Santorum predicts President Obama will bomb Iran to win re-election

Santorum, who has previously stated that if elected president he would attack Iran and claimed Obama is helping Iran acquire nuclear weapons, told right wing radio host Steve Malzberg on Thursday that Obama may bomb Iran in October to ensure his reelection.
Read the exchange:

STEVE MALZBERG: Even doing something against Iran, which probably fundamentally in his core, he doesn’t want to do because all he wants to do is have dinner with Ahmadinejad.

RICK SANTORUM: … Foreign policy is just something that is a distraction to him. Something that we will deal with later….What he believes he needs to do to win the election is some sort of October Surprise…there is no question that is one of the things that I’m sure he will look at.

MALZBERG: We’re talking about possibly attacking Iran. You wouldn’t be surprised?

SANTORUM: I don’t know…It would not surprise me that this president would do anything to let the country know that he’s on the watch and that he is a vital player in keeping us safe.

Breaking News!

This just in:

• President Obama will find a cure for cancer to win re-election.
• President Obama will bring Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt back together to win re-election.
• President Obama will explain quantum mechanics to Sarah Palin [and she will "get it"] to win re-election.
• President Obama will successfully clone Abraham Lincoln and name him as his vice presidential running mate at the Demcoratic convention to win re-election.
• President Obama will run the 2 1/2 minute mile at the London Summer Olympics to win re-election.
• President Obama will find Amelia Earhart living in Buffalo, New York, to win re-election.
• President Obama will design a successful perpetual motion machine to win re-election.
• President Obama will walk on the Charles River from the MIT bridge to the Longfellow Bridge to win re-election.
• President Obama will beat Wilt "The Stilt" Chamberlain's record for scoring more than 100 points in an NBA game to win re-election.
• President Obama will install the world's largest bowl in Fenway Park and fill it with clam chowdah to win re-election.
• President Obama will successfully design a fusion reactor to provide free energy to the USA to win re-election.
• President Obama will write The Great American novel, a five-act grand opera, a string quintet, a piano sonata, and paint a mural on the Washington Monument, all in 6 days, and will rest on the 7th, to win re-election.
• President Obama will grow the world's largest pumpkin on the White House lawn and turn it into a space shuttle to the moon to win re-election.
• President Obama will convince the GOP to work with him to solve America's economic problems to win re-election.

WELCOME BACK TO THE GILDED AGE

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

"Over the past 40 years, corporations and politicians have rolled back many of the gains made by working and middle-class people over the previous century. We have the highest level of income inequality in 90 years, both private and public sector unions are under a concerted attack, and federal and state governments intend to cut deficits by slashing services to the poor. We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to help lift them out of hard times. With Republicans more committed than ever to repealing every economic gain the working-class has achieved in the last century and the Democrats seemingly unable to resist, we need to understand the Gilded Age to see what conservatives are trying to do to this nation. Here are 8 ways our corporations, politicians and courts are trying to recreate the Gilded Age.

1. Unregulated Corporate Capitalism Creates Economic Collapse

In the late 19th century, corrupt railroad capitalists created the Panic of 1873 and Panic of 1893 through lying about their business activities, buying off politicians and siphoning off capital into their own pockets. Railroad corporations set up phony corporations that allowed them to embezzle money from the railroad into their bank accounts. When exposed, the entire economy collapsed as banks failed around the country. The Panic of 1893 lasted five years, created 25% unemployment, and was the worst economic crisis in American history before the Great Depression. In the early 21st century, the poorly regulated financial industry plunged the nation into the longest economic downturn since the Depression. Like in the Gilded Age, none of the culprits have served a day in prison.

2. Union Busting In the Gilded Age, business used the power of the state to crush labor unions.

President Hayes called in the Army to break the Great Railroad Strike of 1877; President Cleveland did the same against the Pullman strikers in 1894. Today’s corporations don’t have to use such blunt force to destroy unions, but like in the past, they convince the government to do their bidding. Whether it is holding up FAA renewal in order to make it harder for airline employees to unionize, Republican members of the National Labor Relations Board leaking material on cases to Republican insiders, or governors Scott Walker and John Kasich seeking to bust their states’ public sector unions, not since before the Great Depression has the government attacked unions with such force.

3. Income Inequality Today, we have the highest levels of income inequality since the 1920s and the gap is widening to late 19th century levels with great speed.

In those days, individuals like John D. Rockefeller had more money than the federal government, while the majority of Americans lived in squalor, poverty and disease. In the Progressive Era, we started creating laws like the federal income tax, child labor laws and workers’ compensation to begin giving workers a fair share of the pie. For decades, labor fought to increase their share and by the 1970s, had turned much of the working class into the middle class. Today, that middle class is under attack by a new generation of plutocrats who wish to recreate the massive fortunes of the Gilded Age.

4. Open Purchase of Elections In 1890, copper magnate William Clark paid Montana lawmakers $140,000 to elect him to the U.S. Senate.

While most plutocrats did not share Clark’s interest in being politicians, they ensured their lackeys would serve in office, often by offering corporate stock to politicians. Disgusted by this corruption, America in the Progressive Era of the early 20th century created a number of reforms, including the 17th Amendment that created direct elections of senators, as well as a 1912 Montana state law limiting corporate expenditures in politics. Beginning with the Citizens United decision and continuing with the recent overturning of that 1912 law, the Supreme Court has allowed corporations and wealthy plutocrats to buy elections openly once again.

5. Supreme Court Partisanship In the Gilded Age, the Supreme Court interpreted laws not as to the intent of the lawmakers, but to promote business interests.

It refused to enforce the 14th Amendment to stop segregation, but it did create the idea that a corporation was a person with rights. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was intended to moderate monopolies; the Supreme Court only enforced it against unions since organized labor “unfairly restrained trade.” Today’s Supreme Court has resorted to this aggressively partisan stance. The Court is fine with the open flouting of the 4th Amendment, allowing strip searches of middle-school girls if they’re suspected to be carrying drugs, but creates a grotesque expansion of the 14th Amendment in the Citizens United decision. Meanwhile, Antonin Scalia just took the opportunity in a Supreme Court dissent to lambast his colleagues for striking down much of the Arizona anti-immigration law by approvingly citing 19th-century laws in the South that limited the movement of African Americans.

6. Violations of Civil Liberties In the late 19th century, civil and military authorities looked down upon protesting citizens.

Widespread violations of civil liberties took place when Americans protested for almost any reasons, whether it was labor unions, political gatherings in Washington, D.C., or African Americans organizing to protect themselves from white supremacists. Police shot strikers and thugs and mobs murdered organizers. Today we are seeing a growing recreation of this society with no respect for civil liberties. The use of police violence against Occupy protesters, like the pepper-spraying of nonviolent activists at the University of California-Davis did spawn some outrage. But in the aftermath of the PATRIOT Act, the authorities have tremendous power to suppress protest and are not afraid to use it against peaceful citizens.

7. Voter Repression The Gilded Age saw the rolling back of Reconstruction, with black people unable to vote in the South due to the grandfather clause, poll taxes, literacy tests, and threat of violence.

Conservative extremists have chafed at black people voting ever since the civil rights movement ended segregation. Today, voter ID laws and voter roll-purging seek to limit black voting again. Florida Governor Rick Scott hopes to purge enough black people from the voting rolls to swing the Sunshine State to Mitt Romney this fall, while a lawmaker in Pennsylvania openly said the Keystone State’s recently passed voter ID law would do the same. Even more shocking, the recently released Texas Republican Party platform has a plank calling for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed in the wake of police beatings of civil rights protestors in Selma, Alabama.

8. Anti-Immigration Fervor In the Gilded Age, Americans feared the millions of people coming from eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia to work in the nation’s growing economy.

Fearing these immigrants would never assimilate, Americans looked to bar their entry. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and continuing through the Immigration Act of 1924, the country slowly closed its doors to the world’s tired and hungry. Today’s immigrants face an increasingly militarized border, states like Arizona trying to usurp federal immigration policy, and increased numbers of deportations. Conservatives fear the changes Latinos could bring to the United States and talk about English-only laws and the evils of bilingual education. They also recognize the likelihood of Latinos voting for the Democratic Party in coming decades and thus use the same kind of voter repression strategies that target black voters."

CERN Reporting Higgs boson Found!

"ASPEN, Colo. — Physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a potential key to understanding why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe.

“I think we have it,” said Rolf Heuer, the director general of CERN, in an interview from his office outside of Geneva, calling the discovery “a historic milestone.” His words signaled what is probably the beginning of the end for one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science. If scientists are lucky, the discovery could lead to a new understanding of how the universe began.
      

Dr. Heuer and others said that it was too soon to know for sure whether the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, one of the heaviest subatomic particles yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many particles yet to be discovered . The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality. For now, some physicists are calling it a “Higgs-like” particle.

      

“It’s great to discover a new particle but you have find out what its properties are,” said John Ellis, a theorist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

      

Joe Incandela, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and spokesperson for one of two groups reporting data on Wednesday called the discovery, “very, very significant. It’s something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks, for example.”

       

Here at the Aspen Center for Physics, a retreat for scientists that will celebrate its 50th birthday on Saturday, the sounds of cheers and popping corks reverberated early Wednesday morning against the Sawatch Range through the Roaring Fork valley of the Rockies, as bleary-eyed physicists watched their colleagues read off the results in a Webcast from CERN. It was a scene duplicated in Melbourne, Australia, where physicists had gathered for a major conference, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, Princeton, New York, London, and beyond — everywhere that members of a curious species have dedicated their lives and fortunes to the search for their origins in a dark universe.

       

At CERN itself, 1,000 people stood in line all night to get into the auditorium, according to Guido Tonelli, a CERN physicist who said the atmosphere was like a rock concert. Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh theorist for whom the boson is named, entered the meeting to a standing ovation.

       

Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed in the boson for half a century without ever seeing it. And it reaffirms a grand view of a universe ruled by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws, but in which everything interesting in it, such as ourselves, is due to flaws or breaks in that symmetry.

       

According to the Standard Model, which has ruled physics for 40 years now, the Higgs boson is the only visible and particular manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles that would otherwise be massless with mass. Particles wading through it would gain heft.

      

Without this Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, physicists say all the elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life. "  --New York Times

This is an exciting day for science, and especially for theoretical physicists.

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY TO ALL!

Frum on Roberts vs. Scalia

I read Smartypants just about every day and am always better informed after I do so.  She posted this on Saturday [while several family members and I were enjoying a great weekend on Cape Cod], and I'm happy to re-post it here, because it speaks to previous posts about how radical and obstructionist the present-day GOP has become, and how that behavior has harmed this country and impeded its economic recovery.  This isn't just a liberal's opinion.  Again, as in other posts about the GOP's intransigence and scorched-earth mentality, this is from a moderate Republican, David Frum, who does not see the Democratic Party as an enemy of the state, but rather a party of Americans who differ on how to make this country better for all our citizens.  It's a thoughtful and thought-provoking article.  Thanks to Smartypants for posting it.

"Frum on Roberts v Scalia

The other day I speculated about how the SCOTUS ruling on health care reform may have vindicated President Obama's strategy as much as his policy.


Yesterday, David Frum posted a rather lengthy comment from a reader who clerked on an appellate court saying basically the same thing.


For some background, one of the main things the Court had to decide, if they were to find the mandate unconstitutional, was whether or not it could be "severed" from the rest of the law.


What we know from the 4 dissenters on this ruling (Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito) is that they were not willing to consider severability. They simply wanted the entire bill tossed out.

Frum's reader suggests that was a bridge too far for Roberts."

'The following is speculation, but plausible, and would be an interesting parallel to the conservative legislative strategy. Any objective legal observer would tell you (and I'm trying to be one here) that the dissent's treatment of the severability issue is detached from 200 years of constitutional law. It's unsupported legally and it's a mess logically... In any event, rather than holding the mandate [un]constitutional and those portions of the bill inextricably linked with it (guaranteed issue/community rating), four members of the Court were primed to throw the whole bill out. That level of judicial activism, in a context like this one, would be nearly unprecedented.


I imagine the dissenters either had Roberts's vote or that Roberts left the post argument conference without commiting to a side and saying something to the effect of "let me see how it writes."... And he waited to see what was written.

What was written was not measured judicial analysis, but rather an opinion that started with a goal --- throw the bill out --- and then figured out how to get there, blowing by any precedent in its path...


That dissent intended to get his vote. It might have had it only struck a portion of the law. But Roberts correctly realized that he couldn't jump off that cliff without precedent or logic supporting him. Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas went all in. And they lost their bet. Just like the conservatives in Congress.'

"In other words, the 4 dissenters took the same "total obstruction" strategy that we've seen from Republicans in Congress over and over.

Its no surprise that a conservative like Frum would recognize this as a failed strategy by the conservatives on the Court. It is exactly the same argument he made following passage of the health care bill that got him ejected from the Republican establishment.

'A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.


At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision:...No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994...


This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none...


We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.'

So if Frum's reader is right (and I suspect s/he is), Chief Justice Roberts just joined the few people on the right who have rejected the idea of total obstruction all the time, while justices like Scalia run ever faster off an extremist cliff.


Asking Republicans to make that choice is part of the long game President Obama is engaging. Score a win for him on this one! "

Cognitive Dissonance Alert! Government Does Better Than Private Sector in Containing Health Care Costs!

The chart below contradicts something that many conservatives and libertarians believe:  That government can't do anything right. 

By Andrew Fieldhouse, The Eonomic Policy Institute Blog

"Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its lynchpin—the individual mandate—my colleague Josh Bivens noted all the ways conservatives have tried to keep health care from being delivered efficiently, notably by blocking government from using its monopsony power and economies of scale wisely. This, of course, is difficult to square with conservatives’ professed concerns about public debt, because rapidly rising health costs are, by far, the single biggest impediment to stabilizing long-run public debt (if the economy operates at full potential over this long-run). Political opportunism aside, reasonable policy should unequivocally aim to lower health care cost-growth; so here’s some evidence worth revisiting on the comparative efficiency of public versus private provision of health care."

"...the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Medicare is 11 percent cheaper than an actuarially equivalent private insurance plan, an efficiency premium that will similarly compound with time: Fee-for-service Medicare is projected to be at least 29 percent cheaper than an equivalent private insurance plan by 2030 (relative to CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario for the long-term budget outlook).

The ACA is projected to expand coverage to some 30-33 million additional non-elderly Americans by the end of the decade, a critical step for risk-pooling, increasing cost-saving preventive care, and decreasing uncompensated care costs passed along to providers and policy holders. It also included ambitious reforms to control costs (particularly the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB), but too many provisions leveraging the public sector’s ability to directly contain costs—notably offering a public insurance option (e.g., Medicare buy-in) and negotiating Medicare Part D prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies (as is done for Medicaid)—were lobbied out of the bill.

Even though stronger cost-containments could have been included, the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the ACA is a major victory for long-run fiscal sustainability, as health reform is projected to reduce annual long-run budget deficits by roughly half-a-percentage point of GDP.

The ACA is a momentous step toward more efficient and comprehensive health care coverage in the United States, but reform will undoubtedly remain a work in progress—particularly as the various cost-containment provisions in the ACA are evaluated and successes merit replication. Our experience over the last 40 years should guide policymakers as they inevitably go back to the drawing board on health care reform; and the evidence over this time overwhelmingly suggests that public provision of health care is more effective at containing excess cost growth and more efficient than private insurance provision."


If You Oppose Single Payer Insurance, Take Your Parents Off Medicare and Pay for Their Medical Bills Yourself

 

**************

WASHINGTON, July 1 (Reuters) - Voter support for President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul has increased following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling upholding it, a lthough majorities still oppose it, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday showed.

Among all registered voters, support for the law rose to 48 percent in the online survey conducted after Thursday's ruling, up from 43 percent before the court decision. Opposition slipped to 52 percent from 57 percent.

The survey showed increased backing from Republicans and, crucially, the political independents whose support will be essential to winning the Nov. 6 presidential election.

Thirty-eight percent of independents supported the healthcare overhaul. That was up from 27 percent from a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken days before the justices' ruling. Opposition among independents was 62 percent, versus 73 percent earlier.

"This is a win for Obama. This is his bill. There's not really any doubt in people's minds, that it belongs to him," said Julia Clark, vice president at Ipsos Public Affairs. "It's his baby. It's literally been labeled 'Obamacare' ... which maybe it works in his favor now that there's a little bit of a victory dance going on." -HuffPost-

**************

The hysterics coming from some conservative blogs do nothing to help us understand that yes, in some cases, the government actually can be beneficial.  Health care cost containment is among those areas where government does better than the private sector.

Is The Mandate a Tax?

Is The Mandate a Tax?


"There’s a technical and a subjective answer. The technical answer is yes. The Court found that, by requiring people to either buy insurance or pay money to the IRS, the mandate functions like a tax, and is thus a valid exercise of the taxing power.

'The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,' the controlling opinion reads. 'Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.'

But the taxing power also justifies other Obama-era measures like his 2009 cigarette tax — an incentive for people to quit smoking — and only the most fervent anti-tax activists characterize that as a 'tax increase on the American people' or the middle class.

The mandate is even less direct than the cigarette, and both the Court and Democrats have been clear that the intent is not to raise revenue by raising people’s taxes, but to provide people an incentive to buy subsidized health insurance. In other words, unlike income and payroll taxes, it’s a penalty.

And indeed, the Court relied on this more subjective understanding of the mandate’s intent in deciding to rule on the merits of the case at all. A 19th century law called the Anti-Injunction Act protects the government from challenges to taxes that have yet to be assessed. But even though the mandate doesn’t take effect until 2014 — and even though the majority declared it a valid use of the taxing power — they held that the Anti-Injunction Act did not apply.

The Anti-Injunction Act applies to suits 'for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax,' the Court determined. 'Congress, however, chose to describe the ‘[s]hared responsibility payment’ imposed on those who forgo health insurance not as a ‘tax,’ but as a ‘penalty.’ … There is no immediate reason to think that a statute applying to ‘any tax’ would apply to a ‘penalty.’ Congress’s decision to label this exaction a ‘penalty’ rather than a ‘tax’ is significant because the Affordable Care Act describes many other exactions it creates as taxes.'

Intent matters. And the Court essentially held that the law’s authors created something that functions like a tax, but serves the purposes of a penalty."

**********

"The health insurance mandate upheld today by the Supreme Court will impact roughly 26 million Americans, or 8 percent of the population, according to a recent study by the Urban Institute and an independent analysis by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who advised both Mitt Romney and President Obama on health care law.

Those individuals will be required to obtain coverage or pay a fine starting in 2014.

Not everyone will be forced to pay out of pocket, however. Here’s how it breaks down – courtesy of the Urban Institute:

– 8.1 million will be eligible for free/close-to-free insurance through expansion of Medicaid under the law.

– 10.9 million will have to purchase coverage but receive subsidies to help with premiums

– 7.3 million (2 percent of population) will not be eligible for any assistance and will simply have to buy a plan or pay the penalty.

Look at it the other way, the mandate will not directly impact most Americans. Two hundred fifty million out of 268 million non-elderly folks, or 94 percent, of Americans already have insurance coverage through an employer or the government and don’t face the penalty or having to buy a new plan." ---ABC News



 "...the ruling is both a political and a constitutional landmark. It bestows a measure of validation on President Obama's legislative achievement after two years of relentless attacks and casts a new light on Chief Justice Roberts—a George W. Bush appointee whom some Democrats had pegged as a Republican partisan—reaching across the ideological divide even while reinforcing some long-standing conservative principles." --Wall Street Journal



Who's Exempt From the 2014 Mandate?


The mandate is not a tax on the middle class or anyone else who is responsible and has health insurance coverage.  It is a tax penalty for those who act irresponsibly and do not purchase health insurance and use the emergency room of a hospital while everyone pays for that service.  Those who cannot afford coverage will receive help.

I thought conservatives were for individual responsibility.  This forces people to be responsible and not pass the onus of providing health care to people who do the responsible thing and obtain health coverage.


Last note:

Here are a couple of observations by the loyal opposition.  The apocalypic language these two characters use illustrates the extent of their infantile colic in extremis, not the end of America.

"This is the greatest destruction of individual liberty since Dred Scott. This is the end of America as we know it. No exaggeration."
— benshapiro (@benshapiro) June 28, 2012

Yeah, right ben.  No exaggeration. 




"Republican from Indiana Mike Pence, a gubernatorial candidate, “likened the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Democratic health care law to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to several sources present” reported Politico. In other words, it was an act of terrorism and ranked up there with killing several thousand people."

Really.  They need to go to a quiet room and suck on a binky.

Michael Savage, a much admired conservative radio hate jockey had this to say today about Chief Justice Roberts:

"Let's talk about Roberts," Savage said. "I'm going to tell you something that you're not gonna hear anywhere else, that you must pay attention to. It's well known that Roberts, unfortunately for him, has suffered from epileptic seizures. Therefore he has been on medication. Therefore neurologists will tell you that medication used for seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, can introduce mental slowing, forgetfulness and other cognitive problems. And if you look at Roberts' writings you can see the cognitive disassociation (sic) in what he is saying..."


We can always count on Savage to say the most jaw-dropping, cringe-inducing moronic rant.  But today, the darling of the conservatives outdid himself by mocking the Chief Justice's illness and suggesting he's lost his mental abilities.  Because in the oatmeal gruel that passes for his brain, that's the only reason for Roberts' decision.

Andrew Breitbart would have been so proud.  This is the sort of political discourse he loved. 

Question:  Has Bill O'Reilly apologized yet for being an idiot?

O’Reilly predicted that the law would be struck down: “It’s going to be five-to-four. And, if I’m wrong, I will come on and I will… apologize for being an idiot.”

OBAMACARE IS CONSTITUTIONAL

photo:  Andrew Sullivan's blog.



What Liberal Media?

I didn't expect that decision.  I believed it would go 5/4 against Obamacare.

This is an important win for  President Obama.  I'd read on various news blogs and from pundits that if Obamacare were ruled unConstitutional, it would have implied that the president wasted the first half of his presidency on pursuing health care reform.  And in turn that would have made Mr. Obama a loser in some voters' eyes.  Now he's seen as a winner, again, and no more can his opponents label him as amateur or not knowing what he's doing.  He deserves to be acknowledged as a very, very savvy politician.  Good going for President Obama, and good for all Americans who have been helped by Obamacare.  --SK



HuffPost:

"WASHINGTON -- The individual health insurance mandate is constitutional, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, upholding the central provision of President Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act.

The controlling opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld the mandate as a tax, although concluded it was not valid as an exercise of Congress' commerce clause power. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined in the outcome
.
The decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius comes as something of a surprise after the generally hostile reception the law received during the six hours of oral arguments held over three days in March. But by siding with the court's four Democratic appointees, Chief Justice Roberts avoided the delegitimizing taint of politics that surrounds a party-line vote while passing Obamacare's fate back to the elected branches. GOP candidates and incumbents will surely spend the rest of the 2012 campaign season running against the Supreme Court and for repeal of the law.

Five justices concluded that the mandate, which requires virtually all Americans to obtain minimum health insurance coverage or pay a penalty, falls within Congress' power under the Constitution to 'lay and collect taxes.'

'The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress's power under the Commerce Clause,' Roberts wrote. 'That Clause authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, not to order individuals to engage in it. In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax.'



Victory for Obama, but Ruling Limits Medicaid Provision

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.       

"In a victory for President Obama and Congressional Democrats, the Supreme Court on Thursday left standing the basic provisions of the health care overhaul, ruling that the government may use its taxation powers to push people to buy insurance."

From Talking Points Memo:

Today’s Ironies

1. Conservatives devastated that Chief Justice Roberts chose path of judicial restraint.

2. According to today’s statement, Mitt Romney supports virtually every provision of ‘Obamacare’ other than the mandate that he pioneered.


Interesting observation from the daily kos:

"As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito,” reads the ‘Courts & The Constitution’ section of Romney’s campaign website.

So to recap, Republicans nominated the Father of Obamacare, and has pledged to nominate justices in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts, who upheld Obamcare."

Now go eat your broccoli, it's not only good for you, it's Constitutional, too.

Pennsylvania GOP State Legislator Reveals Real Motive Behind GOP Voter ID Laws

 "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

Apparently the GOPers don't feel it's necessary to deceive the public on the non-issue of voter fraud.  Their pols are so confident of disenfranchising traditional Democratic voters that they are now pubicly voicing the real motives behind their Voter ID legislation.

At a recent Republican state committee meeting...

"House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny) suggested that the House’s end game in passing the Voter ID law was to benefit the GOP politically.


'We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we’ve talked about for years,' said Turzai in a speech to committee members Saturday. He mentioned the law among a laundry list of accomplishments made by the GOP-run legislature.


'Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.'


The statement drew a loud round of applause from the audience. It also struck a nerve among critics, who called it an admission that they passed the bill to make it harder for Democrats to vote — and not to prevent voter fraud as the legislators claimed.


'Instead of working to create jobs and get our economy back on track, Mike Turzai and the Republicans in Harrisburg have been laser focused on a partisan agenda that simply helps their donors and political allies,' said PA Dems spokesman Mark Nicastre.


'Mike Turzai’s admission that Voter ID only serves the partisan interests of his party should be shocking, but unfortunately it isn’t. Democrats are focused on protecting Pennsylvanians’ rights to vote, and we are working hard to ensure that everyone who is eligible to vote can vote this fall.'
Turzai spokesman Stephen Miskin said voter fraud is a real problem.


'Do you remember Joe Cheeseboro?' he asked, reiterating that election fraud has occurred in PA and across the nation.


'Rep. Turzai was speaking at a partisan, political event. He was simply referencing, for the first time in a long while, the Republican Presidential candidate will be on a more even keel thanks to Voter ID…Anyone looking further into it has their own agenda.'


Sen. Daylin Leach (D-Montco), one of the loudest critics of Voter ID, disagreed. He said that in order to justify the scope of the Voter ID law, and the hundreds of thousands of people who will be prevented from voting under its provisions, would require hundreds of Joe Cheeseboro cases.


'This is making clear to everyone what Voter ID was all about. This is about one thing: disenfranchising Democratic voters and rigging elections for Republicans,' Leach said. 'When they get behind closed doors, they admit it. And that’s exactly what Turzai did.'  ”


We can thank Turzai for exposing to the country the real reasons behind voter ID laws:

Policy Brief on the Truth About “Voter Fraud”
Analysis

[PDF]

Summary

* Fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare.
* Many vivid anecdotes of purported voter fraud have been proven false or do not demonstrate fraud.
* Voter fraud is often conflated with other forms of election misconduct.
* Raising the unsubstantiated specter of mass voter fraud suits a particular policy agenda.
* Claims of voter fraud should be carefully tested before they become the basis for action.

Fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare. Most citizens who take the time to vote offer their legitimate signatures and sworn oaths with the gravitas that this hard-won civic right deserves. Even for the few who view voting merely as a means to an end, however, voter fraud is a singularly foolish way to attempt to win an election. Each act of voter fraud risks five years in prison and a $10,000 fine - but yields at most one incremental vote. The single vote is simply not worth the price.

Because voter fraud is essentially irrational, it is not surprising that no credible evidence suggests a voter fraud epidemic. There is no documented wave or trend of individuals voting multiple times, voting as someone else, or voting despite knowing that they are ineligible. Indeed, evidence from the microscopically scrutinized 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington State actually reveals just the opposite: though voter fraud does happen, it happens approximately 0.0009% of the time. The similarly closely-analyzed 2004 election in Ohio revealed a voter fraud rate of 0.00004%. National Weather Service data shows that Americans are struck and killed by lightning about as often.

SOURCE

"YOU LIE!"

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche


Observers of the recent GOP presidential debates, and now the the presidential campaign, are scratching their heads over the blatant lies that candidate Romeny chooses to tell.  Among the easily disproved [and they have been by research] are Romeny's continuous lie about Mr. Obama's "Apology Tour," and saying Mr. Obama has increased the deficit.

Both of those lies have been exposed, but that doesn't stop Romeny from repeating them.  Most disturbing is when he's confronted with evidence of his lying, Romney lies about having spread the lie. 

This article tries to explain and understand this sort of mendacity:


"...presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.

[skip]

My personal favorite in Romney's cavalcade of untruths is his repeated assertion that President Obama has apologized for America. In his book, appropriately titled "No Apologies", Romney argues the following:

'Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable.'

Nothing about this sentence is true.

********

PolitiFact has give that particular Romney lie a "Pants-on-Fire!" rating, yet a number of people on the right continue to believe the lie.

PolitiFact:

Our ruling

Some of the Obama speeches that Romney cited in his book certainly laid out Obama’s foreign policy ideas, and it seems fair to say that a less confrontational approach was among Obama’s goals. Obama had made no secret during the campaign that he intended to set a different course on foreign policy than Bush -- a committed unilateralist -- had pursued.

Still, we think it’s incorrect for Romney to portray these early speeches as part of a global apology tour. Using Romney’s standard, you could argue that any change in foreign policy that’s undertaken after a presidential transition and announced to the world would constitute an "apology" for the previous policy.

On the substance of Romney’s charge, we believe that what we wrote in March 2010 still stands. While Obama's speeches contained some criticisms of past U.S. actions, those passages were typically leavened by praise for the United States and its ideals, and he frequently mentioned how other countries have erred as well. We found not a single, full-throated apology in the bunch. And on the new angle Romney has added -- that the trips were intended to offer the president a forum to apologize to other countries -- we think it’s a ridiculous charge. There’s a clear difference between changing policies and apologizing, and Obama didn’t do the latter. So we rate Romney’s statement Pants on Fire."


Romney also likes to argue that the stimulus didn't help private-sector job growth, but rather helped preserve government jobs.

Michael Cohen continues:

"In fact, the Obama years have been witness to massive cuts in government employment. While the private sector is not necessarily "doing fine", as Obama said in a recent White House press conference, it's doing a heck of a lot better than the public sector.

And the list goes on. Romney has accused Obama of raising taxes – in reality, they've gone down under his presidency, and largely because of that stimulus bill that Romney loves to criticize. He's accused the president of doubling the deficit. In fact, it's actually gone down on Obama's watch.

Romney took credit for the success of the auto bailout – even though he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt". He's said repeatedly that businesses in America see Obama as the "enemy", and that under his presidency "free enterprise" and economic freedom" are at risk of disappearing. In reality, since taking office, corporate profits, industrial production and the stock market are up, while corporate bankruptcies have actually decreased."

[skip]

"Now, it's certainly true that on the campaign trail, facts can be stretched in many different directions – and both parties, including President Obama, frequently make arguments that are misleading, lacking in context or simply false. But it is virtually unheard of for a politician to lie with such reckless abandon and appear completely unconcerned about getting caught.

Back in the old days (that is, pre-2008) it would have been considered unimaginable that a politician would lie as brazenly as Romney does – for fear of embarrassment or greater scrutiny. When Joe Biden was accused of plagiarizing British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock's speeches in 1988, it derailed his presidential aspirations. When Al Gore was accused of exaggerating his role in "inventing the internet" (which, actually, was sort of true), it became a frequent attack line that hamstrung his credibility. Romney has done far worse than either of these candidates – yet it's hard to discern the negative impact on his candidacy.

Romney has figured out a loophole – one can lie over and over, and those lies quickly become part of the political narrative, practically immune to "fact-checking". Ironically, the more Romney lies, the harder it then becomes to correct the record. Even if an enterprising reporter can knock down two or three falsehoods, there are still so many more that slip past.

It's reminiscent of the old line that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. In Romney's case, his lies are regularly corrected by media sources, but usually, in some antiseptic fact-checking article, or by Democratic/liberal voices who can be dismissed for their "partisan bent". Meanwhile, splashed across the front page of newspapers is Romney saying "Obamacare will lead to a government take-over of healthcare"; "Obama went on an apology tour"; or "the stimulus didn't create any jobs". Because, after all, it's what the candidate said and reporters dutifully must transcribe it."

No Evidence President Obama or Anyone at the White House Involved -- Darrell Issa

WASHINGTON -- House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) contradicted House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Sunday, saying that Congress has found no evidence that President Barack Obama or anyone at the White House had participated in a cover-up involving the Fast and Furious scandal.


On Thursday, Boehner said that the Obama administration's decision to invoke executive privilege to prevent the release of some documents about the program Issa had requested was "an admission that White House officials were involved in the decision that misled the Congress and covered up the truth."


During an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," host Chris Wallace asked Issa whether he had "any evidence" that the White House had been involved with the matter.


"No, we don't," Issa said.


The Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms apparently allowed some gun sales in Arizona to known Mexican criminals. Two of the guns involved were found at the scene of a firefight in which U.S. Customs Agent Brian Terry was killed.

In February 2011, DOJ sent a letter to Congress denying such sales, but retracted that claim in December. It is not clear if either Attorney General Eric Holder or President Barack Obama were aware of the program, and Issa acknowledged Sunday that he has not found evidence Holder was involved.


"I did not say that Eric Holder always knew," Issa said.


But the investigation has devolved into a bizarre, complex conspiracy theory, which Issa and other congressional Republicans have suggested the Obama administration hatched in order to impose new gun control regulations. By inciting gun violence in Mexico, the theory goes, the administration hoped to spark a controversy that would build public support for gun control.


In April, Issa presented the case at a National Rifle Association conference.

Source

This report from The Huffington Post and the following, supplied by Dave Miller, will disappoint those who were hoping this issue would destroy Mr. Obama's presidency.

Strawberry Pie

Shaw's homemade strawberry pie

One of the joys of summer is the abundance of berries in the marketplace. Here's a simple recipe for a lucious dessert that not only looks beautiful, but is a taste delight. It's easy to make with just a few ingredients so that the berries are the real star in this dessert.



Strawberry pie:

1 9-inch pie crust, baked


2 16-oz containers of fresh strawberries

1 cup water


1 cup, full, sliced strawberries


3/4 cup sugar


3 Tablespoons cornstarch

sprig of mint

Wash and hull the strawberries, reserve the biggest for the pie. Set aside one cup of strawberries for slicing.

Mix the sugar and constarch together and set aside.

Bring the cup of water to a boil in a saucepan. Place the 1 cup of sliced strawberries in the boiling water and bring to the boil again and cook for a minute until soft. (I use a masher to mash them to a pulp). Remove from heat and push the mash through a strainer over a bowl.

Return the strawberry liquid to the saucepan and add the sugar/cornstarch mixture. Bring to a gentle boil and stir until the liquid becomes translucent. Remove from heat.

Arrange one layer of strawberries in the pre-baked pie crust. Pour half the strawberry sauce over them. Arrange a top layer of the best looking strawberries and pour remaining strawberry sauce over them. Chill for an hour, top with a sprig of mint, and serve with whipped cream if you wish.

Quick and beautiful.

Darrell Issa is Accelerated and Ablaze

UPDATE:  Thanks to commenter, Leslie, for this link to a real analysis by John Cook over at Gawker of what Issa is really up to.


More on Darrell Issa's Oversight Committee to Elect Willard Romney:

From Digby:

Whatever happened to "guns don't kill people, people kill people?"by digby

I haven't followed the Fast and Furious pseudo scandal all that closely because it seemed so unlikely to me that it could be the one to metastasize into a Village feeding frenzy. Why? Well, here's a concise description of the case:


It honestly never occurred to me that the right could turn this one into a cause celebre. After all, haven't we been told for decades that "guns don't kill people, people kill people?" Of all the hissy fits they might stage, freaking out over the origin of some guns just slays me. This has to be the only crime in history in which these right wing gun fetishists give a damn about the fact that guns got in the hands of criminals and someone was killed.

These are the same people who cheered this, after all:

Ashcroft ordered that all government lists — including voter registration, immigration and driver's license lists — be checked for links to terrorists. But there was one list Ashcroft did not want used - the gun purchasers background check.

Every person who buys a gun from a dealer must pass an instant criminal background check. It's called the National Instant Criminal Background check system or NICS. The records of those checks are kept by the FBI. After September 11th, the ATF wanted to review those records to see if any suspected terrorists had bought guns.

They wanted to know whether any of them had slipped through the system. The Department of Justice stepped in and stopped the FBI in their tracks. The Department of Justice said no, you can't do that. You can't use the records of approved gun purchasers in connection with a criminal investigation.

Attorney General John Ashcroft told the FBI to stop checking the NICS list...That mirrors the position of the National Rifle Association, which insists that the data collected when people buy guns is an invasion of privacy.

Even in the immediate wake of 9/11,
the thought of terrorists getting their hands on guns didn't bother them. These are not people who normally lose sleep over gun violence of any kind.

Now, they have floated a rationale for their extremely unusual exception to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people rule" but it's so stupid it's hard to imagine that even Darrell Issa would believe it:

Allowing drug cartels to get their hands on American weapons was an elaborate scheme to confiscate Americans' guns.

Meanwhile, in the congress you've got the nation's greatest braintrusts on the case:

Issa's close colleague, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who has been equally zealous on Fast and Furious, was blunt about his goal. "The only think I want out of this is somebody's scalp that approved this," Grassley said on Fox News earlier this month. "They should just have to get out of government and be held responsible . . . because their decisions led to the death of Terry."

I'll be looking forward to Grassley's call for the heads of those who provided the guns to the next campus or workplace mass killer. '

It gets even more interesting:

  "The Merida Initiative is the, and was the, basis for the 2008 HR-6028 Bill which specifically funded "Project Gunrunner."

Darrell Issa pretends he has never heard of Project Gunrunner, yet in 2008 he specifically voted to fund Project Gunrunner.

Apparently, there is more than just a huge connection between Merida Initiative and Project Gunrunner whereby Project Gunrunner funding, per HR-6028, is directly enveloped into the Merida Initiative.

In October 2007, President Bush and Mexico's President Calderon announced the Mérida Initiative, is a Billions of dollar aid package to support President Calderón's war on drugs by, among other things, sending military grade weapons and helicopters to Mexico. Project Gunrunner was Legislated into the Merida Initiative through HR-6028 in 2008. After ample Congressional debate on conditionality and appropriations, the US Congress approved the initiative in HR-6028 without any strings attached.
 
IMPORTANT FACTS:

1) Rep. Darrell Issa voted "yes" specifically to Fund: "Project Gunrunner" in June 2008.2) In January 2008: ATF went to Congress and asked Congress to Fund Project Gunrunner for 3 years.
3) In 2008, HR-6028 combined "Project Gunrunner" with the "Merida Initiative" also known as the "Merida Program."
4) The Title of the Bill HR-6028 is:
Assistance for Mexico and Central America for Anti-Drug Programs (Merida Program)
5) A SubSection of the Bill HR-6028 is Titled: PROJECT GUNRUNNER INITIATIVE
6) Among other things, Project Gunrunner is directly funded through Merida Initiative
7) In 2007 the Congress held hearings on Merida Initiative
8) Merida Initiative is complicated because it is an initiative that crosses through: Homeland Security, Secretary of State, ATF, FBI & DoJ.

Merida is kind of like an octopus as Merida has many tentacles that go through many different areas of US security departments.

The notion that Darrell Issa had never heard of Project Gunrunner is bullsh!t since Issa voted "yes" to specifically fund Project Gunrunner in 2008."

**********

I brought Issa's background into the post below this one, and then was asked by some of my commenters why that was necessary. 

This question was posed by members of a political faction that has ceaselessly examined every minutia of President Obama's background, starting with his astounding ability to be born in Kenya and then magically transported to Hawaii in order to receive a forged birth certificate, all the way to his Vietnam draft dodging days as a 6 year old child.

"Fast and Furious" Makes Stephen Colbert "Quickly Angry"

Stephen Colbert, as usual, puts the Darrell Issa* Show in perspective:


*Via Wikipeda:

A retired Army sergeant claimed that Issa stole a Dodge sedan from an Army post near Pittsburgh in 1971. The sergeant said he recovered the car after confronting and threatening him. Issa denied the allegation and no charges were filed.

In 1972, Issa and his brother allegedly stole a red Maserati sports car from a car dealership in Cleveland. He and his brother were indicted for car theft, but the case was dropped.

That same year, Issa was convicted in Michigan for possession of an unregistered gun. He received three months probation and paid a $204 fine. [...]

On December 28, 1979, Issa and his brother allegedly faked the theft of Issa's Mercedes Benz sedan. Issa and his brother were charged for grand theft auto, but the case was dropped by prosecutors for lack of evidence. Later, Issa and his brother were charged for misdemeanors, but that case was not pursued by prosecutors.

Issa accused his brother of stealing the car, and said that the experience with his brother was the reason he went into the car alarm business.

A day after a court order was issued, giving Issa control of automotive alarm company A.C. Custom over an unpaid $60,000 debt, Issa allegedly carried a cardboard box containing a handgun into the office of A.C. Custom executive, Jack Frantz, and told Frantz he was fired.

In a 1998 newspaper article, Frantz said Issa had invited him to hold the gun and claimed extensive knowledge of guns and explosives from his Army service.

In response, Issa said, "Shots were never fired. ... I don't recall having a gun. I really don't. I don't think I ever pulled a gun on anyone in my life."  [Issa claims "shots were never fired" but then says he didn't recall having a gun?]


From "The National Memo":

"Stirring extreme partisanship together with rightist paranoia, Rep. Darrell Issa and his Republican colleagues on the House Government Operations Committee have transformed a legitimate investigation into a breach of Constitutional authority and a danger to law enforcement. With Wednesday’s vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt – for refusing to turn over every document demanded in the committee’s probe of the Justice Department’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning sting – the reckless Issa invited attention to his own aims and tactics, which cannot withstand much scrutiny.



There was little expectation of scrupulous conduct from Issa, who upon assuming the committee chair announced plans to hold “seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks” to “measure [the] failure” of the Obama administration. While he hasn’t achieved that supersized goal, his blustering tone was telling. He has turned a sober and important committee into a parody of Fox Nation. And now with his most ambitious probe unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing by Holder, he is abusing Congressional power to distract from his own failure.

The Fast and Furious fiasco originated during the Bush administration, when agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms decided to track illegal gun sales by U.S. dealers to Mexican drug cartels by allowing weapons to be “walked” across the border. The agents hoped that with the cooperation of Mexican police, they would be able to make major conspiracy cases rather than merely arresting a few dealers or smugglers. But the operation blew up when two of the weapons permitted to be “walked” by a small-time dealer were identified at an Arizona shootout where a Border Patrol agent was killed."





More here.

There's no question that Congressman Issa has a "colorful" backround.


Fringy Fraud: Darrell Issa’s Fast and Furious Exposed