.

They claim that an increase on the gas tax would result in a “regressive tax hike” on lower-income Americans. Nevermind the fact that many struggling financially rely on walking, biking, or other means of transportation rather than spending money on gas.

President of the League of American Bicyclists said in a statement,

“This scorch-earth proposal would eliminate the ability of local transportation agencies to invest in their own transportation priorities and lock us all into a 1950’s-style highway-and-car-only mentality that flies in the face of common sense – not to mention economics and what the free marking and simple demographics have been telling us for years.

As SB pointed out, federal funding for biking and walking projects actually are incredibly cost efficient, and eliminating them won’t fix the transportation budget. In fact, the savings “wouldn’t even be enough to cover the cost of rebuilding a single interchange in Wisconsin.”

While these GOP-backed groups claim that eliminating these types of projects is actually a move that would save the American taxpayer money, this move is nothing more than a way to make the country that much more dependent on fossil fuels. The Koch brothers are willing to take away the only means of transportation that some of America’s poorest have in efforts to increase their profits.
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"... Rand Paul is the bigger joke this week, by dint of his doltish foray onto Michele Bachmann turf."

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Vaccine politics an uproar of ignorance
By Dick Polman, February 4, 2015

Listening to the attacks on vaccines, I'm reminded of the closing line in "The Great Gatsby": "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

And back we go – wasting our time, yet again, re-debating stuff that is settled science. We have lightweights like Rand Paul claiming he has "heard of" cases where vaccinated kids have "wound up with profound mental disorders." We have a new Senate that can barely rouse itself to acknowledge what virtually all scientists know to be true, that man is hurting the climate.

What's next, a boats-against-the-current debate on whether cigarettes cause cancer?

But what's most pathetic is that some politicians – this week it's Rand Paul and Chris Christie – seem so eager to bow at the altar of ignorance. The '16 GOP primaries loom on the horizon, and some voters are probably jonesing for a candidate who's willing to stick it to the nanny-state scientists. Granted, there are misguided Luddites in the Democratic electorate as well – lots of vaccine–haters live in rich California communities – but no Democratic presidential candidate with even an ounce of a sense would ever think to indulge them.

Maybe Christie's worst line – aside from his insistence that parents should have the "choice" on whether to vaccinate their kids against disease – was this: "Not every vaccine is created equal, and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others." It's hard to know what he was talking about. He seemed to be suggesting that parents should refuse whatever kid vaccines they deem unimportant – like maybe for measles, or diphtheria, or influenza, or the human papillomavirus.

For seemingly endorsing the notion that parents should have the right to defy government mandates and cherry-pick the vaccines of their choosing, Christie got rightly toasted on Twitter – by Republican strategist Rick Wilson: "I'm as libertarian as it comes, but the social contract includes not letting your kids die of preventable diseases or spread them to others....(His) statement is wildly irresponsible for a public figure," and has "disqualified" him as a credible candidate.

But Rand Paul is the bigger joke this week, by dint of his doltish foray onto Michele Bachmann turf.

Perhaps you remember Bachmann's anti-science mishap during a 2011 debate. While railing against Rick Perry's HPV vaccine, she claimed the vaccine causes mental retardation. She said this without a shred of evidence – because there wasn't any. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tallied 35 million doses of the vaccine, yet hadn't found a single case of mental retardation.

Paul's most notorious remark – "I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines" – is in sync with the Bachmann spirit. As one pediatrician wrote the other day, "If (Paul) presented a scientific paper at a conference and expected data of that sort to be taken seriously, he'd be laughed out of the room."

Fortunately for the GOP, saner voices have surfaced. Down in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal said all kids should be vaccinated. And Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon, said on Tuesday: "Although I strongly believe in individual rights and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, I also recognize that public health and public safety are extremely important in our society."

When the likes of Ben Carson – who has likened Obamacare to slavery, who has compared the U.S government to Nazi Germany – comes off as one of the saner voices, you know the GOP has to get itself right with science. And stop boating against the current.
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"By politically authentic, I mean someone who presents him or herself more or less as what they are rather than adopting a carefully crafted campaign persona. And who stays reasonably true to their core beliefs rather than setting sail under a flag of ideological convenience. "

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COMMENTS:
*  In the age of the internet, where every utterance and mistake is potentially crippling fodder for millions, authenticity is in rapid decline. How many authentic human beings are prepared to weather the this type of attention? Not many, I suspect. Most of those in the public eye seem to live in fear of being destroyed. Better for them to keep their guards up, stick to safe answers, and protect their brand.
*  The people elect those who tell them what they *want* to hear; not what they *need* to hear. As long as Americans believe they can have everything and suffer nothing, the liar who tells them it's possible will win; regardless of how genuine the candidate appears. Add to that the well-financed PACs that reinforce the lies and you get the cesspool that is the American Government; floaters and all.
*  The voters generally knock out the "real" candidates in the early primaries. There is nothing the matter with our elections that a THINKING electorate wouldn't cure. Don't vote Party, Single Issue, etc., and watch how quickly things will improve.
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Voters want political candidates to get real
By Scot Lehigh, February 6, 2015

A week after Mitt Romney announced that he wouldn’t run for president again, I’m still bemused by one notion that drove his flirtation with a third campaign: Romney’s team reportedly thought that voters would respond positively if they just got to know the real Mitt.

Mull that for a moment. Although Romney spent the better part of a decade pursuing the presidency, he did so in such a closed and guarded fashion that his own inner circle concluded voters didn’t really know him.

It’s an interesting jumping off point for a contemplation of political authenticity.

But first, a definition. By politically authentic, I mean someone who presents him or herself more or less as what they are rather than adopting a carefully crafted campaign persona. And who stays reasonably true to their core beliefs rather than setting sail under a flag of ideological convenience. Plus two stipulations. True believers usually view their party’s candidates as the very emblem of authenticity, the other party’s as its antithesis. And: Judgments about who is real or genuine obviously involve a good deal of subjectivity.

And yet, some political figures clearly stand out as authentic.

Ronald Reagan was one. Yes, some critics considered him an actor playing the role of a lifetime, but most people felt that what you saw with the Gipper was basically what you got. That sense served him well; voters tended to like him even when they disagreed on issues, something that seems all the more remarkable in these more polarized times.

But authenticity can prove an evanescent asset. Being an earnest, decent, upright Michigander helped Jerry Ford when he took over after the resignation of Richard Nixon, one of the most scheming and contrived figures in modern politics, but it wasn’t enough to carry the day against Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s own authenticity, meanwhile, didn’t wear well over time. Mind you, it wasn’t his personal qualities that doomed his presidency. Inflation, high interest rates, gas prices, and foreign-policy failures sufficed to do that. Yet by the end of his four years in the White House, what initially seemed like honest, earnest goodness had taken on the tiresome tone of eat-your-peas sanctimony.

George H.W. Bush certainly had no truck with authenticity. He underwent public political plastic surgery to remake himself as Reagan’s understudy and heir — and won a term of his own, despite the obvious artificiality of it all. But when poor Bob Dole promised to be “another Ronald Reagan” — and even styled himself something of a supply-sider — he didn’t have similar luck.

The Clintons are too complicated, calculated, and consumed with control to qualify as genuine, though their attempts to feign authenticity can prove diverting. George W. Bush’s frat-boy jocularity seemed real, but not his affected Texas play-to-the-cheap-seats populism.

Barack Obama, contrariwise, does seem authentic, from his high-minded seriousness of purpose to his interiority and disdain for the deal-cutting grubbiness of politics. Ditto John McCain, testiness and all.

No discussion of this topic can avoid two local figures, John Kerry and Romney himself. Both suffered from pronounced authenticity gaps, coming off as elitists clumsily trying to pretend otherwise. They gave us two campaign classics in the category of striking-a-false-note-when-aiming-for-a-common-chord, both centered around hunting.

“Can I get me a hunting license here?” Kerry inquired in an Ohio store in 2004.

“I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter,” Romney claimed in 2007. “Small varmints, if you will.”

What, really, can be said about that? That those remarks themselves don’t already say, that is.

Now, authenticity obviously doesn’t always carry the electoral day. Voters can judge you real but still think you are too conservative or too liberal or too ornery or too odd or too weak for the job.

And yet there are certainly advantages to being true to yourself on the campaign trail.

You won’t seem like a phony.

And if you lose, as most presidential hopefuls do, you won’t be left wondering if it all might have turned out differently if you’d just run as who you are.
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Wouldn't you know-- turnabout is fair play.

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COMMENTS:
*  And all the while, we the people, who pay for all of these clowns to do our business, just keep funding their childish games.
*  Idiots, idiots, and more idiots. Who the hell is running this country. What a bunch of buffoons.
*  Put up a clean bill and it should pass. It's time to can the "poison pills" that assure they are shot down and get something productive done for a change.
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The New Democratic Obstructionists
By Russell Berman, February 3, 2015

Who are the obstructionists now? For nearly five years, Democrats in Congress denounced the GOP as "the party of no" for routinely using the Senate's filibuster rule to block legislation and presidential nominations from passing with a simple majority vote. On Tuesday, it was the Democrats' turn to stand in the way.

All 46 senators in the new minority joined together to oppose a $40 billion House Republican spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security that sought to reverse President Obama's unilateral move to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. The measure received 51 votes, but that was well short of the 60 it needed to be eligible for debate in the Senate. Republicans have vowed to try again, but it's clear they will have to come up with another way to fund the department before a February 27th deadline.

It was an interesting tactical move for Democrats. They could have allowed the bill to pass, since it would have faced a certain veto from President Obama. Harry Reid, the majority-leader-turned-minority-leader, has said he doesn't want to mimic the obstructionism of Republicans that so frustrated him when he ran the Senate. Standing down on the homeland security bill would have been one way of showing that, but Democrats also knew that allowing Republicans to spend a week or two to debate and pass it could waste precious time before the department's funding expires. And keeping the bill mired in the Senate's procedural muck makes life more difficult for Mitch McConnell, the new majority leader, who would relish the chance to blame an Obama veto for the bill's failure rather than arcane voting rules. this way, the burden for finding a workable solution still resides with Republicans.

The homeland security debate has upended the usual dynamic in another way. It's hard to imagine the hawkish GOP of the George W. Bush era demanding conditions on any legislation related to national security. Now it's the Democrats who are accusing Republicans of "playing politics with national security," as both Reid and President Obama put it on Tuesday. Senator Ted Cruz countered that it was "the height of irresponsibility for Senate Democrats to filibuster DHS funding to protect President Obama's unconstitutional amnesty." But Republican leaders knew that the House bill would never be signed into law, and Speaker John Boehner is already preparing to authorize a lawsuit over the president's immigration move, a backup plan of sorts.

Republicans must now figure out how to keep the paychecks flowing for thousands of the nation's frontline security agents. (Most of the department wouldn't shut down if funding lapsed, since so many of its employees are considered essential, but their checks would be delayed.) Democrats are hoping the GOP will simply remove the immigration language altogether, but Republican leaders may try to find a token restriction on the president's policy as a way of saving face. If nothing else, the vote on Tuesday showed that for all of the Democrats' complaints about the GOP's procedural maneuvers when they were in charge, they are plenty willing to try them out now that the roles are reversed.
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"... conservatives in Congress tend not to care about whether a healthcare reform plan actually helps increase access to coverage." Of course they don't care!

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COMMENT:  When the retardican voters get their healthcare pulled by the scotus and the gopers they will all fall in line with faux talking points and say it is Obama's fault. But that's okay because the 'get sick and die quickly' rule will apply to the goper voter also and hopefully they will get sick and die quickly. Thus the gop will have a reduced field of dumb asses to vote for them.
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GOP’s “serious” self-delusion: Why it’s always on cusp of getting real about health reform

Richard Burr & co. unveil "new" Obamacare replacement to prove they're still super serious about healthcare reform

By Simon Maloy, February 5, 2015

Good news, fans of the interminable Obamacare Wars: there’s a new/old Republican “replacement” plan to fight over. As part of the Republican campaign to convince the Supreme Court that they should go ahead and destroy the Affordable Care Act for no good reason, Orrin Hatch, Richard Burr, and Fred Upton have unveiled their own legislative framework for repealing and replacing Obamacare. The Hatch-Burr-Upton plan is an “updated version” of the plan Hatch, Burr, and former Sen. Tom Coburn released last January to great fanfare.

The old plan was widely praised as a “serious” effort that demonstrated conclusively that Republicans have ideas when it comes to healthcare reform and were finally ready to start the conversation about reforming the healthcare system. That conversation didn’t go very far, so they’re putting the plan out again (with a few tweaks) as reminder to the world of how serious and ready they are. Republicans never coalesced around Hatch-Burr-Coburn, and they’re not likely to coalesce around Hatch-Burr-Upton, mainly because the plan commits a number of heresies.

Conservatives are famous for enthusiastically allowing the perfect become the enemy of the slightly-less-than-perfect, and the Hatch-Burr-Upton plan is very far from the mythic conservative ideal. As Paul Waldman ably documents at the Washington Post, the plan is basically a stripped-down version of Obamacare. It retains some of Obamacare’s most popular features – federal subsidies to purchase insurance, allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26, guaranteed coverage for people with preexisting conditions – but tweaks them to make them less effective. The subsidies are less generous, states can opt out of the provision allowing kids to stay on their parents’ plans, and you can’t be discriminated against for a preexisting condition so long as you maintain continuous health coverage. The Hatch-Burr-Upton plan is probably less expensive than the Affordable Care Act, but will almost certainly cover fewer people and have wider cracks for people to fall through.

But conservatives in Congress tend not to care about whether a healthcare reform plan actually helps increase access to coverage. What they mainly care about is a) “does this raise taxes?” and b) “is this at all like Obamacare?” And the Hatch-Burr-Upton plan can’t answer either question with a definitive “no.” The authors of the plan boast that they’re getting rid of all of Obamacare’s punishing tax hikes, and propose doing this instead:

To help lower the cost of health coverage, our proposal takes a measured step to reduce a distortion in the tax code—the unlimited exclusion from a worker’s taxes of employer-provided health coverage. This step is necessary and important because economists across the political spectrum largely agree that the current distortion in the tax code helps to artificially inflate the growth in health care costs.

This is a long-winded way of saying “taxing employer-provided health benefits above a certain level.” They set that level high ($12,000 for individual plans, $30,000 for families), but they’re still exposing previously untaxed benefits to taxation, and the closest the authors come to copping to that fact is when they describe it as “certainly fairer than Obamacare,” referring to the ACA’s so-called “Cadillac tax” on expensive health plans. There’s nothing wrong with this policy per se, but if you’re a conservative who considers capping a tax exclusion to be a “tax hike,” well then you’re probably going to have a problem with this, which is likely why the New York Times described it as “a potentially explosive proposal.”

Just in the last week we’ve seen Republicans inside and outside of Congress affirm their opposition to any sort of tax increase as part of the party’s efforts on healthcare reform. Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a bill instructing committee chairs to come up with health reform provisions that meet certain criteria, one of which is that they may not “increase the tax burden on Americans.” Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, author of his own Obamacare “replacement,” wrote an Op-Ed this week mocking Republicans in Washington for backing an “Obamacare Lite” plan: “This puts Republicans in the positions of being ‘cheap’ Democrats, or Democrat-lite. We’ll raise taxes — but just … less than Obamacare.”

A number of people will argue that Republicans don’t actually have to unite around a plan – they just have to look like they have a plan so the conservatives on the Supreme Court will be incentivized to rule against the government in King v. Burwell and precipitate the ACA’s demise. “The point of the proposal is not for it to be the plan, but for it to be a plan, hopefully one among many,” Peter Suderman writes at Reason. Some conservatives are optimistic that, with the ACA’s future imperiled by King v. Burwell, the GOP will finally get past the infighting and unite around a plan like Hatch-Burr-Upton. “Republicans have been justly criticized for not coalescing around a plan. This may very well be the moment that forces their hand,” Avik Roy writes.

Eh. Perhaps? It’s not like the GOP hasn’t been in this position before, with the Supreme Court threatening to destroy the ACA. And the party hasn’t exactly demonstrated a talent for suppressing internal division in pursuit of shared political gain. But maybe this time will be different. After all, they were “serious” about it last year, so must be even more “serious” about it now.
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My oh my, Pam Roach opened a real can of worms!

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COMMENT:  Pam Roach is, quite simply, a disgrace. Her record is full of these kind of vindictive episodes. Usually it is against fellow legislators and this is the first time she has been so blatantly mercenary, but really this is just more of the same from this shameful "representative of the people."  What she truly represents is the worst in politics: a pay-to-play, votes-for-sale lawmaker. And one with a nasty disposition to boot. Even those in her party know it. Her reelection is south king county's shame.
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A rare outburst of what money really means in politics
A state senator’s pique demonstrates how much money matters in politics — and why dark money is so dangerous.
By Danny Westneat, February 6, 2015

I would like to thank state Sen. Pam Roach for publicly acknowledging what really drives the complex affairs of politics and public policymaking.

Namely money. With a dose of revenge.

Roach, R-Loose Cannon, or, depending on your point of view, R-She-Says-What-Nobody-Else-Will, was chairing a Senate committee Thursday when in a major breach of political protocol she decided to tell everyone what was really going on.

The businesspeople seated in front of her to testify on a bill had contributed money to her opponent in the last election, she announced. This was horrible, and it wouldn’t go unpunished.

“I think it’s terrible, myself. You need to know where your money’s going,” she scolded one of the shellshocked panelists. “Because you know what? I won.”

This was a great moment in government transparency. You never hear politicians speak frankly about money or how it affects them. If you ask who donates to them, or how much, they usually beg off, saying they don’t keep close track. Some even act insulted at the question — a grand here or there couldn’t possibly matter.

But they know exactly who their moneyed friends and enemies are. Roach is volatile, yes. But her outburst was the best argument I’ve seen for why campaign-finance-disclosure laws are so important.

If lawmakers care that much who gave what to whom, and base their public behavior on it, then shouldn’t you know, too?

If private forces are using money to push a public agenda, whatever it is, then you ought to have a right to know that, too. (The backstory here was that the donations were from grocery businesses, and the testimony before Roach was on a grocery-backed bill to regulate the initiative-signature gatherers who gather in front of stores.)

This is why the news was so disturbing last month that the multibillionaire Koch brothers plan to raise nearly $900 million for the next congressional and presidential elections. That’s so much cash it rivals the influence of the two major political parties. But what’s truly toxic is that the donors, and their specific agendas, will be secret.

U.S. Supreme Court rulings such as Citizens United not only allow unlimited spending on elections by private groups but gives them ways to avoid disclosing it. You often won’t know which groups favor which candidates and for what reasons.

Your elected officials will know, though. They will be sitting up there on the dais with thought bubbles about who in the room gave them money, who they may owe favors to and who their financial opponents are.

But unless one of them erupts about it out of pique like Pam Roach (not likely), democracy will go careening along in the dark.

There’s no way to stop the Kochs or environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer from pouring their fortunes into politics. The answer is to shine a light. Instead of no disclosure, in the digital age there ought to be daily reports of who’s backing whom.

And when the rich say nobody needs to know, because their giving doesn’t affect lawmakers much anyway, watch this hearing with Senator Roach. It sure seems to matter to those on the receiving end.

[snipped]
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"That gutting Obamacare over this would 'damage the court’s honor' is not very persuasive. It implies that there’s extant honor for it to lose."

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Supreme Court’s political stench: Why John Roberts will obviously base his Obamacare decision on politics

John Roberts would love to destroy Obamacare, and is just looking for the right political conditions

By Jim Newell, February 6, 2015

There is no serious legal case for the Supreme Court to eliminate subsidies for health plans on federally facilitated health insurance exchanges. This has been written many, many times already, and the New York Times’ Supreme Court columnist Linda Greenhouse makes it in stark detail today. It would go against everything the conservative Supreme Court justices have written before about statutory interpretation.

“To reject the government’s defense of the law,” Greenhouse writes, “the justices would have to suspend their own settled approach to statutory interpretation as well as their often-stated view of how Congress should act toward the states.” She then addresses the conservative justices who would take Obamacare’s soul: “If you do, and you proceed to destroy the Affordable Care Act nonetheless, you will have a great deal of explaining to do — not to me, but to history.”

Well, the conservative justices who comprise a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court probably do not care that much for the warnings of Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times. As she well knows. They have their own history to make, after all, and that is a political one: gutting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act while they have the chance. I would like to believe that they’re thinking about this in anything but political terms, but it’s doubtful, because they’re well-established political hacks. The Democratic and Republican parties understand that they’re political hacks, too, and it makes sense to play to that side of them.

The decision likely comes down to John Roberts, again. Roberts, much to the enmity of his fellow conservative justices, upheld the individual mandate in 2012. Even if he didn’t go full-hack, this was not a neutral, balls-and-strikes reading of the law from our self-styled umpire. It was a careful weighing of political considerations. He decided then that he wouldn’t join Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy in going out of his way to wipe the entire law from the books. That would be too abrupt. So he upheld the individual mandate, but only on the grounds of taxation and not the Commerce Clause, as a way to needle the administration. And he also gutted Medicaid as a sop to conservatives.

He may regret letting the Affordable Care Act live, and now he gets a second lick at the apple. That gutting Obamacare over this would “damage the court’s honor” is not very persuasive. It implies that there’s extant honor for it to lose. That train left the station when the court picked up this stupid case to begin with, if not much earlier.

A top concern for Roberts, then, might be the extent to which a ruling against the government in King v. Burwell would send the country’s healthcare system into chaos. This shouldn’t be a concern for a justice who’s deciding on the merits of a case, but it is. And it’s a political consideration: his court would more easily get away with an inept ruling if he knew there was a safety net. Convincing Roberts that there is no safety net, then, is a priority for the White House, and convincing him that there is – that everything will be hunky-dory if he just goes ahead and ruins Obamacare — is a top goal for the Republicans.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell appeared before the Senate Finance Committee in what turned out to be a testy hearing yesterday. Republican senators repeatedly pressed her for details on what the administration’s backup plan is should the court eliminate subsidies for insurance plans bought on federally facilitated exchanges. Burwell repeatedly dodged, saying that her focus now is meeting targets for the open enrollment period. Sen. John Cornyn went so far as to suggest she was acting in contempt of Congress.

Does the administration have a contingency plan? Have they thought about what they’d do? Well, yeah! And two former Bush HHS officials who spoke with the Hill seem to nail why Burwell and the administration are keeping their plans close to the chest now: because they don’t want to signal “weakness” to John Roberts.

“Of course, they have one, they should all resign if they don’t,” said Tom Scully, an HHS official under former President George W. Bush. “And they certainly should not discuss it either.”

Former HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt, who left office in 2009, agreed. He added that he isn’t surprised that senior officials would rather face a day of bad headlines than signal weakness to the Supreme Court.

“If the court thought they had a plan, they might think, they felt like their case was weak,” Leavitt, who also served as governor of Utah, said in an interview.

The GOP, of course, would love for the administration to signal weakness — all while they, the party that controls both chambers of Congress now, signal strength, comfort and reassurance. That’s why they’re putting effort into developing an “alternative” to Obamacare after all these years. It’s all to show John Roberts: go ahead, guy, we’ll take care of everything else. There’s no way that any of this should have any bearing on what John Roberts will decide, but it’s a reasonable bet that it will, and it makes perfect, cynical sense to appeal to John Roberts this way.
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"... here we have a former two-term state senator not only walking away from Republicans, but doing so in part because his party won’t embrace Medicaid expansion through the ACA."

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COMMENTS:
*  Wow. A Republican who recognizes "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one."  Good for him. It shows that all Republicans are not nut jobs or heartless pawns of the Koch brothers.
*  wow  that's like 5 or 6 republicans, in the last month or so, I've thought had a functioning brain and beating heart
*  I'm just glad that when I wake up in the morning I know I am not doing the bidding of billionaires and corporations... I imagine it must entail some gyrations to train your brain to accept the lies as the truth...
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Why a Mississippi Republican is now a Democrat
By Steve Benen, February 6, 2015

Lately, Republicans leaving their party to become a Democrat is rare. When it happens in the South, it’s even rarer. When it happens in in Mississippi, it’s practically unheard of.

And when it happens because of “Obamacare,” one can hardly believe their eyes. But my colleague Laura Conaway flagged this piece from the Clarion Ledger this week, and the story is absolutely real.

Former Republican state Sen. Tim Johnson on Wednesday announced he’s switching parties and challenging incumbent Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves this year.

But the noted Elvis impersonator said he won’t be appearing as the King on the campaign trail.

According to the local report, Johnson held a press conference at the state Capitol and reportedly told supporters, “Why join the Democratic Party and run for lieutenant governor?  I’ll tell you: We are all Mississippians first. Elected officials should be in the business of helping all Mississippians, not picking out who to hurt.

“The Republican Party leaders’ actions against supporting Medicaid expansion and threatening our local hospitals was the final, deciding factor for me.”

I was tempted to compare this to a blue moon, but c’mon – blue moons are practically common compared to stories like these.

Keep in mind, Mississippi isn’t exactly a competitive battleground for Democrats. The governor’s office and state legislature are controlled by conservative Republicans, and most statewide offices are held by the GOP. There have been a large number of party-switchers over the last couple of decades in Mississippi, but they’ve all moved away from the Dems, not towards the Dems.

The Affordable Care Act, meanwhile, probably isn’t the most popular idea in the Magnolia State.

And yet, here we have a former two-term state senator not only walking away from Republicans, but doing so in part because his party won’t embrace Medicaid expansion through the ACA.

According to the Clarion Ledger, state Democratic Party Chairman Rickey Cole, not surprisingly, welcomed Johnson. Cole added that he believes the GOP has “turned a lot of people off” with “extremist politics.”

Note, Mississippi is one of only three states that will hold statewide elections this year. We’ll see later this year, in other words, whether Johnson’s shift pays off.
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"The Republicans are like Fido when he finally catches the car... Now they don’t have any clue about what to do."

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Democrats Exercise ‘No’ Power in Senate to G.O.P.’s Dismay
By Jeremy W. Peters, February 5, 2015

You could see the mischievous delight in John A. Boehner’s face as soon as he heard the question Thursday.

Did he, the speaker of the House, have any idea how his Republican counterpart in the Senate was going to corral enough Republicans to support a plan that keeps the Department of Homeland Security funded?

“No,” Mr. Boehner said, shrugging his shoulders. Then, he grinned as he contemplated the task that faced Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader. “He’s got a tough job over there. I’ve got a tough job over here. God bless him and good luck.”

Now that they control both houses of Congress, Republicans are beginning to learn the limits of their newfound power. For the third day in a row, Senate Republicans called a vote on a bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded. And for the third time, it failed to clear a Democratic filibuster.

The problems were old and new: political divisions within the party, difficulties over managing the expectations of conservative lawmakers, and the simple arithmetic of getting to the filibuster-proof threshold of 60 votes when there are only 54 Republican senators. The tactics that had served them well when they were in the minority were now being effectively exploited against them.

Democrats were gleeful as, one by one, they flashed thumbs down to the Senate clerks and recorded their no votes.

“The Republicans are like Fido when he finally catches the car,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. “Now they don’t have any clue about what to do. They are realizing that being in the majority is both less fun and more difficult than they thought.”

Republicans were certainly exasperated — though not to the point of wishing they were still in the minority.

But they were discovering that many of the perks of privilege they now enjoy — control of the Senate floor, chairmanships on the standing committees, more spacious quarters for their caucus meetings — are empty unless they can agree among themselves on how to move their agenda forward. They promised voters positive movement when they crushed Democrats in the midterm elections. So far, inertia has prevailed.

They were also coming to another realization about the pitfalls of their power, and it was the same reckoning that Democrats had when they decided to block the Homeland Security bill: Republicans, as the party that controls Congress, would be blamed as the department closed in on the Feb. 27 deadline when it will run out of money.

“I’m hoping public opinion starts to recognize that it’s not Republicans who are objecting or obstructing,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Time out,” Mr. Johnson added. “We wouldn’t even be discussing this if President Obama hadn’t done what he did.”

What the president did — declaring through his powers as the chief executive to make up to five million undocumented immigrants eligible for new legal protections and rights, including work permits — has left Republicans divided over how to fight back.

The party has struggled to come up with an alternative to the current Homeland Security bill, which includes provisions approved by the House that would rescind those new legal protections and subject many people here illegally, including children, to deportation.

Even some Republicans have acknowledged that this legislation will never pass the Senate because members in both parties believe it is too harsh. Some, like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, have tried to come up with a more palatable alternative; so far, Ms. Collins has yet to see a vote on her approach.

But conservative lawmakers and the powerful class of right-leaning news media commentators that can heavily influence public opinion expect Republicans to push Mr. Obama harder — even if he is certain to veto legislation that tries to undermine his immigration policies.

Some Republicans acknowledge that the immigration aspects of the Homeland Security bill will have to be stripped out. The question they cannot resolve is how to get conservative lawmakers to realize that. Some have suggested that the repeated Senate votes that all end the same way, in defeat, will help drive that point home.

Part of the problem that some Senate Republicans find so frustrating is that their colleagues in the House do not always seem to appreciate that a majority in the Senate does not mean that the party controls every outcome.

In fact, many Senate Republicans are learning that lesson.
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Who knew? Faux Newz has limits! LOL

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COMMENTS:
*  Too batshit crazy for Fox? Keep up the good work, Chris and Rand. Row that crazy boat right over the waterfall.
*  Seems like Fox is tossing alot of their guys under the bus.  First they questioned the Constitutionality of having the Israeli prime minister address Congress and now this?  I wonder if they've figured out that catering to the crazies actually spells political death by alienating every Republican-leaning moderate and independent out there or that they fed this beast to the point it's becoming dangerous. 
*  Republicans - the Anti-Hygiene Party, the Party of Disease.  No to vaccinations, yes to measles.  No to washing hands, yes to filthy, filthy freedom.  No to universal health care, to preventive care, to pre-natal care, and yes to pointless, preventable, festering diseases.  No to organic vegetables and bike paths, yes to SUV's, fast food and diabetes.  What new innovative projects will they support to get us more sick?  Nose picking?  Bloodletting?  Ass-eating?  :)
*  Bottom line.  Obama said people should vaccinate so GOP has to say the opposite even though ALL their kids are vaccinated 
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Fox News throws Paul and Christie overboard: On vaccines, GOP nuts go too far even for the propagandists

Paul and Christie thought they were playing from a time-honored playbook with vaccine nonsense. So what changed?

By John Stoehr, February 5, 2015

Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie must feel like they’ve been thrown under the bus. They were just doing what every red-blooded Republican would have done.

In saying parents have the right to choose whether their kids are vaccinated for measles and other preventable illnesses, as Christie did, and in saying state mandated immunizations have been categorically linked to mental illness, as Paul did, the (unofficial) presidential hopefuls were merely following the GOP playbook. They were teaching the controversy.

Teaching the what? It’s easy. They were taking something politically neutral, like vaccinations to stop communicable diseases, and fabricating another side. Then they took the “side” of the “debate” that most reflects the values of voters they are courting.

Another thing they were doing that every Republican does, especially if they are gunning for the White House, was finding the freedom angle to something that’s long been settled politically. That’s easy too. Take any kind of law or policy that impacts personal behavior and suggest, or even claim outright, that such requirements could infringe on individual liberty.

In Christie’s case, he was suggesting parents are oppressed by state laws requiring children to be vaccinated. They need freedom from the regulatory state. In Paul’s case, he was tapping into the vast, murky and truth-defying realm of conspiracy theory. If the government wants you to do something, there must be a host of conspiratorial forces behind it. “The state doesn’t own your children,” Paul said. Conclusion: Freedom equals the absence of government.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, Paul and Christie find themselves on the outside looking in. On Tuesday, Republican House Speaker John Boehner said every child should be vaccinated. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who once contracted polio, said he was grateful for vaccinations. And Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly said, with no small amount of passion, that vaccinations should be federally mandated: “Some things do require Big Brother.”

These same strategies work so very well when the subject of conversation is climate change, gun violence or food stamps. Now Paul and Christie have lost even Fox News.

What happened?

Apologists will say both went too far in their hunger for a voter base and that Republican leadership had to step in and bring them back in line. Right now that’s especially important to party bosses, as they are trying to convince anyone listening that they can govern.

The most likely answer is the simplest.

Unlike an environmental cataclysm, out-of-control firearm distribution and bureaucratized transfer payments, contagious diseases aren’t abstract. More importantly, they are concrete to a majority of white affluent senior-citizen suburbanites who make up the GOP’s base of power.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi accused Paul and Christie of being anti-science and anti-governance. That’s totally true and totally irrelevant. Science and governance never won the presidency for any Republican. Ever. What does matter, however, is what propertied and privileged Republicans say, and what they said was what the hell are you doing!

Such rare disunity presents an opportunity for Democrats to cut into the GOP’s base. Nancy Pelosi already took the first step by appealing to Republicans who are educated, informed and approving of good governance, especially when it comes to issues of public health.

This opportunity is ideological as much as it is tactical. It’s also historical.

Freedom from big government made a kind of sense 35 years ago when taxation was high, inflation was high and the marketplace was highly regulated. So-called Reaganomics was once “voodoo economics,” said George H.W. Bush. Now it’s orthodoxy. Movement conservatism won.

But times change.

We are now at another impasse in which orthodox methods is making matters worse. Yet conservatives still believe the solution is attacking big government. Consider this from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who seriously suggested a way to achieve greater economic growth is to get rid of laws requiring food-service employees to wash after using the restroom.

“I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says we don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,” Tillis said with earnest. “The market will take care of that.”

Some ideologies are historically contingent. They once mattered for reasons peculiar to their time and place. But it’s not enough for national Democrats to permit movement conservatism to rot on the vine. They have to replace it with a credible and productive alternative.

Perhaps more importantly, they have to replace the old meaning of freedom with a new one.

With the worst outbreak of measles in the last 15 years, a disease once thought to have been eradicated by vaccines, it’s hard to imagine a better time to claim a meaning.

Freedom is good governance.
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"Right now, we are living in a country where women who don’t want to be pregnant are being denied the ability to access contraception and abortion while women who do want to be pregnant are fretting about whether carrying to term is financially possible."

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COMMENTS:
*  Voter put these loons in control. VOTERS!  Blame them for this madness.  There are more immigrants that understand Americas government better than a citizen who was born here.  If any citizen of this country that was born here, took the same test required to become a citizen, no one would pass,and thats the truth.  People don't vote in elections and then the minority wins.  I simply can not believe, with all of the poor in this country, that the GOP could not be voted out across the board, IF People VOTED!
*  Republicans pretty much have declared war on everybody who isn't a white  conservative male.
*  Nobody said right-wingers, anti-choice bible thumpers and Republicans had to employ logic or common sense. Their inability, or should I say their penchant, for not being able to connect their policies as causation, is a huge factor in the deterioration of our quality of life.
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GOP’s “family values” freakout: How it declared war on working mothers

Thanks to the GOP's twisted new agenda, having kids is harder than ever before. Here's why

By Katie McDonough, February 5, 2015

Rebecca Traister has a really excellent piece over at the New Republic on how America’s lack of paid family leave hurts working women. She weaves her own experiences as a mother and a journalist into a sweeping analysis of existing policy that dives into the layered, complex ways that the decision to have a child can impact a woman’s career.

Whereas most politicians can sound generic to the point of meaninglessness when discussing the economic challenges women face as they support their families (GOP platitudes about “real-world solutions” for working mothers while blocking basic pro-family policies come to mind), Traister goes deep into the specifics of the struggle. And that struggle includes, but is not limited to: barfing at work and brain-melting fatigue during pregnancy, disclosing (or not disclosing) a pregnancy during a job interview, taking (or not taking) a new job because of the benefits, figuring out how to survive on unpaid leave, wondering how to pay for childcare.

It’s not a neatly summarizable story, so I’d suggest you just go read it in full. But one of the things that struck me while reading it was how our current system, with our inexcusable lack of paid family leave, no paid sick days, no guarantee of affordable childcare and a minimum wage that keeps millions in poverty, manages to punish working women for having children at the same time that our reproductive health policies make it more and more difficult to avoid becoming pregnant or space out pregnancies. Paid leave and universal preschool are essential policies to support women balancing the demands of family and work, but so is a reproductive health agenda that allows women to plan for the families they want.

It is 2015 and we are currently fighting to keep abortion legal and accessible more than 40 years after Roe v. Wade made it a constitutional right. Employers can now deny women insurance coverage for birth control if they claim to object to it on religious grounds, and Republicans are pushing to defund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest reproductive healthcare provider that also offers low- and no-cost birth control. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to ban abortion pre-viability, while House Republicans voted last week to prevent private insurers from covering the procedure. At the state level, conservative lawmakers are passing laws that shutter clinics and force women to wait longer and travel farther to access care.

Taken as a whole, the government is making it really, really hard to avoid becoming pregnant. And if you get pregnant and don’t want to be, the government is making it really, really hard to get an abortion. As Jessica Valenti wrote recently at the Guardian, the last few years of Republican-backed restrictions on abortion and birth control are effectively “trapping women into forced pregnancies.” The barriers women face in controlling their own fertility, particularly low-income women, can’t be separated out from our current debate about paid leave and other policies that support working families. Because for many women, avoiding pregnancy isn’t about avoiding parenthood. It’s delaying having kids or spacing out pregnancies while you finish school, search for a job with benefits, wait for your partner’s promotion to come through or any number of the good reasons women have for wanting and needing reliable access to birth control and abortion.

Financial concerns — the very basics about whether you can afford a child — can factor heavily into the decision to have an abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than 70 percent of women who had an abortion listed money as a reason they decided to terminate. And many women who have abortions are already parents. So the decision isn’t whether to have a child, but whether to have another child.

And this is precisely where issues like wages, pay equity, paid leave and affordable childcare meet the conversation about reproductive freedom. Women account for two-thirds of the low-wage workforce, and yet we don’t have the policies in place to support them. Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour (something that the Republicans in Congress have rejected) would help lift millions of women out of poverty — but even then, just barely. In a city like New York, even a progressive policy like Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposed $13 minimum wage still doesn’t constitute a living wage for single parents. In order for a single mother to support herself and one child, she would need to be earning nearly $25 an hour; for a mother of two, that number jumps to over $30 an hour.

Right now, we are living in a country where women who don’t want to be pregnant are being denied the ability to access contraception and abortion while women who do want to be pregnant are fretting about whether carrying to term is financially possible. Traister’s piece outlines the very real challenges faced by working women who decide to have children (or more children), and she covers a number of policies that could begin to address those problems. But it’s also clear how limited even President Obama and other Democrats’ progressive agenda for working families is when lined up against women’s actual needs, the struggle and expense of raising a family in America. In order to take on these issues, Democrats are going to have to get much more ambitious about the policies they are fighting for, going beyond just paid leave to a more expansive agenda about universal preschool, sick days and other measures that support working families. And by connecting this agenda to robust support for reproductive healthcare, Democrats can help fight to support the families that women already have and ensure that they have full control over if, when and how those families grow over time.
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"Even New Jersey Republicans are starting to wonder whether Governor Christie is treating his day job as an afterthought ..."

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COMMENT:  Wow, a conservative thinking about themselves. Has anyone ever read their hero, Ayn Rand? She says no one should ever help someone else. Only themselves matter.
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Most New Jersey residents think Gov. Christie focused on own ambitions: poll
By Hilary Russ, February 5, 2015

New Jersey residents are becoming increasingly skeptical of the motives of Governor Chris Christie and think he is more focused on his own political future than governing the state, according to a poll on Wednesday.

Two-thirds of adults polled by Monmouth University said Christie put his political ambitions ahead of running New Jersey, up from 56 percent in a poll in September.

Christie, a Republican who is likely to seek his party's 2016 presidential nomination, is scheduled to return on Wednesday morning from a trade mission to London.

It was the latest of many trips overseas and across the United States, which have prompted questions about who has paid for his travel. The state's economy is struggling more than most to recover from the recession.

The poll showed that 65 percent thought his trip to the United Kingdom was designed mainly to boost his presidential prospects.

The trip was described by Christie's administration as a way to promote his state's life sciences industry. He also took in a soccer match and met the prime minister.

A large portion of the shift in thinking about Christie's focus comes from members of his own party. More than half of Republicans told Monmouth pollsters that they think Christie's ambitions are his paramount concern. In September, only a third believed that.

"Even New Jersey Republicans are starting to wonder whether Governor Christie is treating his day job as an afterthought," said Patrick Murray, director of the New Jersey-based Monmouth University Polling Institute, in a statement.

Christie canceled three scheduled press appearances on Tuesday amid a controversy over his comments that parents needed some choice on whether to vaccinate their children.

Monmouth's poll also showed that Democrat Hillary Clinton would handily beat Christie in a presidential election 58 percent to 32 percent among New Jersey voters.

Against former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, another likely 2016 Republican candidate, Christie would fare better at 40 percent versus 36 percent, according to the poll.

The telephone poll of 805 New Jersey adults was conducted from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2. The sample has a margin of error of 3.5 percent.
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"The skirmishes all seemed likely to end in eventual defeat for Republicans ..."

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COMMENT:  Of course the GOP challenges Obama because the GOP has absolutely not ideas worth a #$%$. How the GOP is behaving is sad and pathetic in that they are doing nothing for the people which Obama is at least trying to do.
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Republicans challenge Obama on all fronts
By David Espo and Alan Fram, February 3, 2015

Newly empowered congressional Republicans challenged President Barack Obama at both ends of the Capitol on Tuesday, voting in the House to repeal the health care program he signed into law but faltering in an initial Senate attempt to roll back immigration policies he issued on his own.

There was a third challenge as well, as Republican leaders announced the House would give final approval next week on legislation clearing the way for construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. That would trigger Obama's threatened veto, the first in a new era of divided government.

The skirmishes all seemed likely to end in eventual defeat for Republicans, but served as a potent reminder of their power after Obama challenged them bluntly last month with his State of the Union address and a no-balance budget on Monday calling for higher taxes and new spending. The GOP won control of the Senate in last fall's elections, and has its largest House majority in nearly 70 years.

Badly beaten in last fall's elections, Democrats were defiant.

"They're baying at the moon, something that is not going to work," said the party's leader in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, referring to Republicans as the health care vote neared.

The vote was 239-186 to repeal the health care law known as Obamacare. Similar votes have been held more than 50 times in the four years, but the day gave newcomers to Congress their first opportunity to vote to uproot the health care law they campaigned against last fall.

"Today, I am making good on my commitment to support a full repeal of Obamacare," said Rep. Alex Mooney, a West Virginia Republican who took his seat in Congress last month.

The day's vote was marked by a second difference. The bill included instructions to key committees to begin work on a replacement that the party promised in the 2010 political campaign. Officials described that as a measure of preparation in case the Supreme Court overturns a key portion of the existing program in a ruling expected this June.

Only three Republicans opposed repeal of the program, Reps. Bob Dold of Illinois and first-termers John Katko of New York and Bruce Poliquin of Maine.

Across the Capitol, Democrats blocked debate on legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security and simultaneously overturn presidential executive orders that have spared an estimated four million immigrants in the country illegally from the threat of deportation. The vote was 51-48, nine shy of the 60 needed to begin work on the measure.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said his rank and file would continue to block action on the measure until Republicans agree to strip out the immigration provisions.

Echoed by other Democrats, he said Republicans were "playing politics with national security," citing the execution-by-burning earlier in the day of a Jordanian pilot held hostage by Islamic terrorists in the Middle East as evidence of a threat.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said that by issuing his immigration policy by executive order, Obama had committed a "power grab" that exceeded his authority as president.

"So I'm calling on Democrats to vote with us now to fund the Department of Homeland Security. I'm calling on Democrats to join us and stand up for core democratic principles like the rule of law and separation of powers," he said.

It was an offer they refused, unanimously. A total of 51 Republicans voted to advance the bill, while all 44 Democrats, two independents and two Republicans were opposed. The two GOP opponents included Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, whose state is home to a large Hispanic population, and McConnell, whose vote will permit him to call for a revote in the future.

The Department of Homeland Security will lose a portion of its funding on Feb. 27 unless Congress has acted by then.

Rhetoric aside, the vote appeared to be part of a delicate dance in which the Senate GOP leadership, knowing it lacked the votes to prevail, wanted to demonstrate as much to anti-immigration lawmakers who helped pass the measure through the House last month. The provisions that drew objections from Democrats would roll back administration policies that shield millions of immigrants from the threat of deportation even if they are in the country illegally, and also give protection to younger immigrants brought to the country unlawfully by their parents.

Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said it was up to Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama as well as Democrats to "stand with the American people and to block the president's action." The two Republicans were influential in the House's decision to toughen the immigration provisions of the House bill, and officials said Boehner's remark was a challenge to them to make sure the Senate follows suit.

The speaker did not say what the next step would be if, as expected, the bill was bottled up in the Senate. But Rep. John Carter, R-Texas., said the House may eventually have to pass a second bill that extends funding without immigration-related provisions attached. "Ultimately there may be a clean bill sent," he said.

Republican senators were searching for another way out. Moderate Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said late Tuesday she was working with Cruz and others on alternate legislation funding the Homeland Security Department and rolling back the new administration policies limiting deportations, but keeping in place protections for immigrants brought here as kids. But with Democratic leaders demanding a clean bill, it was not clear Collins' proposal would shift the debate.

The announcement that Congress would soon send Obama legislation to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline meant the House would accept relatively minor changes that the Senate added when it passed the bill. Among them is a non-binding statement that climate change is not a hoax.

Democrats say they have enough votes to sustain a veto to the measure.
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"By holding the vote [on Obamacare], these lawmakers can head back to their districts and tell their constituents that yes, they did everything they could to get rid of the reviled law." How ridiculous can you get?

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Why Republicans Are Voting to Repeal Obamacare—Again
By Russell Berman, February 3, 2015

As if begging for a Groundhog Day joke, House Republicans will vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act again on Tuesday. It'll be the 56th shot they've taken at the law, and just like every other time they've tried to erase President Obama's signature achievement, this attempt is doomed to fail. Republicans have nowhere near the veto-proof majority they'd need to kill Obamacare.

GOP leaders know it, too. They've stopped promising to repeal the law, and Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have taken the extra step of swearing up and down that they won't shut down the government over it again, either.

So why waste everyone's time with another futile repeal vote? The simple answer, as Boehner himself told Fox News's Bret Baier last week, is they're doing it for the freshmen—that is, the 47 House Republicans who just took office a month ago and have never had the high honor and privilege of voting to repeal Obamacare. By holding the vote, these lawmakers can head back to their districts and tell their constituents that yes, they did everything they could to get rid of the reviled law. "We're just getting it out of the way," one Republican aide told the Washington Examiner, reflecting a sentiment probably shared by a party leadership that has seen this game play out several times already.

A more pressing issue for Republicans is whether, at long last, they can coalesce around an Obamacare replacement bill that they've promised for years but have never delivered. Around this time in 2014, then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor made an explicit pledge to conservatives that the House would vote on a GOP healthcare plan by the end of the year. He lost his primary three months later, and that promise was more or less forgotten. Now, the Republican leadership has assigned three committee chairmen, including 2012 vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, with the dual task of writing an Obamacare alternative and forming a contingency plan in case the Supreme Court votes this spring to wipe out insurance subsidies for people who signed up for coverage under the federal exchange. Republicans are praying for such a ruling, but they know they'd face immediate pressure from Democrats to help out several millions Americans who would suddenly be unable to afford their health insurance.

Both challenges could be impossible to overcome, for reasons Philip Klein ably explains at the Examiner. The GOP's lock-step unity in opposing Obamacare over the last four years obscures the party's stark divisions when it comes to healthcare policy. Individual Republicans have unveiled a number of serious proposals for replacing the Affordable Care Act, but the party has simply been unable to agree on key issues: How much should their plan expand coverage? How should they treat employer-based health insurance? Should they keep any of the more popular elements of Obamacare, like the ban on discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions? And as the Supreme Court ruling could demonstrate, the fact that the 2010 law is now fully implemented makes it that much more difficult to scrap it entirely.

As complicated as it is, don't expect any Obamacare replacement bill to come out for several months, if that. As Molly Ball noted last week, the new Republican majority isn't exactly off to a fast start. In the meantime, House leaders have to give their members something to do, and like the Keystone bill last month, repealing the health law is a piece of low-hanging fruit. It may not go much further than the GOP's last four dozen attempts, but it'll give the newbies something to brag about back home, and the leadership can get it out of the way.
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Sensitivity training sessions for GOP candidates? Gee, they must have slept through them! LOL

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Shhhh, Rand Paul: A Guide for Politicians on How Not to Talk to Women
By Charlotte Alter, February 3, 2015

Calm down, let me finish.

Most politicians know by now that making a major gaffe against women can lead to mocking on the feminist blogosphere and alienation of crucial female voters. That’s why the GOP even made a bunch of candidates sit through sensitivity training sessions on how to run against women. But these days, it’s hard to know exactly what might irritate women, so what’s a guy to do?

No, no, shhhh, calm down, gentlemen, no need to get upset: here’s a handy cheat-sheet of 5 things male politicians should never say to women.

1) “Sshhh”: When Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky repeatedly shushed CNBC’s Closing Bell co-anchor Kelly Evans, it came off as obnoxious and condescending. Especially when he paired it with “calm down” and “let me finish” before mansplaining that “your premise and your question is [sic] mistaken.” Women too often feel shut out of public debate, so literally trying to quiet a woman tends to grate.

2) “Attractive”: Here’s a good rule: Only compliment a woman’s appearance if she’s in your family (as in “mom, you look pretty”) or you’re romantically involved. Otherwise, hold your tongue in public, even if you think you’re being nice. When President Obama called Kamala Harris the “best-looking attorney general in the country” it came off as awkward, and when former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin called now-Sen. Joni Ernst “as good looking as Taylor Swift,” it made him look like a little weird.

3) “Ugly as sin”: If calling a woman politician attractive can come off as smarmy, calling her unattractive makes you look like a jerk. Republican New Hampshire lawmaker Steve Vaillancourt called U.S. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster “ugly as sin” in comparison to her opponent, Marilinda Garcia, whom he called “not so attractive as to be intimidating, but truly attractive.” And when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York revealed that male colleagues had called her “porky” and “chubby,” it sparked a near-witch hunt to find the offenders in Congress.

4) Her first name: Using a female candidate’s first name instead of her title in a formal political context can come off as belittling. Just look at when Republican Thom Tillis debated then-Democratic Senator Kay Hagan for her North Carolina Senate seat. He repeatedly called her “Kay,” instead of “Senator,” causing one state reporter to say he “stopped just short of calling her ‘little lady.'”

5) Anything about being “likeable”: Obama’s lame quip that Hillary Clinton was “likeable enough” was another big gaffe from their 2008 face-off. (2016 Republicans, are you taking notes on this?) If you want people to like you, don’t talk about whether they’re likeable.

The bottom line: Treat women like other adult professionals, and you’ll be OK.
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"If you actually want to see progress, be willing to vote for candidates that believe compromise is a good thing."

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The Political Strategy of GOP Gun Bills
By Dominic Dezzutti, February 3, 2015

Colorado Republican lawmakers made national headlines this week as they submitted a total of seven bills that addressed gun control laws passed in 2013.

Five of the bills met quick and predictable party line demises in a House Committee. Two of the bills were approved in a Senate committee, again on a party line vote, but are likely fail in the House.

With five of the seven bills not making it out of committee, it seems clear to me, and everyone else watching, that the goal of these bills had nothing to do with repairing any damage done by the laws passed in 2013. Rather, these bills have a strictly political mission.

This isn’t uncommon, and frankly it’s much more common in our current political environment. Political parties often use the bully pulpit of the legislature to advocate for bills that they know have no chance of passing, but make great fodder on the campaign trail and at fundraisers.

This also can’t come as a shocking revelation to most folks watching the political fanfare this week since Republican lawmakers recited the goal of repealing the 2013 laws throughout the 2014 campaign.

But what does surprise me is that the GOP isn’t really trying to affect some of the gun control laws that could at least be amended if the GOP were willing to actually work across the aisle.

My point is this. If you truly felt a law was onerous, would you work to change the law, at least slightly, or would you feel you made more progress attempting a full repeal and failing miserably?

Perhaps I’m naïve, but with all of the back and forth over the magazine limit law, it seemed that changing the magazine limit from 15 to 20 or 30 was far more likely to pass than a full repeal of the law.

And while it is certainly not new, it still saddens me how effective introducing bills that have no shot of passing is with a party’s base. It goes both ways, Democrats do it too.

But who are the base supporters, and even more interesting, who are the funders who consider this a good investment of campaign funds? Is there actually a valuable satisfaction from tilting at impossible windmills for the right reason, regardless of the result?

As consumers, we Americans rarely use the same strategy when making other investments. When was the last time you invested your hard earned money in a company guaranteed to fail? Our economy would collapse if we used this theory in our business transactions.

Yet, it seems that this investment strategy is not only embraced, but encouraged in politics.

I think this can give us all a good opportunity for a gut check on where we are as voters.

Are we okay with voting for folks who have no intention of making any real progress, but promote the exact issues we want?

Or do we want elected leaders who will slightly move the ball, but only after compromise with the other side?

There is no wrong answer, but if you prefer the former, principle before progress, please do not complain about gridlock because that’s what you prefer to see.

If you actually want to see progress, be willing to vote for candidates that believe compromise is a good thing.

Remember, you can’t have your cake and complain about it too.
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"The bakery is not a religious institution under the law." If it were, wouldn't they have religious services on Sundays and Wednesdays? [chuckle]

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COMMENTS:
*  How is anything being forced on them? They make cakes for a living.
*  OK, 3 things. 1) As a chef and restaurateur for 35 years, I can categorically state that baking a cake does not condone anything other than baking a cake. 2) Where exactly, in the Bible, does one find anything about a wedding cake? 3) The cake has nothing whatsoever to do with the wedding ceremony or the marriage, it's served at the party after the wedding.  So legal issues aside, they were simply being discriminatory for no reason at all (unless, of course, that reason is that they hate gay people).
*  ... Do you serve liars? If you say no, you're among them. Does that mean you support lying? Do you serve people who have cheated on a spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend? You probably have and don't know it. Does that mean you support adultery? Do you serve people who have, somehow, hurt another person with their words and deeds? We all have, so that would be your entire customer base. Does that mean you support inflicting pain on your fellow human being?  If you refused to serve anyone because they were sinners and you didn't want to show that you supported their sins, your business would fail the second it opened. Because there isn't anyone in this world who is so perfect that they wouldn't be turned away.  So what about homosexuality makes it different? Why is it acceptable that you turn them away for their "sin," and not liars? How far are you willing to go to promote Biblical living among your customers and why does it start and end at "homosexuality"?  Something for you to think about.
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Sweet Cakes By Melissa Violated Oregon Law By Turning Away Lesbian Couple, Officials Rule
By Curtis M. Wong, February 3, 2015

The owners of an Oregon bakery who turned away a lesbian couple who sought a wedding cake violated the state's anti-discrimination laws, state officials announced Feb. 2.

The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries ruled that Aaron and Melissa Klein, who own Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, will have to pay the lesbian couple up to $150,000, USA Today is reporting. The final amount is set to be determined at a March 10 hearing, according to the report.

Bureau spokesman Charlie Burr said in a statement cited by Reuters that although Oregon law provides an exemption for religious institutions, it "does not allow private businesses to discriminate based on sexual orientation, just as they cannot legally deny service based on race, sex, age, disability or religion."

He added, "The bakery is not a religious institution under the law."

Attorney Paul Thompson, who is advising the lesbian couple, told OregonLive that he was happy with the ruling, noting, "The entire time, I felt the law was very much on our side because the law is black and white."

Meanwhile, Anna Harmon, the Kleins' lawyer, called the ruling "wrong and dangerous," and added, "Americans should not have to choose between adhering to their faith or closing their business, but that is what this decision means."

In October, the Kleins told The Daily Signal that a large fine from the state would “definitely” be enough to bankrupt the couple and their five children. Meanwhile, footage of Melissa Klein's emotional speech about the case at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. went viral in the blogosphere around the same time.

The Kleins, who shuttered their bakery storefront in September 2013 but still takes orders online, offered the following image on the company's official Facebook page: [image not found]

At the time of the 2013 incident, Aaron Klein argued that he and Melissa were simply living in accordance with their religious beliefs by rejecting the lesbian couple's request.

"I believe that marriage is a religious institution ordained by God," Klein is quoted as saying at the time. "I'd rather have my kids see their dad stand up for what he believes in than to see him bow down because one person complained."

With more U.S. states implementing same-sex marriage legislation, bakeries have become an unlikely battleground for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in recent months.

In January, the owner of a Colorado-based bakery was slapped with a religious discrimination complaint after she refused to bake a cake decorated with anti-gay images and phrases.
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