...................................................................................................................................................................
Joe The Plumber: 'Your Dead Kids Don't Trump My Constitutional Rights' To Have Guns
By Paige Lavender, May 27, 2014
Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, insisted the deaths of innocent people "don't trump" his constitutional rights in an open letter to the families of victims in Friday's shooting rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Wurzelbacher's letter was published on Barbwire Monday, days after one shooting victim's father blamed "craven, irresponsible politicians" and the National Rifle Association for his son's death.
Wurzelbacher said the words of Richard Martinez, whose son Christopher Martinez was a victim in Friday's incident, "will be exploited by gun-grab extremists as are all tragedies involving gun violence and the mentally ill by the anti-Second Amendment Left." The former Congressional candidate told Martinez to "back off."
Wurzelbacher said his letter is directed "only to the families of the gunshot victims in Santa Barbara" and not to the families of three who were stabbed ahead of the shooting spree.
"I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But: As harsh as this sounds -- your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights," Wurzelbacher wrote.
Wurzelbacher acknowledged his comments are "harsh" but claimed pro-gun control activists "don't care about your family or your dead children at all."
"They sound like they do, whereas I sound uncaring and like I say, harsh," Wurzelbacher wrote. "Don’t be fooled – I care about your family and mine. The future of our very liberty lies in the balance of this fight."
Read Wurzelbacher's entire letter here.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
"... remember and shame those who unnecessarily led to the soldiers shedding their blood"
...................................................................................................................................................................
Remember: Politicians Who've Sent Soldiers to Die Unnecessarily and Those Who Opposed Those Wars
By Rob Kall, May 26, 2014
It's time that we revise how we celebrate memorial day.
What about these no-good politicians-- in both parties-- who either were bought by corporations or who didn't have the guts to stand up and say "This is a bad war. This is a bad idea?"
There are too many of these spineless politicians.
There are too many soldiers dead because of them.
There are too many people who keep voting for them.
Let's remember the people who contributed to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of soldiers.
Yes, we should remember the members of the military who nobly sacrificed their lives.
But someone has to start asking why? Someone has to start saying that there are bad causes and wrongheaded politicians and cowardly politicians who just go along. There are corporations which spend millions buying out the votes and souls of politicians. There are religious leaders who sell out their souls and integrity leading their flocks to vote for corporate-bought and paid politicians.
Let's also remember the politicians who lost elections because they stood up for peace, who stood up against foolish wars (they're all foolish. Read David Swanson's books on war, starting with War is A Lie.) Thank you Dennis Kucinich.
Let's remember Phil Donahue and his producer, Jeff Cohen, who stood up against the lies and insanity of the Iraq war, losing their jobs and their show in the process. Thank you Phil and Jeff.
Let's remember Bill Maher whose Politically Incorrect show on ABC was a casualty of him telling the truth about 911, that the terrorists on the planes were not cowards. God bless you Bill. Umm, make that thanks and may the force be with you-- the atheist one.
And let's remember the millions who went out on the streets to march against the Iraq war and all those who stand on street corners once a week or once a month, opposing war. Thanks Quakers, and Veterans Against War, and Bill P., Debra S., Cathy O. and Bill D. and countless more.
Celebrate courage, yes. But not just the courage of soldiers who died on battlefields.
And remember and shame those who unnecessarily led to the soldiers shedding their blood.
Please list other people to thank and others to revile in the comments.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Remember: Politicians Who've Sent Soldiers to Die Unnecessarily and Those Who Opposed Those Wars
By Rob Kall, May 26, 2014
It's time that we revise how we celebrate memorial day.
What about these no-good politicians-- in both parties-- who either were bought by corporations or who didn't have the guts to stand up and say "This is a bad war. This is a bad idea?"
There are too many of these spineless politicians.
There are too many soldiers dead because of them.
There are too many people who keep voting for them.
Let's remember the people who contributed to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of soldiers.
Yes, we should remember the members of the military who nobly sacrificed their lives.
But someone has to start asking why? Someone has to start saying that there are bad causes and wrongheaded politicians and cowardly politicians who just go along. There are corporations which spend millions buying out the votes and souls of politicians. There are religious leaders who sell out their souls and integrity leading their flocks to vote for corporate-bought and paid politicians.
Let's also remember the politicians who lost elections because they stood up for peace, who stood up against foolish wars (they're all foolish. Read David Swanson's books on war, starting with War is A Lie.) Thank you Dennis Kucinich.
Let's remember Phil Donahue and his producer, Jeff Cohen, who stood up against the lies and insanity of the Iraq war, losing their jobs and their show in the process. Thank you Phil and Jeff.
Let's remember Bill Maher whose Politically Incorrect show on ABC was a casualty of him telling the truth about 911, that the terrorists on the planes were not cowards. God bless you Bill. Umm, make that thanks and may the force be with you-- the atheist one.
And let's remember the millions who went out on the streets to march against the Iraq war and all those who stand on street corners once a week or once a month, opposing war. Thanks Quakers, and Veterans Against War, and Bill P., Debra S., Cathy O. and Bill D. and countless more.
Celebrate courage, yes. But not just the courage of soldiers who died on battlefields.
And remember and shame those who unnecessarily led to the soldiers shedding their blood.
Please list other people to thank and others to revile in the comments.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"If successful, this case would give the wealthiest among us even more influence in politics ..."
...................................................................................................................................................................
RNC files lawsuit to raise unlimited cash
By Philip Elliott, May 23, 2014
The Republican National Committee on Friday sued the Federal Election Commission for the ability to raise unlimited cash from individual donors.
The central committee, chairman Reince Priebus and Louisiana Republicans filed a joint lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking for permission to set up an independent account that could raise and spend potentially enormous sums of money to help federal candidates. Under the current rules, the RNC may only accept $32,400 each year from donors, and local-level parties are capped at $10,000.
"The patchwork of limits on political speech undermines the First Amendment and puts high transparency, full-disclosure groups like the RNC on an unequal footing with other political entities," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. "We are asking that political parties be treated equally under the law."
Super PACs, which operate independently of the political parties or the candidates they support, can raise unlimited money from allies, including corporations and unions. The groups technically cannot coordinate their spending and strategy with their favored candidates, but seldom have they pushed a message that runs counter to the campaigns' wishes.
While emphasizing that they do not want to accept money from corporations or unions as super PACs do, RNC officials said they want to have the same abilities to establish independent accounts that can buy ads, send campaign mail and make phone calls.
"In an era when independent-expenditure accounts can solicit unlimited contributions and spend enormous amounts to influence political races, political parties are constitutionally entitled to compete equally with them with their own independent campaign activity," said James Bopp Jr., the lawsuit's lead attorney.
Campaign finance watchdogs warned of serious implications if the court sides with the GOP.
"If the RNC is successful, we will again see party committees brazenly soliciting $1 million contributions from wealthy contributors seeking to directly purchase influence over candidates and officeholders, with the party committees acting as the sales agent," said Lawrence Noble, general counsel to the FEC from 1987 to 2000 and now an adviser at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Friday's challenge was the latest effort from the RNC to whittle away at campaign finance laws, said David Donnelly, executive director of the Public Campaign Action Fund, which backs taxpayer-funded elections
"If successful, this case would give the wealthiest among us even more influence in politics, further drowning out the voices of everyday people who can't write huge checks," Donnelly said.
The RNC has helped to chip away at campaign finance rules in recent years, most recently joining a lawsuit that ended a two-year, $123,200 aggregate limit on donations. Now, donors can give the maximum amount to as many candidates as they want. The caps on how much a donor can give to each candidate, however, remain.
Republican officials emphasized the move was to seek parity with super PACs, which have grown in influence since 2010 and can help a few deep-pocketed donors exercise incredible influence. For instance, billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has spent tens of millions of dollars to help GOP candidates and causes.
"I believe it is my job as the leader of the Republican Party to do everything in my power to help our candidates and get out our message of economic growth and opportunity," Priebus said.
It isn't as though the RNC has been struggling to raise money. Since January 2013, the RNC has raised almost $112 million, the best of any party-controlled committee. Opening the door to megadonors could dramatically increase that amount, if they can be wooed.
If successful in its lawsuit, the RNC plans to establish independent spending accounts for House and Senate candidates this election year, followed in 2016 with a spending account for the Republican presidential nominee, according to the lawsuit.
Unlike some outside groups, money given to the RNC would be subject to the reporting requirements that currently exist. The committee still would file monthly reports detailing where it receives its money and where it spends it.
In addition to the RNC and Priebus, the Republican Party of Louisiana, the Jefferson and Orleans Parish Republican Executive Committees and Louisiana Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere joined the lawsuit.
...................................................................................................................................................................
RNC files lawsuit to raise unlimited cash
By Philip Elliott, May 23, 2014
The Republican National Committee on Friday sued the Federal Election Commission for the ability to raise unlimited cash from individual donors.
The central committee, chairman Reince Priebus and Louisiana Republicans filed a joint lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking for permission to set up an independent account that could raise and spend potentially enormous sums of money to help federal candidates. Under the current rules, the RNC may only accept $32,400 each year from donors, and local-level parties are capped at $10,000.
"The patchwork of limits on political speech undermines the First Amendment and puts high transparency, full-disclosure groups like the RNC on an unequal footing with other political entities," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. "We are asking that political parties be treated equally under the law."
Super PACs, which operate independently of the political parties or the candidates they support, can raise unlimited money from allies, including corporations and unions. The groups technically cannot coordinate their spending and strategy with their favored candidates, but seldom have they pushed a message that runs counter to the campaigns' wishes.
While emphasizing that they do not want to accept money from corporations or unions as super PACs do, RNC officials said they want to have the same abilities to establish independent accounts that can buy ads, send campaign mail and make phone calls.
"In an era when independent-expenditure accounts can solicit unlimited contributions and spend enormous amounts to influence political races, political parties are constitutionally entitled to compete equally with them with their own independent campaign activity," said James Bopp Jr., the lawsuit's lead attorney.
Campaign finance watchdogs warned of serious implications if the court sides with the GOP.
"If the RNC is successful, we will again see party committees brazenly soliciting $1 million contributions from wealthy contributors seeking to directly purchase influence over candidates and officeholders, with the party committees acting as the sales agent," said Lawrence Noble, general counsel to the FEC from 1987 to 2000 and now an adviser at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Friday's challenge was the latest effort from the RNC to whittle away at campaign finance laws, said David Donnelly, executive director of the Public Campaign Action Fund, which backs taxpayer-funded elections
"If successful, this case would give the wealthiest among us even more influence in politics, further drowning out the voices of everyday people who can't write huge checks," Donnelly said.
The RNC has helped to chip away at campaign finance rules in recent years, most recently joining a lawsuit that ended a two-year, $123,200 aggregate limit on donations. Now, donors can give the maximum amount to as many candidates as they want. The caps on how much a donor can give to each candidate, however, remain.
Republican officials emphasized the move was to seek parity with super PACs, which have grown in influence since 2010 and can help a few deep-pocketed donors exercise incredible influence. For instance, billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has spent tens of millions of dollars to help GOP candidates and causes.
"I believe it is my job as the leader of the Republican Party to do everything in my power to help our candidates and get out our message of economic growth and opportunity," Priebus said.
It isn't as though the RNC has been struggling to raise money. Since January 2013, the RNC has raised almost $112 million, the best of any party-controlled committee. Opening the door to megadonors could dramatically increase that amount, if they can be wooed.
If successful in its lawsuit, the RNC plans to establish independent spending accounts for House and Senate candidates this election year, followed in 2016 with a spending account for the Republican presidential nominee, according to the lawsuit.
Unlike some outside groups, money given to the RNC would be subject to the reporting requirements that currently exist. The committee still would file monthly reports detailing where it receives its money and where it spends it.
In addition to the RNC and Priebus, the Republican Party of Louisiana, the Jefferson and Orleans Parish Republican Executive Committees and Louisiana Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere joined the lawsuit.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Democrats are banking on public revulsion" over Republicans' use of the Benghazi tragedy for political and financial gain
...................................................................................................................................................................
GOP seeks election edge with Benghazi, IRS probes
By Charles Babington, May 26, 2014
Republican strategy for the fall elections seemed set: hammer Democrats on the health care law and "jobs, jobs, jobs."
As Democrats show increasing confidence on those fronts, however, House Republicans are gambling that ramping up new inquiries into old controversies involving the Internal Revenue Service and Libya will energize conservative voters without turning off moderates.
Over Democrats' heated objections, House Republicans voted this month to hold an IRS official in contempt for refusing to testify. They also launched a new investigation into the September 2012 terrorist attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
Democrats say the moves reek of political opportunism and desperation.
Criticizing the president's health care law "has run its course," said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and Republicans "have to find something else to talk about." She called the new Benghazi inquiry a "political stunt."
Republicans say their actions are serious and justified, even if they also might be good politics.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the select committee on Benghazi will not be partisan or involve political "sideshows." But he declined to tell Republicans to stop using the Benghazi tragedy to raise campaign money.
Republicans acknowledge the hearings could backfire if their select committee members appear overly zealous.
"There's a real burden on us," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. "We need to not overreach" and simply "figure out what the truth is." He predicted the select committee chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., will "lean over backward to be fair."
Democrats spend little time defending the Obama administration's role in Benghazi or the IRS' actions in scrutinizing conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status. Instead, they cite the multiple hearings and inquiries already conducted into the matters, which were fading from national headlines except on outlets such as Fox News.
An inspector general's report blamed poor management in an IRS office that gave special scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. But it found no evidence of political conspiracy.
The division's director, Lois Lerner, infuriated Republicans a year ago by proclaiming her innocence at a House Oversight Committee hearing and then declining to answer questions, citing her constitutional right against self-incrimination. In a mostly party-line vote, the House voted May 7 to hold Lerner in contempt. It wants a U.S. attorney to take steps to force her to testify.
As for Benghazi, at least half a dozen inquiries have probed the terrorist assault of Sept. 11, 2012, generating more than 25,000 pages of documents. Main questions include: Did the Obama administration do enough to get military relief to those under attack? And did it try to mislead Americans about the attack's origins to protect President Barack Obama's record on terrorism with two months left in his re-election campaign?
Opinions mostly fall along partisan lines, although some Republicans express more outrage than others. House Armed Services Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., said the military did what it reasonably could.
The attack's origins were murky at first. At the time, Egyptians were rioting over an amateur American-made video mocking Islam's prophet Mohammad.
Then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice cited Islamic outrage over the video when she appeared on talk shows the Sunday after the Benghazi attack. Administration officials later said the assault was a calculated terrorist action, not a direct response to the video.
House Republicans have seized on a recently divulged White House "talking points" memo written to help Rice prepare for her TV appearances. The memo said one goal was "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy" by the administration.
Republicans say the White House deliberately hid the memo from investigators.
Many Democrats say congressional Republicans want to injure Hillary Rodham Clinton, a possible 2016 presidential candidate, who was secretary of state during the Benghazi tragedy.
Several GOP political strategists said revived inquiries into Benghazi and the IRS will probably do their party more good than harm, provided their lawmakers appear more professional than partisan.
Undecided voters might not get excited about GOP accusations regarding the IRS and Benghazi, said Dan Schnur, a former Republican consultant who teaches political science at the University of Southern California. But given the administration's questionable behavior in both areas, he said, "They certainly don't line up on the other side."
GOP strategist Terry Holt agrees. The Benghazi assault, he said, was "the phone call Hillary Clinton warned us about in 2008 when she was running against Obama. They both blew it."
Democrats are banking on public revulsion.
"To make use politically and financially of the tragedy of the loss of four great Americans is beneath contempt," said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y.
...................................................................................................................................................................
GOP seeks election edge with Benghazi, IRS probes
By Charles Babington, May 26, 2014
Republican strategy for the fall elections seemed set: hammer Democrats on the health care law and "jobs, jobs, jobs."
As Democrats show increasing confidence on those fronts, however, House Republicans are gambling that ramping up new inquiries into old controversies involving the Internal Revenue Service and Libya will energize conservative voters without turning off moderates.
Over Democrats' heated objections, House Republicans voted this month to hold an IRS official in contempt for refusing to testify. They also launched a new investigation into the September 2012 terrorist attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
Democrats say the moves reek of political opportunism and desperation.
Criticizing the president's health care law "has run its course," said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and Republicans "have to find something else to talk about." She called the new Benghazi inquiry a "political stunt."
Republicans say their actions are serious and justified, even if they also might be good politics.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the select committee on Benghazi will not be partisan or involve political "sideshows." But he declined to tell Republicans to stop using the Benghazi tragedy to raise campaign money.
Republicans acknowledge the hearings could backfire if their select committee members appear overly zealous.
"There's a real burden on us," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. "We need to not overreach" and simply "figure out what the truth is." He predicted the select committee chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., will "lean over backward to be fair."
Democrats spend little time defending the Obama administration's role in Benghazi or the IRS' actions in scrutinizing conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status. Instead, they cite the multiple hearings and inquiries already conducted into the matters, which were fading from national headlines except on outlets such as Fox News.
An inspector general's report blamed poor management in an IRS office that gave special scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. But it found no evidence of political conspiracy.
The division's director, Lois Lerner, infuriated Republicans a year ago by proclaiming her innocence at a House Oversight Committee hearing and then declining to answer questions, citing her constitutional right against self-incrimination. In a mostly party-line vote, the House voted May 7 to hold Lerner in contempt. It wants a U.S. attorney to take steps to force her to testify.
As for Benghazi, at least half a dozen inquiries have probed the terrorist assault of Sept. 11, 2012, generating more than 25,000 pages of documents. Main questions include: Did the Obama administration do enough to get military relief to those under attack? And did it try to mislead Americans about the attack's origins to protect President Barack Obama's record on terrorism with two months left in his re-election campaign?
Opinions mostly fall along partisan lines, although some Republicans express more outrage than others. House Armed Services Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., said the military did what it reasonably could.
The attack's origins were murky at first. At the time, Egyptians were rioting over an amateur American-made video mocking Islam's prophet Mohammad.
Then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice cited Islamic outrage over the video when she appeared on talk shows the Sunday after the Benghazi attack. Administration officials later said the assault was a calculated terrorist action, not a direct response to the video.
House Republicans have seized on a recently divulged White House "talking points" memo written to help Rice prepare for her TV appearances. The memo said one goal was "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy" by the administration.
Republicans say the White House deliberately hid the memo from investigators.
Many Democrats say congressional Republicans want to injure Hillary Rodham Clinton, a possible 2016 presidential candidate, who was secretary of state during the Benghazi tragedy.
Several GOP political strategists said revived inquiries into Benghazi and the IRS will probably do their party more good than harm, provided their lawmakers appear more professional than partisan.
Undecided voters might not get excited about GOP accusations regarding the IRS and Benghazi, said Dan Schnur, a former Republican consultant who teaches political science at the University of Southern California. But given the administration's questionable behavior in both areas, he said, "They certainly don't line up on the other side."
GOP strategist Terry Holt agrees. The Benghazi assault, he said, was "the phone call Hillary Clinton warned us about in 2008 when she was running against Obama. They both blew it."
Democrats are banking on public revulsion.
"To make use politically and financially of the tragedy of the loss of four great Americans is beneath contempt," said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Honor our veterans
...........................................................................................
Sunday, May 25, 2014
A "gift from God"? Ben, your "god" has a funny idea of what constitutes a gift!
...................................................................................................................................................................
Ben Carson Calls Veterans Affairs Scandal A 'Gift From God'
By Igor Bobic, May 24, 2014
Dr. Ben Carson views the scandal over delayed treatments at the Department of Veterans Affairs as a "gift from God" meant to draw attention to what he sees as an incompetent government that cannot manage its citizens' health care.
“I think what’s happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider,” the Fox News contributor said Saturday. “And if we can’t get it right, with the relatively small number of veterans, how in the world with are you going to do it with the entire population?”
Carson argued that the VA scandal is just the latest example of a failed government program, comparing it to Obamacare.
“We need seriousness here rather than just political speak," he said. "‘How can I look better? How can my party look better?’ And I’m saying this to both Democrats and Republicans: Stop, and think about the people.”
Watch the video via Media Matters ...
...................................................................................................................................................................
Ben Carson Calls Veterans Affairs Scandal A 'Gift From God'
By Igor Bobic, May 24, 2014
Dr. Ben Carson views the scandal over delayed treatments at the Department of Veterans Affairs as a "gift from God" meant to draw attention to what he sees as an incompetent government that cannot manage its citizens' health care.
“I think what’s happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider,” the Fox News contributor said Saturday. “And if we can’t get it right, with the relatively small number of veterans, how in the world with are you going to do it with the entire population?”
Carson argued that the VA scandal is just the latest example of a failed government program, comparing it to Obamacare.
“We need seriousness here rather than just political speak," he said. "‘How can I look better? How can my party look better?’ And I’m saying this to both Democrats and Republicans: Stop, and think about the people.”
Watch the video via Media Matters ...
...................................................................................................................................................................
"For a party undergoing an identity crisis [the GOP], a Koch-style makeover may not be such a bad thing."
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Koch brothers can save the Republican Party — by making it more moderate
By Daniel Schulman, May 23, 2014
Recently, no less a Republican Party icon than Karl Rove canonized Charles and David Koch: “Bless them for all they do,” he wrote in Time magazine.
Rove’s blessing is the clearest sign yet that the brothers have been granted admission to the inner sanctum of Republican power. Yet for many years the Kochs were enemies of the GOP, whose political primacy they challenged through the libertarian movement. Writing in 1978 in a magazine he owned called Libertarian Review, Charles Koch called the GOP “the party of ‘business’ in the wors[t] sense” and blasted Republicans for advancing a doomed strategy that “has failed so miserably.”
It seems hard to fathom now, but the Republican establishment once viewed the Kochs as a threat. In the late 1970s, National Review — now a reliable defender of the brothers — devoted a series of articles to eviscerating the libertarian movement and its angel investor, Charles Koch, whom the magazine described as “a man whose wealth and devotion to privacy are straight out of the Howard Hughes legend.”
Now the Koch brothers, thanks to their sprawling political and fundraising network, are the toast of the GOP, while Democrats have taken up the cause of demonizing them, even placing them at the center of their midterm election strategy. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) recently suggested that Senate Republicans should “wear Koch insignias to denote their sponsorship.” The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, meanwhile, has rolled out a Web site proclaiming that the “GOP is addicted to Koch.”
But their fiercest critics on the left may be surprised to learn that the Kochs actually share a host of views with them, particularly on social issues (though emphatically not on economic ones). And now that the brothers wield significant influence within the Republican Party, they have an opportunity to push it closer to the center on issues that have caused members of many key voting blocs — women, Latinos, youth — to shun the GOP.
For a party undergoing an identity crisis, a Koch-style makeover may not be such a bad thing.
The brothers have achieved political notoriety for bankrolling the tea party movement, leading the charge against Obama-care, stoking skepticism about climate change and carpet-bombing the airwaves with ads targeting vulnerable Democratic lawmakers via their advocacy group Americans for Prosperity. But lesser known are the issues on which they are at odds with the conservative mainstream.
The Kochs generally disapprove of foreign military interventions and were no fans of the Iraq war. As a young man, Charles strongly opposed the Vietnam War, even though this position was highly unpopular in his home town of Wichita, headquarters of military contractors such as Beech and Cessna that supplied the war effort. His activism so angered the leadership of the conservative John Birch Society, which his father had played a role in founding and where Charles was a member, that he was forced to part ways with the group in the late 1960s after placing an antiwar ad in the local newspaper.
David has criticized U.S. drug policy and victimless-crime laws. “I have friends who smoke pot. I know many homosexuals. It’s ridiculous to treat them as criminals,” he said in 1980. He supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights — positions that risk his standing in the GOP. Charles seemingly shares these views. “What a spectacle it is for the same people who preach freedom in voluntary economic activities to call for the full force of the law against voluntary sexual or other personal activities!” he wrote in his 1978 jeremiad. “What else can the public conclude but that the free-market rhetoric is a sham — that business only cares about freedom for itself, and doesn’t give a damn about freedom for the individual?”
The Kochs have largely remained quiet on these issues in recent decades, but David made headlines at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, when he told Politico, “I believe in gay marriage.” His remark came just days after the GOP had officially hammered out a platform calling for a federal ban on gay marriage.
The libertarian movement, in which Charles and David Koch were leading figures, attempted to forge an alliance with the political left by highlighting the issues on which they could agree, such as robust civil liberties, a non-interventionist foreign policy, reproductive rights and the elimination of corporate subsides. It sought to demolish “the two-party monopoly,” as David put it when he accepted the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nomination in 1979. But the fractious movement imploded in the wake of the 1980 election, after David and his running mate claimed 1 percent of the popular vote but came under fire from within the libertarian ranks for diluting the movement’s radical agenda on the campaign trail. (They had, for instance, committed the heresy of failing to call for the full eradication of the income tax.)
The Kochs ultimately abandoned the Libertarian Party, though not its core beliefs, once the futility of challenging the two-party system became clear. Thus began their three-decade climb from libertarian gadflies to Republican power brokers. The question now is what they will do with their newly acquired clout within the GOP.
The brothers have focused their advocacy largely on economic issues, such as blocking passage of 2009’s climate bill and pushing for steep decreases in state and federal spending, but there have been subtle signs that they are trying to influence other political battles. Charles dipped a toe into last year’s immigration reform debate when his institute co-sponsored a forum on the subject with BuzzFeed. His organization has lately waded into criminal justice reform, highlighting troubling racial disparities in the system and convening an event that featured a chapter president of the NAACP — an organization that in the past has condemned the political activities of the Koch brothers.
That’s a start, but there are other ways the Kochs could nudge the Republican Party to a more moderate place. The brothers have traditionally avoided bankrolling advocacy on controversial social issues, but they would certainly throw a curveball to their opponents on the left (not to mention their supporters on the right) by actively backing the causes of marriage equality or reproductive rights. They could take a page from hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a member of their donor network, who has emerged as a top backer of same-sex marriage.
The Kochs may fear jeopardizing their newfound power by actively supporting issues that could rile the GOP base. By challenging the Republican Party on some of its most entrenched positions, they would surely risk alienating allies, yet they stand to more than make up for that with new supporters whom the GOP has traditionally turned off or written off. But it all depends on whether Charles and David Koch are willing to take on the Republican Party once again, this time as insiders.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Koch brothers can save the Republican Party — by making it more moderate
By Daniel Schulman, May 23, 2014
Recently, no less a Republican Party icon than Karl Rove canonized Charles and David Koch: “Bless them for all they do,” he wrote in Time magazine.
Rove’s blessing is the clearest sign yet that the brothers have been granted admission to the inner sanctum of Republican power. Yet for many years the Kochs were enemies of the GOP, whose political primacy they challenged through the libertarian movement. Writing in 1978 in a magazine he owned called Libertarian Review, Charles Koch called the GOP “the party of ‘business’ in the wors[t] sense” and blasted Republicans for advancing a doomed strategy that “has failed so miserably.”
It seems hard to fathom now, but the Republican establishment once viewed the Kochs as a threat. In the late 1970s, National Review — now a reliable defender of the brothers — devoted a series of articles to eviscerating the libertarian movement and its angel investor, Charles Koch, whom the magazine described as “a man whose wealth and devotion to privacy are straight out of the Howard Hughes legend.”
Now the Koch brothers, thanks to their sprawling political and fundraising network, are the toast of the GOP, while Democrats have taken up the cause of demonizing them, even placing them at the center of their midterm election strategy. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) recently suggested that Senate Republicans should “wear Koch insignias to denote their sponsorship.” The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, meanwhile, has rolled out a Web site proclaiming that the “GOP is addicted to Koch.”
But their fiercest critics on the left may be surprised to learn that the Kochs actually share a host of views with them, particularly on social issues (though emphatically not on economic ones). And now that the brothers wield significant influence within the Republican Party, they have an opportunity to push it closer to the center on issues that have caused members of many key voting blocs — women, Latinos, youth — to shun the GOP.
For a party undergoing an identity crisis, a Koch-style makeover may not be such a bad thing.
The brothers have achieved political notoriety for bankrolling the tea party movement, leading the charge against Obama-care, stoking skepticism about climate change and carpet-bombing the airwaves with ads targeting vulnerable Democratic lawmakers via their advocacy group Americans for Prosperity. But lesser known are the issues on which they are at odds with the conservative mainstream.
The Kochs generally disapprove of foreign military interventions and were no fans of the Iraq war. As a young man, Charles strongly opposed the Vietnam War, even though this position was highly unpopular in his home town of Wichita, headquarters of military contractors such as Beech and Cessna that supplied the war effort. His activism so angered the leadership of the conservative John Birch Society, which his father had played a role in founding and where Charles was a member, that he was forced to part ways with the group in the late 1960s after placing an antiwar ad in the local newspaper.
David has criticized U.S. drug policy and victimless-crime laws. “I have friends who smoke pot. I know many homosexuals. It’s ridiculous to treat them as criminals,” he said in 1980. He supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights — positions that risk his standing in the GOP. Charles seemingly shares these views. “What a spectacle it is for the same people who preach freedom in voluntary economic activities to call for the full force of the law against voluntary sexual or other personal activities!” he wrote in his 1978 jeremiad. “What else can the public conclude but that the free-market rhetoric is a sham — that business only cares about freedom for itself, and doesn’t give a damn about freedom for the individual?”
The Kochs have largely remained quiet on these issues in recent decades, but David made headlines at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, when he told Politico, “I believe in gay marriage.” His remark came just days after the GOP had officially hammered out a platform calling for a federal ban on gay marriage.
The libertarian movement, in which Charles and David Koch were leading figures, attempted to forge an alliance with the political left by highlighting the issues on which they could agree, such as robust civil liberties, a non-interventionist foreign policy, reproductive rights and the elimination of corporate subsides. It sought to demolish “the two-party monopoly,” as David put it when he accepted the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nomination in 1979. But the fractious movement imploded in the wake of the 1980 election, after David and his running mate claimed 1 percent of the popular vote but came under fire from within the libertarian ranks for diluting the movement’s radical agenda on the campaign trail. (They had, for instance, committed the heresy of failing to call for the full eradication of the income tax.)
The Kochs ultimately abandoned the Libertarian Party, though not its core beliefs, once the futility of challenging the two-party system became clear. Thus began their three-decade climb from libertarian gadflies to Republican power brokers. The question now is what they will do with their newly acquired clout within the GOP.
The brothers have focused their advocacy largely on economic issues, such as blocking passage of 2009’s climate bill and pushing for steep decreases in state and federal spending, but there have been subtle signs that they are trying to influence other political battles. Charles dipped a toe into last year’s immigration reform debate when his institute co-sponsored a forum on the subject with BuzzFeed. His organization has lately waded into criminal justice reform, highlighting troubling racial disparities in the system and convening an event that featured a chapter president of the NAACP — an organization that in the past has condemned the political activities of the Koch brothers.
That’s a start, but there are other ways the Kochs could nudge the Republican Party to a more moderate place. The brothers have traditionally avoided bankrolling advocacy on controversial social issues, but they would certainly throw a curveball to their opponents on the left (not to mention their supporters on the right) by actively backing the causes of marriage equality or reproductive rights. They could take a page from hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a member of their donor network, who has emerged as a top backer of same-sex marriage.
The Kochs may fear jeopardizing their newfound power by actively supporting issues that could rile the GOP base. By challenging the Republican Party on some of its most entrenched positions, they would surely risk alienating allies, yet they stand to more than make up for that with new supporters whom the GOP has traditionally turned off or written off. But it all depends on whether Charles and David Koch are willing to take on the Republican Party once again, this time as insiders.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Our government desperately needs more women in leading roles.Women lead with a more collaborative style ..."
...................................................................................................................................................................
Let’s Help Women Accelerate to Political Leadership
In Congress, women hold fewer than 20 percent of the seats. To encourage more women to run for office, we need to confront the personal, structural AND social barriers standing in the way.
By Marni Allen, Shauna Shames, May 21, 2014
In recent weeks, a vigorous public debate has swirled around the dearth of women in American leadership. One side locates the root of the gender imbalance in women’s internal traits, while the other identifies external structural factors as the true barriers to women’s progress. The question is especially relevant as we approach another election season for our vitriolic, hyper-partisan Congress, where women hold fewer than 20 percent of the seats: Why do so few women run and win? To use an automotive metaphor, is it the driver or is it the road?
Strong empirical evidence backs the “driver” camp. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, in their new book, The Confidence Code, cite numerous studies that point to lack of confidence as the principal factor holding women back from professional leadership positions. “There is a particular crisis for women – a vast confidence gap that separates the sexes,” they say (The Atlantic). When looking explicitly at politics, Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox have found that women are less likely than men to seek elective office. “Men have [political ambition], women don’t.”
But what if self-doubt is just a symptom of a larger problem? Elizabeth Plank (in Policy Mic) focuses her spotlight squarely on the road itself, rather than the woman trying to navigate it. “Gender inequality can’t be reduced to mental health issues,” she writes. She offers a list of structural barriers – such as lack of paid maternity leave, elevation of “male” rather than “female” leadership traits, and racism in the workplace – that challenge women’s progress.
This view puts the blame for women’s low leadership attainment squarely on a system that still harbors biases and double standards. Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and colleagues have found that women are punished more than men (by both male and female bosses) for “aggressive” behavior, like asking for a raise. In political campaigns, women candidates often have to work harder and longer than men to raise the same amount of money. And in a new doctoral dissertation on “rational non-candidates,” Shauna Shames (2014) finds that women as potential candidates perceive higher costs and lower rewards than similarly situated men.
For several years, Political Parity, a Cambridge-based nonpartisan program, has worked to understand and address the persisting gender gap in high-level political candidacies. Why, we wonder, are men still so much more likely than women to declare themselves candidates, especially for high-level offices like House, Senate, and Governor?
Our new research report, “Shifting Gears,” concludes that the confidence-versus-structure debate sets up a false choice. Both the driver and the road matter. In particular, the driver’s perceptions of whether she will face smooth road conditions or endless detours and delays influence not only her route but also her destination.
Drawing from surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 236 women in politics, we found that women contemplating a run for office are strongly affected by the costs and benefits they anticipate from a candidacy. Surely women’s documented lower confidence matters when they’re deciding whether or not to run for office – but so too do the structural and social realities that shape their choices.
Political parties still provide women far less organized support than men, making it tougher to raise enough money to compete. Women who run have to navigate a media minefield to present themselves as calm, competent, and credentialed, often facing scrutiny about personal as well as professional choices. Those who are mothers worry about their children’s privacy, while unmarried women spoke about difficulties dating “in a fishbowl.” It adds up to a highly unwelcoming environment that reasonably makes even the most qualified and motivated women think twice.
Getting more women on the road to Congress requires strong, consistent support. More mentors are needed. Motherhood should be celebrated as a motivator for public service, driving women candidates to improve policies for the next generation. Candidate training programs must focus on the specific challenges of high-level races, especially preparing women for fundraising and helping them see politics as useful in solving problems.
Our government desperately needs more women in leading roles.Women lead with a more collaborative style; it was no coincidence that women senators were at the forefront of the group that broke through the government shutdown stalemate last fall. But until we recognize and confront the complex maze of barriers women face when seeking public office – personal, structural, and social – we’ll continue to be stuck in neutral.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Let’s Help Women Accelerate to Political Leadership
In Congress, women hold fewer than 20 percent of the seats. To encourage more women to run for office, we need to confront the personal, structural AND social barriers standing in the way.
By Marni Allen, Shauna Shames, May 21, 2014
In recent weeks, a vigorous public debate has swirled around the dearth of women in American leadership. One side locates the root of the gender imbalance in women’s internal traits, while the other identifies external structural factors as the true barriers to women’s progress. The question is especially relevant as we approach another election season for our vitriolic, hyper-partisan Congress, where women hold fewer than 20 percent of the seats: Why do so few women run and win? To use an automotive metaphor, is it the driver or is it the road?
Strong empirical evidence backs the “driver” camp. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, in their new book, The Confidence Code, cite numerous studies that point to lack of confidence as the principal factor holding women back from professional leadership positions. “There is a particular crisis for women – a vast confidence gap that separates the sexes,” they say (The Atlantic). When looking explicitly at politics, Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox have found that women are less likely than men to seek elective office. “Men have [political ambition], women don’t.”
But what if self-doubt is just a symptom of a larger problem? Elizabeth Plank (in Policy Mic) focuses her spotlight squarely on the road itself, rather than the woman trying to navigate it. “Gender inequality can’t be reduced to mental health issues,” she writes. She offers a list of structural barriers – such as lack of paid maternity leave, elevation of “male” rather than “female” leadership traits, and racism in the workplace – that challenge women’s progress.
This view puts the blame for women’s low leadership attainment squarely on a system that still harbors biases and double standards. Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and colleagues have found that women are punished more than men (by both male and female bosses) for “aggressive” behavior, like asking for a raise. In political campaigns, women candidates often have to work harder and longer than men to raise the same amount of money. And in a new doctoral dissertation on “rational non-candidates,” Shauna Shames (2014) finds that women as potential candidates perceive higher costs and lower rewards than similarly situated men.
For several years, Political Parity, a Cambridge-based nonpartisan program, has worked to understand and address the persisting gender gap in high-level political candidacies. Why, we wonder, are men still so much more likely than women to declare themselves candidates, especially for high-level offices like House, Senate, and Governor?
Our new research report, “Shifting Gears,” concludes that the confidence-versus-structure debate sets up a false choice. Both the driver and the road matter. In particular, the driver’s perceptions of whether she will face smooth road conditions or endless detours and delays influence not only her route but also her destination.
Drawing from surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 236 women in politics, we found that women contemplating a run for office are strongly affected by the costs and benefits they anticipate from a candidacy. Surely women’s documented lower confidence matters when they’re deciding whether or not to run for office – but so too do the structural and social realities that shape their choices.
Political parties still provide women far less organized support than men, making it tougher to raise enough money to compete. Women who run have to navigate a media minefield to present themselves as calm, competent, and credentialed, often facing scrutiny about personal as well as professional choices. Those who are mothers worry about their children’s privacy, while unmarried women spoke about difficulties dating “in a fishbowl.” It adds up to a highly unwelcoming environment that reasonably makes even the most qualified and motivated women think twice.
Getting more women on the road to Congress requires strong, consistent support. More mentors are needed. Motherhood should be celebrated as a motivator for public service, driving women candidates to improve policies for the next generation. Candidate training programs must focus on the specific challenges of high-level races, especially preparing women for fundraising and helping them see politics as useful in solving problems.
Our government desperately needs more women in leading roles.Women lead with a more collaborative style; it was no coincidence that women senators were at the forefront of the group that broke through the government shutdown stalemate last fall. But until we recognize and confront the complex maze of barriers women face when seeking public office – personal, structural, and social – we’ll continue to be stuck in neutral.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Hmmm, I'm not sure much would change.... could be that the system would just become even more cumbersome
...................................................................................................................................................................
What Would Change If Politicians Wrote Laws Based on Internet Polls?
By Robert Sorokanich, May 24, 2014
A new political party, designed by software devs and engineers, is joining the race in California. If elected, PlaceAVote's Congressional candidates vow to decide on every bill based on the majority vote of their constituents—as measured via online polling. Could that sort of direct, digital democracy improve how Congress works? Would it make government more dysfunctional? (Is the latter even possible?)
On the one hand, there's something gratifyingly simple (if perhaps a bit naive) about the idea that an elected official would, I dunno, vote based on the stated desires of his or her constituents. It would provide a much more finely-honed form of representation than the current "they voted for me, which means they trust me to do what I want" system.
On the other hand, though, just because something is popular doesn't mean it's smart. (Insert tired, overplayed joke about Justin Bieber here. It's the weekend and I can't think of anything wittier. Sue me.)
And in particular, there's something unsettling about handing the governmental steering wheel over to the nebulous and unsavory group known as The Internet. This is, after all, the same Internet that gave us Reddit. And 4chan. Would you want to live in a world governed by 4chan?
So what do you think? Would you vote for a candidate whose entire mode of governing boils down to "let the internet decide"? Or would that just bring our already molasses-slow system grinding to a complete halt? Sound off in our comment section—which, by the way, is more of a constitutional monarchy than anything. [PlaceAVote via Engadget]
...................................................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................................................
PlaceAVote wants to replace politicians with internet polls
By Terrence O'Brien, May 24, 2014
Congress' approval rating sits as low as 10 percent, depending on which poll you trust. So a bunch of engineers and developers came up with a uniquely Silicon Valley solution -- replace politicians with software. We're not talking about some advanced AI, though, so don't start worrying about Skynet just yet. PlaceAVote is a simply a digital polling platform, which means there will still need to be a human being on the floor casting a vote. The first two candidates who pledge to simply vote whatever way the internet tells them are already on the ballot in California, and 20 more are supposedly on tap for 2016.
If any of those candidates win they'd then have to find a way to get a private key code out to each and every one of their constituents. That key along with a unique identifier, such as social security number would be needed to log into the PlaceAVote system, which makes security one of its biggest priorities. Of course, no system is 100 percent secure and PlaceAVote would certainly face its fair share of challenges from hackers and those looking to commit voter fraud it it enjoys even a modicum of success. The entire premise requires voters have regular access to a computer for this attempt to shoehorn direct democracy into a representative system to work, which will definitely be problematic is [i.e. "in"] poorer districts around the country. And while well intentioned there's a pretty good case against direct democracy in general; just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good (see Modern Family). In many ways having an elected representative is saving us from ourselves.
...................................................................................................................................................................
What Would Change If Politicians Wrote Laws Based on Internet Polls?
By Robert Sorokanich, May 24, 2014
A new political party, designed by software devs and engineers, is joining the race in California. If elected, PlaceAVote's Congressional candidates vow to decide on every bill based on the majority vote of their constituents—as measured via online polling. Could that sort of direct, digital democracy improve how Congress works? Would it make government more dysfunctional? (Is the latter even possible?)
On the one hand, there's something gratifyingly simple (if perhaps a bit naive) about the idea that an elected official would, I dunno, vote based on the stated desires of his or her constituents. It would provide a much more finely-honed form of representation than the current "they voted for me, which means they trust me to do what I want" system.
On the other hand, though, just because something is popular doesn't mean it's smart. (Insert tired, overplayed joke about Justin Bieber here. It's the weekend and I can't think of anything wittier. Sue me.)
And in particular, there's something unsettling about handing the governmental steering wheel over to the nebulous and unsavory group known as The Internet. This is, after all, the same Internet that gave us Reddit. And 4chan. Would you want to live in a world governed by 4chan?
So what do you think? Would you vote for a candidate whose entire mode of governing boils down to "let the internet decide"? Or would that just bring our already molasses-slow system grinding to a complete halt? Sound off in our comment section—which, by the way, is more of a constitutional monarchy than anything. [PlaceAVote via Engadget]
...................................................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................................................
PlaceAVote wants to replace politicians with internet polls
By Terrence O'Brien, May 24, 2014
Congress' approval rating sits as low as 10 percent, depending on which poll you trust. So a bunch of engineers and developers came up with a uniquely Silicon Valley solution -- replace politicians with software. We're not talking about some advanced AI, though, so don't start worrying about Skynet just yet. PlaceAVote is a simply a digital polling platform, which means there will still need to be a human being on the floor casting a vote. The first two candidates who pledge to simply vote whatever way the internet tells them are already on the ballot in California, and 20 more are supposedly on tap for 2016.
If any of those candidates win they'd then have to find a way to get a private key code out to each and every one of their constituents. That key along with a unique identifier, such as social security number would be needed to log into the PlaceAVote system, which makes security one of its biggest priorities. Of course, no system is 100 percent secure and PlaceAVote would certainly face its fair share of challenges from hackers and those looking to commit voter fraud it it enjoys even a modicum of success. The entire premise requires voters have regular access to a computer for this attempt to shoehorn direct democracy into a representative system to work, which will definitely be problematic is [i.e. "in"] poorer districts around the country. And while well intentioned there's a pretty good case against direct democracy in general; just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good (see Modern Family). In many ways having an elected representative is saving us from ourselves.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Before they open their yaps, Republicans must establish "... a track record of support for our veterans that matches their righteous indignation"
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Republicans like creating veterans, respecting and taking care of them for their sacrifice not so much" -- Comment on article
...................................................................................................................................................................
The GOP and veterans: It’s complicated
By Jonathan Capehart, May 21, 2014
In the very real scandal engulfing the department of veterans affairs and the White House, the moralizing and scapegoating by the Republican House majority is too much to take. “It is time for our president to come forward and take responsibility for this and do the right thing by these veterans and begin to show that he actually cares about getting it straight,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) yesterday.
Yes, President Obama and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki have a lot to answer for since the buck ultimately stops with them. And the president acknowledged his responsibility during his remarks from the press briefing room today. Yet, Cantor’s comments are galling when you consider what Congress has and hasn’t done for veterans.
Just last month, the Obama administration expressed concern about “the funding level for VA Medical Care” in a military construction and veterans affairs bill in the House. It was $386 million below what the president asked for. “This funding level could delay the timely delivery of health care services to veterans and impede the Administration’s efforts to end veterans’ homelessness in 2015,” the statement of administration policy from the Office of Management and Budget said. The measure passed with overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats in the House. Now the action moves to the Senate.
In February, Senate Republicans actively thwarted the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014. The $21 billion legislation was supposed to improve health, education and other benefits for veterans. Instead, it failed to get the 60 votes needed to stop a threatened filibuster. That same month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimated that “close to 200,000 veterans are among the 2 million unemployed workers who've lost access to federal jobless benefits since Congress allowed Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) to expire at the end of last year.”
You may recall that last November I got rather salty with congressional Republicans because for all their professed love of veterans, they let the food-stamps program take a $5 billion hit. According to CBPP, “in any given month, a total of 900,000 veterans nationwide lived in households that relied” on the federal assistance program. And then there was the latest iteration of the “Path to Prosperity” from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). As CBPP noted back in April, Ryan’s budget would take a meat axe to the low-income discretionary and entitlement programs that many veterans rely on once they return home or are out of the service.
We absolutely should be angry about the horrific treatment of veterans in hospitals that are supposed to give them optimal care. Those folks responsible for violating that sacred trust must be held accountable. And everything must be done to ensure that systemic failures that allowed this to happen are fixed quickly and permanently. But, first, Republicans must cease their empty partisan thundering and “we care more than you do” lectures until they have a track record of support for our veterans that matches their righteous indignation.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Republicans like creating veterans, respecting and taking care of them for their sacrifice not so much" -- Comment on article
...................................................................................................................................................................
The GOP and veterans: It’s complicated
By Jonathan Capehart, May 21, 2014
In the very real scandal engulfing the department of veterans affairs and the White House, the moralizing and scapegoating by the Republican House majority is too much to take. “It is time for our president to come forward and take responsibility for this and do the right thing by these veterans and begin to show that he actually cares about getting it straight,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) yesterday.
Yes, President Obama and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki have a lot to answer for since the buck ultimately stops with them. And the president acknowledged his responsibility during his remarks from the press briefing room today. Yet, Cantor’s comments are galling when you consider what Congress has and hasn’t done for veterans.
Just last month, the Obama administration expressed concern about “the funding level for VA Medical Care” in a military construction and veterans affairs bill in the House. It was $386 million below what the president asked for. “This funding level could delay the timely delivery of health care services to veterans and impede the Administration’s efforts to end veterans’ homelessness in 2015,” the statement of administration policy from the Office of Management and Budget said. The measure passed with overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats in the House. Now the action moves to the Senate.
In February, Senate Republicans actively thwarted the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014. The $21 billion legislation was supposed to improve health, education and other benefits for veterans. Instead, it failed to get the 60 votes needed to stop a threatened filibuster. That same month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimated that “close to 200,000 veterans are among the 2 million unemployed workers who've lost access to federal jobless benefits since Congress allowed Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) to expire at the end of last year.”
You may recall that last November I got rather salty with congressional Republicans because for all their professed love of veterans, they let the food-stamps program take a $5 billion hit. According to CBPP, “in any given month, a total of 900,000 veterans nationwide lived in households that relied” on the federal assistance program. And then there was the latest iteration of the “Path to Prosperity” from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). As CBPP noted back in April, Ryan’s budget would take a meat axe to the low-income discretionary and entitlement programs that many veterans rely on once they return home or are out of the service.
We absolutely should be angry about the horrific treatment of veterans in hospitals that are supposed to give them optimal care. Those folks responsible for violating that sacred trust must be held accountable. And everything must be done to ensure that systemic failures that allowed this to happen are fixed quickly and permanently. But, first, Republicans must cease their empty partisan thundering and “we care more than you do” lectures until they have a track record of support for our veterans that matches their righteous indignation.
...................................................................................................................................................................
We ALL contribute to the Koch brothers' fortune whether we intend to or not!
...................................................................................................................................................................
Koch brothers mania arrives at the Capitol
By Dana Milbank, May 22, 2014
"Brawny man" talks to Sen. Harry Reid (Video)
Kochmania came to the Capitol this week, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) screened clips in the Capitol Visitor Center of a new film by liberal documentarian Robert Greenwald, “Koch Brothers Exposed.”
The film, the screening of which Republicans claimed violated congressional regulations, purported to expose the “Kochtopus” of the conservative industrialists’ political spending. But while it’s easy enough to complain about the brothers’ political spending, it’s quite another thing to do something about the source of the Kochtopus’s contributions: the business empire that generated the Koch brothers’ fortune of $100 billion.
Some groups have proposed boycotts of Koch brothers’ products, but such efforts don’t seem to grasp how deeply the Koch tentacles extend into Americans’ daily lives – in ways the average consumer can’t possibly comprehend. Were they a single person, David and Charles would pass Bill Gates as the richest man in the world. Their holdings include oil, chemicals, manufacturing, minerals, fertilizers and a range of consumer products. Lycra in your bathing suit, undergarments or exercise clothing? Koch brothers. CoolMax fabric wicking sweat from your skin? Kochs. Stainmaster cleaning your carpet? Kochs again. Dacron fabric, Vanity Fair napkins, Angel Soft or Quilted Northern toilet paper, Brawny or Sparkle paper towels, Dixie cups? Koch, Koch, Koch, Koch, Koch, Koch and Koch.
To test the depths of Americans’ Koch dependency, I went to the screening with a shopping bag full of Koch products. I offered them as free samples after the screening of “Koch Brothers Exposed.” Even after hearing all of Greenwald’s allegations about the Koch brothers’ evils, the attendees made off with every last roll of Angel Soft and Brawny, and even took the Lycra pantyhose and the Dixie cups.
Even those who lament what the Kochs do with their money are contributors to the brothers’ fortune.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Koch brothers mania arrives at the Capitol
By Dana Milbank, May 22, 2014
"Brawny man" talks to Sen. Harry Reid (Video)
Kochmania came to the Capitol this week, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) screened clips in the Capitol Visitor Center of a new film by liberal documentarian Robert Greenwald, “Koch Brothers Exposed.”
The film, the screening of which Republicans claimed violated congressional regulations, purported to expose the “Kochtopus” of the conservative industrialists’ political spending. But while it’s easy enough to complain about the brothers’ political spending, it’s quite another thing to do something about the source of the Kochtopus’s contributions: the business empire that generated the Koch brothers’ fortune of $100 billion.
Some groups have proposed boycotts of Koch brothers’ products, but such efforts don’t seem to grasp how deeply the Koch tentacles extend into Americans’ daily lives – in ways the average consumer can’t possibly comprehend. Were they a single person, David and Charles would pass Bill Gates as the richest man in the world. Their holdings include oil, chemicals, manufacturing, minerals, fertilizers and a range of consumer products. Lycra in your bathing suit, undergarments or exercise clothing? Koch brothers. CoolMax fabric wicking sweat from your skin? Kochs. Stainmaster cleaning your carpet? Kochs again. Dacron fabric, Vanity Fair napkins, Angel Soft or Quilted Northern toilet paper, Brawny or Sparkle paper towels, Dixie cups? Koch, Koch, Koch, Koch, Koch, Koch and Koch.
To test the depths of Americans’ Koch dependency, I went to the screening with a shopping bag full of Koch products. I offered them as free samples after the screening of “Koch Brothers Exposed.” Even after hearing all of Greenwald’s allegations about the Koch brothers’ evils, the attendees made off with every last roll of Angel Soft and Brawny, and even took the Lycra pantyhose and the Dixie cups.
Even those who lament what the Kochs do with their money are contributors to the brothers’ fortune.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Shame on Karl Rove!
...................................................................................................................................................................
Calling out Rove proper
May 19, 2014
One of the slimier tricks in politics is to make a recklessly non-factual charge just to get it into the political bloodstream. Once there, like an antibiotic-resistant bug, no amount of truth can ever kill it.
Sometimes you wonder whether the people making a charge don't really know what they're talking about, such as when Sarah Palin took to Facebook to claim there were "death panels" in Obamacare.
But nobody has to ask that about Karl Rove. The whip-smart Republican operative has a reputation for picking his words carefully and understanding how they'll resonate. So when Rove suggested at an off-the-record conference last week that Hillary Clinton might have a brain problem from a concussion she got in December 2012, he had to know how that might play out.
"Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that," he said, according to the New York Post.
It was bad enough that Rove lengthened Clinton's hospital stay by a factor of 10 (it was three days, after she fell and hit her head while weakened by a severe stomach bug), or that his "traumatic brain injury" wording lumped Clinton in with victims of IEDs and post-traumatic stress disorder. But the Post turned Rove's quote into this headline: "Karl Rove: Hillary may have brain damage."
After the story went viral, Rove said Clinton "doesn't have brain damage" and went on to say that all he had meant to do was point out that if Clinton runs for president, as she's widely expected to do, she'll be asked detailed questions about her health, as any candidate would be. Well, how helpful.
By Wednesday, the furor was bad enough that former President Bill Clinton weighed in to reassure everyone that his wife was fine: "Look, she works out every week, she is strong, she's doing great. As far as I can tell, she's in better shape than I am. She certainly seems to have more stamina now."
Politics ain't beanbag, and this is hardly the worst a political operative has ever done. Hillary Clinton can expect more such attacks, on Benghazi and other issues, in an effort to dissuade her from running for president, or soften her up if she does.
Rove's comments would be an occasion for the usual lamentations about why Americans have so little faith in the process, except for gratifying pushback from two high-profile Republicans.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said on Facebook that he was "deeply offended" by the comments and that "kind of personal charge is exactly (what's) wrong with (American) politics." He called on Rove to apologize.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said he had no doubt Clinton was qualified to run if she chose to. "I'm not a doctor, (but) as far as I can tell based on the way she engages, she's very alert and very feisty and keeps a busy schedule, so I have no reason to believe that there's anything in her background that will disqualify her," Graham told Politico.
Pundits can criticize political sleaziness all day long, but the critiques carry extra weight when people are willing to call out their own allies for bad behavior.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Calling out Rove proper
May 19, 2014
One of the slimier tricks in politics is to make a recklessly non-factual charge just to get it into the political bloodstream. Once there, like an antibiotic-resistant bug, no amount of truth can ever kill it.
Sometimes you wonder whether the people making a charge don't really know what they're talking about, such as when Sarah Palin took to Facebook to claim there were "death panels" in Obamacare.
But nobody has to ask that about Karl Rove. The whip-smart Republican operative has a reputation for picking his words carefully and understanding how they'll resonate. So when Rove suggested at an off-the-record conference last week that Hillary Clinton might have a brain problem from a concussion she got in December 2012, he had to know how that might play out.
"Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that," he said, according to the New York Post.
It was bad enough that Rove lengthened Clinton's hospital stay by a factor of 10 (it was three days, after she fell and hit her head while weakened by a severe stomach bug), or that his "traumatic brain injury" wording lumped Clinton in with victims of IEDs and post-traumatic stress disorder. But the Post turned Rove's quote into this headline: "Karl Rove: Hillary may have brain damage."
After the story went viral, Rove said Clinton "doesn't have brain damage" and went on to say that all he had meant to do was point out that if Clinton runs for president, as she's widely expected to do, she'll be asked detailed questions about her health, as any candidate would be. Well, how helpful.
By Wednesday, the furor was bad enough that former President Bill Clinton weighed in to reassure everyone that his wife was fine: "Look, she works out every week, she is strong, she's doing great. As far as I can tell, she's in better shape than I am. She certainly seems to have more stamina now."
Politics ain't beanbag, and this is hardly the worst a political operative has ever done. Hillary Clinton can expect more such attacks, on Benghazi and other issues, in an effort to dissuade her from running for president, or soften her up if she does.
Rove's comments would be an occasion for the usual lamentations about why Americans have so little faith in the process, except for gratifying pushback from two high-profile Republicans.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said on Facebook that he was "deeply offended" by the comments and that "kind of personal charge is exactly (what's) wrong with (American) politics." He called on Rove to apologize.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said he had no doubt Clinton was qualified to run if she chose to. "I'm not a doctor, (but) as far as I can tell based on the way she engages, she's very alert and very feisty and keeps a busy schedule, so I have no reason to believe that there's anything in her background that will disqualify her," Graham told Politico.
Pundits can criticize political sleaziness all day long, but the critiques carry extra weight when people are willing to call out their own allies for bad behavior.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Friday, May 23, 2014
C'mon, Koch brothers-- here's your chance to participate in a “free and open debate”
...................................................................................................................................................................
Tom Steyer to Koch brothers: Bawk! Bawk! BAWK! BAWK!
By Lynn Bartels, May 23, 2014
Clever: Instead of a multi-paragraph press release, Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate sent a 15-second video explaining what happened to their request to debate the Koch brothers.
The green billionaire apparently believes billionaires David and Charles Koch from the other side of the political spectrum are too chicken to debate him.
(Although the request for a debate reminds me of Colorado Christian University inviting Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper to debate the four Republicans trying to unseat him. “As if the governor were somehow expected to join a Republican debate,” as columnist Mike Littwin put it.)
NextGen Climate Action announced Thursday Steyer had donated $50 million and the group was raising another $50 million to target seven Democratic races nationwide. One of them is the U.S. Senate battle in Colorado between Democratic Sen. Mark Udall and Republican Congressman Cory Gardner.
The Koch brothers have funded conservative causes and groups, such as Americans for Prosperity and the American Energy Alliance. Those organizations have run ads favorable to Gardner.
In their request for a debate, NextGen Climate wrote:
Tom Steyer to Koch brothers: Bawk! Bawk! BAWK! BAWK!
By Lynn Bartels, May 23, 2014
Clever: Instead of a multi-paragraph press release, Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate sent a 15-second video explaining what happened to their request to debate the Koch brothers.
The green billionaire apparently believes billionaires David and Charles Koch from the other side of the political spectrum are too chicken to debate him.
(Although the request for a debate reminds me of Colorado Christian University inviting Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper to debate the four Republicans trying to unseat him. “As if the governor were somehow expected to join a Republican debate,” as columnist Mike Littwin put it.)
NextGen Climate Action announced Thursday Steyer had donated $50 million and the group was raising another $50 million to target seven Democratic races nationwide. One of them is the U.S. Senate battle in Colorado between Democratic Sen. Mark Udall and Republican Congressman Cory Gardner.
The Koch brothers have funded conservative causes and groups, such as Americans for Prosperity and the American Energy Alliance. Those organizations have run ads favorable to Gardner.
In their request for a debate, NextGen Climate wrote:
The Koch Brothers have always been shrouded in secrecy, their labyrinth of shadowy organizations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars benefiting candidates who deny basic science and push legislation that enables climate change.
Charles Koch has already mourned the oppression of “free and open debate.” Here’s his chance to do something about it:
Tom Steyer has invited Charles and David Koch to a public debate on climate change. Let’s see if they really know how a democracy works and where their money is going....................................................................................................................................................................
GOP-- still beating the Benghazi horse
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Benghazi Boogie
By Will Durst, May 19, 2014
In order to function like a properly greased money machine, the GOP requires a chew toy. Something to snarl and wave and get a good growl on. Railing against easy-to-digest injustices is the perfect lubrication. Nuance – not their strong suit. This party calibrates with pitchforks and 55 gallon drums of oil.
Their specialty is publicly declaring abhorrence for manufactured boogeymen. Communist takeover of the world – bad. Muslim President born with a racist agenda in an African country – bad. Socialist healthcare that kills old people – bad. They, wrapped in a flag holding high the cross – good.
Having never met a dead horse they didn’t enjoy beating, the Party of Lincoln is prone to continuing their battering to microscopic detail. As long as the audience remains rapt, these guys will lambaste anything retaining a whiff of expired equine. Saddles. Baseballs. Horsehide ottomans. Cello bows. Glue.
But after 51 attempted repeals, all the sweet cream goodness has been beaten right out of ObamaCare, what with the world not coming to an end and all like everyone said. And drat the luck, no death panels. Lousy timing, with a mid-term election looming like Godzilla at the end of an alley.
So now the hordes of upraised clubs have moved onto a new target. Demonstrated by House Speaker John Boehner throwing a large number of his Capture The Senate Majority election chips down the Benghazi Rabbit Hole. Let the inquisitions begin. For the 14th time.
Republican Senators are jealously clamoring for similar grandstanding opportunities, but chances of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid granting that request are smaller than Donald Sterling headlining the Apollo.
The issue concerning the death of four Libyan embassy employees excites the base to where they vibrate and leak green froth from their nose while their voices go up two octaves. The major difficulty is negotiating the fine line that separates energizing the tea- drinking troops from politicizing a tragedy. And rumors of Benghazi tote bags don’t help.
I can’t wait for Ted Cruz to start a new nationwide dance craze via Youtube video: “Doing the Benghazi Boogie. Take 2 steps back. Look around. Point your finger. Shake your head. Shake your contributions cup. Shake your tail feather. Take 2 steps back.”
Even after holding 13 hearings on the subject, Republicans are determined that this time, they’ll get the truth. To such disturbing mysteries as why Susan Rice wore a pink blouse when she went on the Sunday talk shows. A signal? How many brain tumors were affecting Hillary Clinton? Why wouldn’t Barack Obama get off the phone with Benjamin Netanyahu? Were they celebrating? And who exactly do Republicans hate more: Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?
Yes, the answer to these and many more questions will be cloaked and shrouded and obscured but why Republicans have lost consecutive Presidential elections will definitely be highlighted in day-glo skywriting. At a certain point the American people grow tired of washing off the horse blood.
Afterwards, a consultation with Geraldo Rivera might be in order, because this investigation is destined to come up emptier than Al Capone’s Vault. The only good news is the term “impeachment” has yet to be bandied about. And for that, we should all get down on our knees and thank… Joe Biden.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Benghazi Boogie
By Will Durst, May 19, 2014
In order to function like a properly greased money machine, the GOP requires a chew toy. Something to snarl and wave and get a good growl on. Railing against easy-to-digest injustices is the perfect lubrication. Nuance – not their strong suit. This party calibrates with pitchforks and 55 gallon drums of oil.
Their specialty is publicly declaring abhorrence for manufactured boogeymen. Communist takeover of the world – bad. Muslim President born with a racist agenda in an African country – bad. Socialist healthcare that kills old people – bad. They, wrapped in a flag holding high the cross – good.
Having never met a dead horse they didn’t enjoy beating, the Party of Lincoln is prone to continuing their battering to microscopic detail. As long as the audience remains rapt, these guys will lambaste anything retaining a whiff of expired equine. Saddles. Baseballs. Horsehide ottomans. Cello bows. Glue.
But after 51 attempted repeals, all the sweet cream goodness has been beaten right out of ObamaCare, what with the world not coming to an end and all like everyone said. And drat the luck, no death panels. Lousy timing, with a mid-term election looming like Godzilla at the end of an alley.
So now the hordes of upraised clubs have moved onto a new target. Demonstrated by House Speaker John Boehner throwing a large number of his Capture The Senate Majority election chips down the Benghazi Rabbit Hole. Let the inquisitions begin. For the 14th time.
Republican Senators are jealously clamoring for similar grandstanding opportunities, but chances of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid granting that request are smaller than Donald Sterling headlining the Apollo.
The issue concerning the death of four Libyan embassy employees excites the base to where they vibrate and leak green froth from their nose while their voices go up two octaves. The major difficulty is negotiating the fine line that separates energizing the tea- drinking troops from politicizing a tragedy. And rumors of Benghazi tote bags don’t help.
I can’t wait for Ted Cruz to start a new nationwide dance craze via Youtube video: “Doing the Benghazi Boogie. Take 2 steps back. Look around. Point your finger. Shake your head. Shake your contributions cup. Shake your tail feather. Take 2 steps back.”
Even after holding 13 hearings on the subject, Republicans are determined that this time, they’ll get the truth. To such disturbing mysteries as why Susan Rice wore a pink blouse when she went on the Sunday talk shows. A signal? How many brain tumors were affecting Hillary Clinton? Why wouldn’t Barack Obama get off the phone with Benjamin Netanyahu? Were they celebrating? And who exactly do Republicans hate more: Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?
Yes, the answer to these and many more questions will be cloaked and shrouded and obscured but why Republicans have lost consecutive Presidential elections will definitely be highlighted in day-glo skywriting. At a certain point the American people grow tired of washing off the horse blood.
Afterwards, a consultation with Geraldo Rivera might be in order, because this investigation is destined to come up emptier than Al Capone’s Vault. The only good news is the term “impeachment” has yet to be bandied about. And for that, we should all get down on our knees and thank… Joe Biden.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Thursday, May 22, 2014
"Citizen Koch" documents the consequences for democracy when private, big money interests determine who is elected to run our government
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Citizen Koch" documents the effect of money on politics
"Money is a weapon."
By Aileen Graef, May 21, 2014
The documentary Citizen Koch shows the effect of big money in politics and how it led to the rise of the tea party.
Academy Award nominated directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin follow the story of how billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries used their super PAC, Americans for Prosperity, to pour millions into political campaigns that advance their conservative, libertarian views.
It focuses on the Republicans of Wisconsin, who were suddenly the target of their own party when Gov. Scott Walker (R) began to fight the labor unions. The film also shows the increase in big donor billionaires since the Citizen United ruling, which stripped many campaign contribution limits. The Supreme Court loosened that even further when they gutted campaign finance caps with the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
Citizen Koch will premiere in screenings across the U.S. this summer and will be a part of the Sundance Film Festival.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Citizen Koch" documents the effect of money on politics
"Money is a weapon."
By Aileen Graef, May 21, 2014
The documentary Citizen Koch shows the effect of big money in politics and how it led to the rise of the tea party.
Academy Award nominated directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin follow the story of how billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries used their super PAC, Americans for Prosperity, to pour millions into political campaigns that advance their conservative, libertarian views.
It focuses on the Republicans of Wisconsin, who were suddenly the target of their own party when Gov. Scott Walker (R) began to fight the labor unions. The film also shows the increase in big donor billionaires since the Citizen United ruling, which stripped many campaign contribution limits. The Supreme Court loosened that even further when they gutted campaign finance caps with the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
Citizen Koch will premiere in screenings across the U.S. this summer and will be a part of the Sundance Film Festival.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"The more people have to drive long distances to get anywhere, the more money the Kochs make" -- therefore cities have to go
...................................................................................................................................................................
Why the Koch brothers hate Detroit
By Ben Adler, May 23, 2014
Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy organization founded and funded by the Koch brothers, has it in for Detroit. One of the leading groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, AFP is trying to put the kibosh on a deal that would rescue Detroit from financial ruin. The New York Times reports:
Saving Detroit would likewise be a sensible move for the state. But the Kochs despise such pragmatism. This is not the first time AFP has played on rural and suburban white voters’ antipathy for Detroit. In another anti-urban effort, AFP opposed the debt-financed redevelopment of the waterfront in Coralville, Iowa, claiming the city “is fast becoming Iowa’s version of Detroit.”
You might wonder why AFP and the Kochs would even care about these issues, seemingly distant from their core mission of disassembling the federal government. But it actually makes perfect sense that they would hate cities, and downtown revitalization, and want to see cities die. Functioning cities — like everything else the Kochs oppose, such as environmental protection and social justice — require functioning governments. If your goal is to undermine government and collective action for the public good, then naturally you’d oppose saving Detroit.
Cities are more energy-efficient than suburbs. If, like Koch industries, you make much of your money refining oil and investing in the Canadian tar sands, then it makes sense that you would favor suburban sprawl. The more people have to drive long distances to get anywhere, the more money the Kochs make.
The right-wing hatred of cities — whether it’s for their racial and ethnic diversity, their culture of tolerance, or the way that density inspires liberal attitudes toward the common good — is long established. National Review’s Stanley Kurtz wrote a whole paranoid book about how President Obama secretly plans to urbanize America. Newt Gingrich regularly inveighs against “elites” who live in Manhattan and “ride the subway.”
David Koch, ironically, lives in Manhattan. And being worth $40 billion he is nothing if not elite. If it were up to him, the city would have gone bankrupt in 1975.
But hypocrisy doesn’t much concern Koch. As The New York Times recently reported, when Koch ran for vice president as a Libertarian in 1980, he was living in a rent-stabilized apartment.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Why the Koch brothers hate Detroit
By Ben Adler, May 23, 2014
Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy organization founded and funded by the Koch brothers, has it in for Detroit. One of the leading groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, AFP is trying to put the kibosh on a deal that would rescue Detroit from financial ruin. The New York Times reports:
Over the last five months, a deal has come together that would solve some of the most contentious issues in Detroit’s bankruptcy. It would minimize the pension cuts for 30,000 retirees and city workers, save the city’s art collection and give a reasonable amount of money to the city’s bondholders.Gov. Snyder is undoubtedly a conservative. He opposes abortion rights, taxes, government spending, and tighter regulation of coal-burning power plants. But he has shown a pragmatic streak before. As I noted in January, Snyder favors a renewable energy portfolio standard because it would be good for the state’s manufacturing economy.
As expected, there were some objections from a few big insurance companies that stood to lose heavily. But with the support of Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, the deal seemed to have a shot in the state legislature, which would be required to spend about $195 million of tobacco-settlement money on behalf of Detroit’s pensioners.
And then, a few days ago, a loud and depressingly familiar voice rose in protest. The Koch brothers, through the screeching megaphone they built known as Americans for Prosperity, condemned the deal and announced plans to contact 90,000 conservatives around the state to build up pressure against it. The Associated Press reported that the group threatened to run ads against any Republicans in the legislature who voted for the deal in the coming days.
AFP has already set up a website — “No more bailouts for Detroit!” — that plays on the long-running, sometimes racially inflected resentment of Detroit around Michigan.
Saving Detroit would likewise be a sensible move for the state. But the Kochs despise such pragmatism. This is not the first time AFP has played on rural and suburban white voters’ antipathy for Detroit. In another anti-urban effort, AFP opposed the debt-financed redevelopment of the waterfront in Coralville, Iowa, claiming the city “is fast becoming Iowa’s version of Detroit.”
You might wonder why AFP and the Kochs would even care about these issues, seemingly distant from their core mission of disassembling the federal government. But it actually makes perfect sense that they would hate cities, and downtown revitalization, and want to see cities die. Functioning cities — like everything else the Kochs oppose, such as environmental protection and social justice — require functioning governments. If your goal is to undermine government and collective action for the public good, then naturally you’d oppose saving Detroit.
Cities are more energy-efficient than suburbs. If, like Koch industries, you make much of your money refining oil and investing in the Canadian tar sands, then it makes sense that you would favor suburban sprawl. The more people have to drive long distances to get anywhere, the more money the Kochs make.
The right-wing hatred of cities — whether it’s for their racial and ethnic diversity, their culture of tolerance, or the way that density inspires liberal attitudes toward the common good — is long established. National Review’s Stanley Kurtz wrote a whole paranoid book about how President Obama secretly plans to urbanize America. Newt Gingrich regularly inveighs against “elites” who live in Manhattan and “ride the subway.”
David Koch, ironically, lives in Manhattan. And being worth $40 billion he is nothing if not elite. If it were up to him, the city would have gone bankrupt in 1975.
But hypocrisy doesn’t much concern Koch. As The New York Times recently reported, when Koch ran for vice president as a Libertarian in 1980, he was living in a rent-stabilized apartment.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... politics in the past 10 years has become a perennial contest of the already converted ... we've effectively left behind the Age of Persuasion and ushered in the Age of Confirmation."
...................................................................................................................................................................
Don't blame college kids for intolerance. Blame us.
By Matt Bai, May 22, 2014
America's college kids are back and resting at home this week, which is a good thing, because during the long months away they seem to have gone completely out of their minds.
Last weekend, The New York Times' Jennifer Medina reported on the latest bizarre demand on campus: "trigger warnings" [see below] to let students know if the text they're about to study will expose them to some version of misogyny or homophobia, so they aren't unexpectedly traumatized by visions of things that can never be unseen – like, say, every novel written by a white man before 1960. That followed the public floggings of several commencement speakers whose invitations had to be rescinded, including such evildoers as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the International Monetary Fund's Christine Lagarde and Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
All of this has provoked a torrent of eloquent condemnation from pundits and academics, who worry that our elite universities, in the words of an editorial published in Monday’s Washington Post, are being "impoverished by intolerance." Which is a reasonable concern, except that it misses the point. It's not the students' fault that they expect to laze around in a world of ideological comfort. It's totally ours.
There's nothing new about the basic tension between speech and sensitivity on campus. When I was at Tufts in the late '80s, at the height of what we called political correctness, we argued fiercely about whether the military belonged on campus or whether certain faculty members were denied tenure because of their politics. But, by and large, we were primed to have the debate, not chill it.
We'd grown up with TV news that tried to get at complicated issues (Ted Koppel's "Nightline" was the single most influential news program of the era) and op-ed pages that crackled with competing arguments. I remember meeting William Colby, the former CIA director, at a symposium. A lot of us were disgusted by the role he had played in Vietnam, but it never occurred to us that he shouldn't speak or that his beliefs weren't at least defensible.
It was reasonable to hope, with the sudden explosion of what we called cyberspace a decade or so later, that this kind of exchange would become more commonplace and more enlightening, rather than less so. Only that's not what happened. Almost from the moment the first iteration of political blogs appeared, not long after the 2000 presidential election that exposed a deep cultural rift in America, like-minded activists began to wall themselves off from any version of reality they didn't like. They set about building ideological silos in the space where virtual town squares might have thrived.
Our political leaders and our media might have recognized the danger here and done their traditional duty, which was to ignore all the noise, and focus instead on explaining the complex realities of a country in social and technological transition. With some notable exceptions, that didn't happen, either. Instead, politics in the past 10 years has become a perennial contest of the already converted, a constant pursuit on either side of "base strategies" and data sets that tell you exactly which voters you need to turn out in order to get and hold power.
Those of us who cover and analyze the news – whose central purpose it is to challenge our own preconceptions about the world, and yours – haven't really performed much better, and I'm not just talking about the partisan rehashing on Fox News and MSNBC. Many of our most respected columnists and academics, too, occupy the predictable extremes, where they can always rely on the clicks of a comforted audience. They use a smokescreen of empiricism to prove to you, over and over again and without fail, that everything you already believe is borne out by some selective poll or study.
What's happened is that we've effectively left behind the Age of Persuasion and ushered in the Age of Confirmation. It sometimes seems the whole world exists to re-affirm our conceptions of it; you can get through days, even weeks, without being at all discomfited, if you know which sites to visit and which channels to watch.
This isn't confined to politics. We target self-help books and superhero movies at consumers whose habits we know, rather than do the hard work of trying to convince anyone to broaden their minds. (Did you like Sheryl Sandberg's book? Then you'll love Arianna Huffington's version, which is pretty much the same thing, right down to the catchphrase title and cover photo.) Log on to Amazon.com, the supermall of the confirmation culture, and you will instantly be introduced to all of the books, movies and songs that are exactly like all the others you've purchased recently.
We have more options and access to information than any society in human history, and less inclination to avail ourselves of it. Maybe we're just overwhelmed.
So tell me this: What exactly did we think the effect of all this was going to be on the generation after ours? Today's college senior was born around 1992 and developed a political awareness just as blogs and social media were bursting into the American consciousness. Did we really expect these kids to emerge from the moment with a sense of intellectual adventurism? Were they supposed to just know that the entire point of literature is to discomfort you with no warning at all?
Did we think the characteristic that F. Scott Fitzgerald cited as the hallmark of first-rate intelligence – "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and retain the ability to function" – didn't have to be taught by example?
Here's the good news. First, while the loudest students have been grabbing the attention lately, anyone who spends any time on campus these days (or who reads some of the better polling of the so-called millennial generation) can tell you that a lot of younger Americans appreciate that something is wrong with the way we talk to each other, or don't. They're distrustful of old political and media institutions and eager to build a more tolerant, less fragmented society than their parents have to this point. That's to their credit.
Second, it's worth remembering that for all the missed opportunity around us, we're still in the infancy of the Internet culture, a moment roughly analogous to where television was in 1960. Our instinct has been to retreat into safe communities online that reinforce our convictions and banish all doubt. But media evolves, and political dialogue with it, and I'm betting we will figure out how to hear alternate (and even odious) worldviews without need for a trigger warning.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of technology is long, and it bends toward enlightenment.
...................................................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................................................
Trigger Warning: A phrase posted at the beginning of various posts, articles, or blogs. Its purpose is to warn weak minded people who are easily offended that they might find what is being posted offensive in some way due to its content, causing them to overreact or otherwise start acting like a dipshit. Popular on reddit SRS or other places that social justice warriors like to hang out.
Trigger warnings are unnecessary 100% of the time due to the fact that people who are easily offended have no business randomly browsing the internet anyways. As a result of the phrase's irrelevance, most opinions that start out with this phrase tend to be simplistic and dull since they were made by people ridiculous enough to think that the internet is supposed to cater to people who can't take a joke.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Don't blame college kids for intolerance. Blame us.
By Matt Bai, May 22, 2014
America's college kids are back and resting at home this week, which is a good thing, because during the long months away they seem to have gone completely out of their minds.
Last weekend, The New York Times' Jennifer Medina reported on the latest bizarre demand on campus: "trigger warnings" [see below] to let students know if the text they're about to study will expose them to some version of misogyny or homophobia, so they aren't unexpectedly traumatized by visions of things that can never be unseen – like, say, every novel written by a white man before 1960. That followed the public floggings of several commencement speakers whose invitations had to be rescinded, including such evildoers as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the International Monetary Fund's Christine Lagarde and Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
All of this has provoked a torrent of eloquent condemnation from pundits and academics, who worry that our elite universities, in the words of an editorial published in Monday’s Washington Post, are being "impoverished by intolerance." Which is a reasonable concern, except that it misses the point. It's not the students' fault that they expect to laze around in a world of ideological comfort. It's totally ours.
There's nothing new about the basic tension between speech and sensitivity on campus. When I was at Tufts in the late '80s, at the height of what we called political correctness, we argued fiercely about whether the military belonged on campus or whether certain faculty members were denied tenure because of their politics. But, by and large, we were primed to have the debate, not chill it.
We'd grown up with TV news that tried to get at complicated issues (Ted Koppel's "Nightline" was the single most influential news program of the era) and op-ed pages that crackled with competing arguments. I remember meeting William Colby, the former CIA director, at a symposium. A lot of us were disgusted by the role he had played in Vietnam, but it never occurred to us that he shouldn't speak or that his beliefs weren't at least defensible.
It was reasonable to hope, with the sudden explosion of what we called cyberspace a decade or so later, that this kind of exchange would become more commonplace and more enlightening, rather than less so. Only that's not what happened. Almost from the moment the first iteration of political blogs appeared, not long after the 2000 presidential election that exposed a deep cultural rift in America, like-minded activists began to wall themselves off from any version of reality they didn't like. They set about building ideological silos in the space where virtual town squares might have thrived.
Our political leaders and our media might have recognized the danger here and done their traditional duty, which was to ignore all the noise, and focus instead on explaining the complex realities of a country in social and technological transition. With some notable exceptions, that didn't happen, either. Instead, politics in the past 10 years has become a perennial contest of the already converted, a constant pursuit on either side of "base strategies" and data sets that tell you exactly which voters you need to turn out in order to get and hold power.
Those of us who cover and analyze the news – whose central purpose it is to challenge our own preconceptions about the world, and yours – haven't really performed much better, and I'm not just talking about the partisan rehashing on Fox News and MSNBC. Many of our most respected columnists and academics, too, occupy the predictable extremes, where they can always rely on the clicks of a comforted audience. They use a smokescreen of empiricism to prove to you, over and over again and without fail, that everything you already believe is borne out by some selective poll or study.
What's happened is that we've effectively left behind the Age of Persuasion and ushered in the Age of Confirmation. It sometimes seems the whole world exists to re-affirm our conceptions of it; you can get through days, even weeks, without being at all discomfited, if you know which sites to visit and which channels to watch.
This isn't confined to politics. We target self-help books and superhero movies at consumers whose habits we know, rather than do the hard work of trying to convince anyone to broaden their minds. (Did you like Sheryl Sandberg's book? Then you'll love Arianna Huffington's version, which is pretty much the same thing, right down to the catchphrase title and cover photo.) Log on to Amazon.com, the supermall of the confirmation culture, and you will instantly be introduced to all of the books, movies and songs that are exactly like all the others you've purchased recently.
We have more options and access to information than any society in human history, and less inclination to avail ourselves of it. Maybe we're just overwhelmed.
So tell me this: What exactly did we think the effect of all this was going to be on the generation after ours? Today's college senior was born around 1992 and developed a political awareness just as blogs and social media were bursting into the American consciousness. Did we really expect these kids to emerge from the moment with a sense of intellectual adventurism? Were they supposed to just know that the entire point of literature is to discomfort you with no warning at all?
Did we think the characteristic that F. Scott Fitzgerald cited as the hallmark of first-rate intelligence – "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and retain the ability to function" – didn't have to be taught by example?
Here's the good news. First, while the loudest students have been grabbing the attention lately, anyone who spends any time on campus these days (or who reads some of the better polling of the so-called millennial generation) can tell you that a lot of younger Americans appreciate that something is wrong with the way we talk to each other, or don't. They're distrustful of old political and media institutions and eager to build a more tolerant, less fragmented society than their parents have to this point. That's to their credit.
Second, it's worth remembering that for all the missed opportunity around us, we're still in the infancy of the Internet culture, a moment roughly analogous to where television was in 1960. Our instinct has been to retreat into safe communities online that reinforce our convictions and banish all doubt. But media evolves, and political dialogue with it, and I'm betting we will figure out how to hear alternate (and even odious) worldviews without need for a trigger warning.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of technology is long, and it bends toward enlightenment.
...................................................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................................................
Trigger Warning: A phrase posted at the beginning of various posts, articles, or blogs. Its purpose is to warn weak minded people who are easily offended that they might find what is being posted offensive in some way due to its content, causing them to overreact or otherwise start acting like a dipshit. Popular on reddit SRS or other places that social justice warriors like to hang out.
Trigger warnings are unnecessary 100% of the time due to the fact that people who are easily offended have no business randomly browsing the internet anyways. As a result of the phrase's irrelevance, most opinions that start out with this phrase tend to be simplistic and dull since they were made by people ridiculous enough to think that the internet is supposed to cater to people who can't take a joke.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Are you a "have" or a "have not"? Too bad if the latter!
..................................................................................................
"... Democrats on the panel will 'try to bring some openness and transparency to what is going on.'"
...................................................................................................................................................................
Too bad Pelosi didn't appoint Alan Grayson! ALAN GRAYSON: Here's How I Plan To Make The Benghazi Investigation A 'Nightmare' For Republicans
...................................................................................................................................................................
House Democrats agree to participate in GOP-led Benghazi probe
By Michael A. Memoli, May 21, 2014
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) on Wednesday named a slate of Democrats to participate in the new select committee on Benghazi, despite reservations of many in her party about the mission of the GOP-led panel.
Pelosi’s decision followed discussions with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) meant to assure Democrats that the panel would operate fairly.
Pelosi said those discussions failed to produce what she considered a fair arrangement. But in her view "that was all the more reason to participate."
"I could argue this either way," Pelosi said. But Democrats on the panel will "try to bring some openness and transparency to what is going on."
The Democratic members of the committee will be Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee; Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee; Adam Schiff of Burbank, a member of the intelligence committee; Linda Sanchez of Whittier; and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war veteran.
Democrats, who have accused Republicans of politicizing the 2012 terrorist attack against a U.S. mission in Libya, held multiple internal discussions about whether to participate in the select committee.
Some advocated a total boycott, arguing that Republicans formed the probe only to stoke their conservative base in an election year. Others suggested appointing a single member who would be able to monitor its activity but not give it the legitimacy that many thought it did not deserve.
In the end they agreed to participate fully, arguing it was vital, especially if administration officials or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be called to testify.
"You want as much firepower on your side as you can get," said Rep. Gerry Connelly (D-Va.), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said recently.
An aide to Boehner said that Republicans offered Democrats “assurances on committee procedures but no substantive changes that could hurt the investigation.”
Boehner had tapped South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, to lead the panel earlier this month.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Too bad Pelosi didn't appoint Alan Grayson! ALAN GRAYSON: Here's How I Plan To Make The Benghazi Investigation A 'Nightmare' For Republicans
...................................................................................................................................................................
House Democrats agree to participate in GOP-led Benghazi probe
By Michael A. Memoli, May 21, 2014
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) on Wednesday named a slate of Democrats to participate in the new select committee on Benghazi, despite reservations of many in her party about the mission of the GOP-led panel.
Pelosi’s decision followed discussions with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) meant to assure Democrats that the panel would operate fairly.
Pelosi said those discussions failed to produce what she considered a fair arrangement. But in her view "that was all the more reason to participate."
"I could argue this either way," Pelosi said. But Democrats on the panel will "try to bring some openness and transparency to what is going on."
The Democratic members of the committee will be Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee; Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee; Adam Schiff of Burbank, a member of the intelligence committee; Linda Sanchez of Whittier; and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war veteran.
Democrats, who have accused Republicans of politicizing the 2012 terrorist attack against a U.S. mission in Libya, held multiple internal discussions about whether to participate in the select committee.
Some advocated a total boycott, arguing that Republicans formed the probe only to stoke their conservative base in an election year. Others suggested appointing a single member who would be able to monitor its activity but not give it the legitimacy that many thought it did not deserve.
In the end they agreed to participate fully, arguing it was vital, especially if administration officials or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be called to testify.
"You want as much firepower on your side as you can get," said Rep. Gerry Connelly (D-Va.), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said recently.
An aide to Boehner said that Republicans offered Democrats “assurances on committee procedures but no substantive changes that could hurt the investigation.”
Boehner had tapped South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, to lead the panel earlier this month.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
"... spending by groups that do not reveal donors is almost three times higher than at the same point in 2012"
...................................................................................................................................................................
Shedding light on dark money lurking in politics
By Ruth Marcus, May 21, 2014
Big money is destined to remain part of U.S. politics, absent a legislative revolution or constitutional amendment. But there is a crucial difference between big money and secret money.
Two differences, actually.
The first is chastening: Big money is troubling; secret money is toxic. Having millions of dollars from outside groups pumped into elections distorts the democratic process. Not knowing what interests are behind those millions magnifies that distortion.
The second is more hopeful: Big money, especially in the post-Citizens United campaign finance free-for-all, is not containable. Secret money, as underscored by the Citizens United case itself, continues to be amenable to regulation, even under a Supreme Court hostile to other forms of campaign finance rules.
The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the 2012 election saw more than $250 million in political spending by nonprofit groups organized under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, up from $86 million in 2008 and $3 million in 2004.
But 2014, the center recently reported, is making 2012 look positively sluggish, even though this is a midterm election. It found that spending by groups that do not reveal donors is almost three times higher than at the same point in 2012.
Which is why an effort now underway at the Internal Revenue Service is so essential – and so contested by interests on both sides of the political spectrum who would prefer to continue to operate in the dark. The long-overdue proposal would dismantle the fiction that certain 501(c)(4) organizations – groups that run political advertisements and engage in other traditional political activity – are somehow exempt from disclosure rules that apply to political committees.
Such groups claim they are entitled to operate in the dark, using the tax code as a shield of secrecy, because it provides an exemption for groups “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” – defined by regulation as “primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community.”
Note the loophole-expanding shift from “exclusively” in the law to “primarily” in the regulations. This gap has allowed groups to meddle in politics so long as such activities stay short of half their spending.
The proposed regulations would help change that, which may be why they generated a record 150,000 comments that the IRS is now plowing through. The rules would make clear that promoting social welfare does not include “candidate-related political activity” – defined as communications that expressly advocate a candidate’s election or defeat or as communications 60 days before a general election, or 30 days before a primary, that “clearly identify a candidate or political party.” Yet the precise amount of such political activity that is permissible remains unclear, and the agency, in finalizing the rules, should set a low limit.
The proposal went too far in some areas, particularly reining in nonpartisan voter registration drives. Such a problem should be fixed as the IRS fine-tunes the proposal.
Conversely, the proposal wouldn’t cover every corner of dark-money spending in the tax code, in particular expenditures by trade organizations set up under a different provision, 501(c)(6). This is already a dark-money growth area, for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other groups: No doubt, even more secret spending would migrate there if the nonprofit rules were tightened without simultaneously addressing these other forms.
It’s too late for 2014, and the pressure will be enormous on IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to junk the project entirely. Koskinen has signaled his intention to proceed. This would be the right outcome – for his agency, which without clear rules risks endless embroilment in fiascoes such as the scrutiny of tea party groups, and for the country, whose citizens at least deserve to know what interests are trying to buy their votes.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Shedding light on dark money lurking in politics
By Ruth Marcus, May 21, 2014
Big money is destined to remain part of U.S. politics, absent a legislative revolution or constitutional amendment. But there is a crucial difference between big money and secret money.
Two differences, actually.
The first is chastening: Big money is troubling; secret money is toxic. Having millions of dollars from outside groups pumped into elections distorts the democratic process. Not knowing what interests are behind those millions magnifies that distortion.
The second is more hopeful: Big money, especially in the post-Citizens United campaign finance free-for-all, is not containable. Secret money, as underscored by the Citizens United case itself, continues to be amenable to regulation, even under a Supreme Court hostile to other forms of campaign finance rules.
The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the 2012 election saw more than $250 million in political spending by nonprofit groups organized under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, up from $86 million in 2008 and $3 million in 2004.
But 2014, the center recently reported, is making 2012 look positively sluggish, even though this is a midterm election. It found that spending by groups that do not reveal donors is almost three times higher than at the same point in 2012.
Which is why an effort now underway at the Internal Revenue Service is so essential – and so contested by interests on both sides of the political spectrum who would prefer to continue to operate in the dark. The long-overdue proposal would dismantle the fiction that certain 501(c)(4) organizations – groups that run political advertisements and engage in other traditional political activity – are somehow exempt from disclosure rules that apply to political committees.
Such groups claim they are entitled to operate in the dark, using the tax code as a shield of secrecy, because it provides an exemption for groups “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” – defined by regulation as “primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community.”
Note the loophole-expanding shift from “exclusively” in the law to “primarily” in the regulations. This gap has allowed groups to meddle in politics so long as such activities stay short of half their spending.
The proposed regulations would help change that, which may be why they generated a record 150,000 comments that the IRS is now plowing through. The rules would make clear that promoting social welfare does not include “candidate-related political activity” – defined as communications that expressly advocate a candidate’s election or defeat or as communications 60 days before a general election, or 30 days before a primary, that “clearly identify a candidate or political party.” Yet the precise amount of such political activity that is permissible remains unclear, and the agency, in finalizing the rules, should set a low limit.
The proposal went too far in some areas, particularly reining in nonpartisan voter registration drives. Such a problem should be fixed as the IRS fine-tunes the proposal.
Conversely, the proposal wouldn’t cover every corner of dark-money spending in the tax code, in particular expenditures by trade organizations set up under a different provision, 501(c)(6). This is already a dark-money growth area, for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other groups: No doubt, even more secret spending would migrate there if the nonprofit rules were tightened without simultaneously addressing these other forms.
It’s too late for 2014, and the pressure will be enormous on IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to junk the project entirely. Koskinen has signaled his intention to proceed. This would be the right outcome – for his agency, which without clear rules risks endless embroilment in fiascoes such as the scrutiny of tea party groups, and for the country, whose citizens at least deserve to know what interests are trying to buy their votes.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)