Krauthammer Blasts Conservatives for Their Support of Bundy

I think it's "truly appalling" that I agree with Krauthammer, but there it is:

Krauthammer Blasts Conservatives For Their Support Of Cliven Bundy

Krauthammer: It's "Truly Appalling" That Anti-Government Stances Can Make You "A Conservative Hero"

"This is a despicable statement. It's not the statement, you have to disassociate yourself entirely from the man. It's not like the words exist here and the man exists here. And why conservatives, or some conservatives end up in bed with people who, you know, he makes an anti-government statement, he takes an anti-government stand, he wears a nice big hat and he rides a horse, and all of a sudden he is a champion of democracy. This is a man who said that he doesn't recognize the authority of the United States of America. That makes him a patriot? I love this country, I love the Constitution, and it is the Constitution that established a government that all of us have to recognize. And for him to reject it was the beginning of all of this. And now what he said today is just the end of this. ...

And look, do I have the right to go in to graze sheep in Central Park? I think not. You have to have some respect for the federal government, some respect for our system. And to say you don't and you don't recognize it and that makes you a conservative hero, to me, is completely contradictory, and rather appalling. And he has now proved it."



NOTE:   Very few conservative blogs wrote anything about Bundy's rancid racism.  Now THAT's truly appalling, especially since so many of them were crowing about how Bundy was their very own anti-gummint hero.

History of US government and rebellions:

See:   Shay's Rebellion and Whiskey Rebellion

Cliven Bundy talks about "the Negro."

Here's the extreme right's hero talking about his opinion of "the Negro."   You go Cliven.  Let the world see what a fascinating mind you have:



Bundy: "I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro…


They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,” Bundy was quoted as saying to a group of supporters last Saturday. “And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.” 





There's so much stupidity and ignorance in that Cliven Bundy statement that it is difficult to believe anyone could utter such imbecilic claptrap. But there it is. He's the extreme Right's hero, in all his miserable bigotry and idiocy.






Bundy’s statements about “the Negro,” published on Wednesday, were made during his daily speech to supporters outside Bunkerville, Nevada, where a crowd gathered to support him in defiance of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during an attempted round up of his cattle. 

The confrontation was the result of Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees on federally-owned land for more than 20 years, in spite of multiple court rulings against him. 

Bundy has stated on several occasions that he does not recognize the existence of the federal government.



 Roger Ailes owns Cliven Bundy now: How dumb opportunism became a right-wing nightmare

A Zany Night in Georgia

Georgia Governor Signs 'Unprecedented' Gun Rights Bill



Bang!  Bang! Bang!  Bang!  Bang! Bang!   Pew! Pew! Pew! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Pew! Pew! Pew!  Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Bang! Bang! Bang!  Bang! Pew! Pew! Pew!Pew! Pew! Bang!  Bang!  Wimper





 "House Bill 60, which passed in the final hours of this year’s legislative session, allows Georgians to legally carry firearms in a wide range of new places, including schools, bars, churches and government buildings [and certain areas of airports]. 

A recent analysis also said it could let felons use the state’s “stand your ground” rules to claim self-defense if they feel threatened. Critics have dubbed it the “guns everywhere” bill for its broad scope, and opponents including former Rep. Gabby Giffords have tried to block its passage. 

Supporters have flooded Deal’s office with pleas to sign the measure, which the National Rifle Association called “the most comprehensive pro-gun reform bill in state history.” There was never serious doubt that he would sign it, though. The powerful gun rights lobby has made it their top priority, and Deal doesn’t want to give his two GOP primary challengers any opening. 

Even Democratic state Sen. Jason Carter, his party’s nominee for governor, voted for the bill. Echoing Deal, Carter told MSNBC this week that he believed he helped “make the bill better than it was when it first started.” 

Deal, for his part, tried to downplay the warnings from critics that the law could endanger police officers and lead to more violence."

States With the Most Gun Violence By Samuel Weigley April 15, 2013
  
Georgia:  

Firearm homicide deaths per 100,000: 4.57 (9th highest) 

Firearm  and aggravated assaults per 100,000: 58.64 (13th highest)

Violent crime rate per 100,000: 373.2 (21st highest) 

Need permit to purchase handgun: No 



Why'd they leave out maternity delivery rooms and nurseries for newborns?  Why not bring little Josh and Emily into the world and place a Glock 41 in their precious newborn hands?  Hell, why not guns for our dogs and cats? Our parakeets?  Free guns for every American man, woman, and child and goat!  An armed population is a safe population, and the 33,000 deaths a year (the highest in any developed nation on the planet) proves how safe firearms keep us!  


The Rime of the Ancient Grim Reaper

Day after day, day after day, 
We shoot, our flesh, our bones
As wild as the wild west 
In new wild west zones. 

Guns, guns, every where, 
And all the innocents died; 
Guns, guns, every where, 
The bloody N.R.A.'s pride.

(apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Bang!  Bang! Bang!  Bang!  Bang! Bang!   Pew! Pew! Pew! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!   Pew! Pew! Pew!     Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Bang! Bang! Bang!  Bang! Pew! Pew! Pew! Bang! Bang! Wimper

Bundy Follies

Cliven Bundy and the Tyranny All Around Us How would the Nevada standoff be different if the rancher were black? 

American history has already answered that question.

Earth Day 2014

Love Your Mother --  Earth Day 2014

Earth Day began in 1970, when 20 million people across the United States—that's one in ten—rallied for increased protection of the environment. "It was really an eye-opening experience for me," Gina McCarthy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who was a self-described self-centered teenager during the first Earth Day rallies, told National Geographic.   

"Not only were people trying to influence decisions on the Vietnam War," she recalled, "but they were beginning to really focus attention on issues like air pollution, the contamination they were seeing in the land, and the need for federal action."


Owen Ullman, USAToday: 

 "To grasp how much attitudes about the environmental movement have changed over the past 44 years, consider a resolution the Daughters of the American Revolution passed to rebut Earth Day in 1970: "The real problem of pollution of our environment is being distorted and exaggerated by emotional declarations and by intensive propaganda." 

 Tuesday, as we observe another Earth Day, there is broad public support for cleaner air and water, and as a nation we have taken dramatic steps to improve the environment. The coming challenge is what to do about climate change, which a nearly unanimous collection of scientists says is real and potentially calamitous if we don't act now to reduce greenhouse gases."

Six Years Later

May All Your Bunnies Be Chocolate

"And they lost."

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo: 


"On Obamacare, the Republican party has bet big on failure for four years. Now the results are in. And they lost. Big time. Of course, substance policy success and political outcomes aren't the same thing. And just as importantly they do not always run on the same time scale. So it is entirely possible. I would say it is likely that the GOP will still derive benefits this November from the core of voters who are extremely upset about Obamacare, extremely motivated to vote and also happen to be the same people who routinely turn out in disproportionate numbers in mid-term elections. But on the core of the policy, which I think there is good reason to believe will align with political outcomes in the future, the results are in. 


And they lost."

"A republic...if you can keep it."

At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Franklin was queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation. In the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention, a lady asked Dr. Franklin “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy.” Franklin replied, “A republic . . . if you can keep it.”


According to a new Princeton study, 227 years later, we didn't keep our republic:



Asking "[w]ho really rules?" researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page argue that over the past few decades America's political system has slowly transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most power. 

Using data drawn from over 1,800 different policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, the two conclude that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will of the majority of voters. 

 "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy," they write, "while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence." 

As one illustration, Gilens and Page compare the political preferences of Americans at the 50th income percentile to preferences of Americans at the 90th percentile as well as major lobbying or business groups. They find that the government—whether Republican or Democratic—more often follows the preferences of the latter group rather than the first. 

 The researches note that this is not a new development caused by, say, recent Supreme Court decisions allowing more money in politics, such as Citizens United or this month's ruling on McCutcheon v. FEC. 

As the data stretching back to the 1980s suggests, this has been a long term trend, and is therefore harder for most people to perceive, let alone reverse. "Ordinary citizens," they write, "might often be observed to 'win' (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail."




Thomas Jefferson:

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”  

"There are over 18,000 ranchers who lease western BLM lands. 

The permits and rates were set by presidential executive order (R. Reagan)- 

'The Federal grazing fee, which applies to Federal lands in 16 Western states on public lands managed by the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, is adjusted annually and is calculated by using a formula originally set by Congress in the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978. 

Under this formula, as modified and extended by a presidential Executive Order issued in 1986, the grazing fee cannot fall below $1.35 per animal unit month (AUM); also, any fee increase or decrease cannot exceed 25 percent of the previous year’s level. (An AUM is the amount of forage needed to sustain one cow and her calf, one horse, or five sheep or goats for a month.) The grazing fee for 2014 is $1.35 per AUM, the same level as it was in 2013'  

For the most part, the arrangement has been mutually successful, most ranchers love the land as much as anyone, the rates are low, the land is shared with fishermen, hunters and campers and the 'rent' goes to its upkeep."    --BB-Idaho, P.E. commenter

Idaho Rancher, Bud Purdy, Emblematic Man of the West

While the extremists on the right hold Cliven Bundy up as their "hero," Joan McCarter tells us about her grandfather, Bud Purdy, an Idaho Rancher who is truly the embodiment of decency and patriotism.

Bud Purdy deserves our admiration, not Cliven Bundy.



By Joan McCarter:

"Being a Westerner and the daughter and granddaughter of cattle ranchers, I think it's about time that the non-crazy Western ranchers get some equal national media time. Because they're not all federal government-hating, "wise use," sagebrush rebelling, gun-toting crazies—even in a state like Idaho. One of Idaho's most influential cattle ranchers, and conservationists is proof of that. His name was Bud Purdy, and in his 96 years, he became sort of a legend in the state. Unfortunately, he passed away this week, but this remembrance from the Idaho Stateman's Rocky Barker tells the story.

Purdy, 96, led the ranching industry into rest and rotation grazing on public lands that both protected the range and improved cattle production.

 He duck-hunted and skied with Ernest Hemingway and hosted Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper at his Picabo Ranch.

He helped start the Idaho Cattle Association, led the University of Idaho Foundation as president and was chairman of the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry. In addition to the ranch, he and his late wife Ruth owned the Picabo Store, the Picabo Elevator and Silver Creek Supply, a seed business. […]

  Purdy donated a 3,500-acre conservation easement on all of the ranch along Silver Creek in the 1990s to the Nature Conservancy, adjacent to its own Silver Creek Preserve. Purdy didn’t even take the tax break on the easement valued at $7 million. […]

  He loved the cattle business, he explained to writer, producer and author Steve Stuebner in an article in 2012 for the Idaho Rangeland Commission (which he co-founded). "Every morning, you get up and do something different," he said. "You turn out on the range and ride a horse every day.

 Even now, I go out and make sure the water is OK, check the fences and make sure the gates are closed. "It's just a constant going out there and doing it," Purdy said. "I was never a cowboy, but I've ridden a million miles."

As one of my good friends here in Idaho wrote on Facebook, "He loved his land so much he owned it and when owning it wasn't enough to preserve it for future generations, he figured out a way to do that.

" Cliven Bundy doesn't represent the West. He doesn't represent cattle ranchers. He represents a minority of right-wing cranks who are good at making a lot of noise through threats of violence. He's also nothing more than a common crook. If you're looking for an emblematic man of the West, it's not Bundy. It's Bud Purdy."

Using Women As Human Shields

The Stupids are at it again:

So how were these brave 2nd Amendment yahoos going to protect Bundy from the federales?

Here's how:   They planned to bring the feds to their knees by using women to shield themselves.


"Oath Keeper Richard Mack told Fox News in an interview that if the Bundy Ranch standoff had continued, or if federal agents started shooting, they planned to put women in front of the men in order to generate sympathy and publicity. 

 TPM: “We were actually strategizing to put all the women up at the front,” Mack said in a Fox News clip pulled by The Blaze. “If they are going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers.” 



"...if things came to a shootin’ war with the Feds — to put all the women out front, so they could bravely get shot first, to prove what monsters the jackbooted federal thugs are. 

This sounds like the sort of perfectly sane thing a great strategic thinker might come up with, and turns out to be the brainchild of former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack, who has a thriving business speaking to assorted wingnut groups and telling them that the true Constitutional power in this country is vested in county sheriffs, not the Federal Government." 

Brilliant.

Bad News For The GOP

A 1993 memo from conservative William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, explains why the GOP waged war on health care reform and all efforts by the Democrats to reform the system.  Here are Kristol's own words about the dangers of a Democratic Party success, and it has nothing to do with helping Americans obtain affordable health care.  It's about political power:



For twenty years, Republicans have feared not that health care reform would fail the American people, but that it would succeed. To put it another way, the GOP was never really concerned about a "government takeover of health care", "rationing", "the doctor-patient relationship" or mythical "death panels," but that an American public grateful for access to health care could provide Democrats with an enduring majority for years to come. 

 But what Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called a "holy war" to block health care reform didn't start when Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, but instead when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. It was then that former Quayle chief of staff and Republican strategist William Kristol warned his GOP allies that a Clinton victory on health care could guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. 

"The Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party," Kristol wrote in his infamous December 3, 1993 memo titled "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal," adding: "Its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government." 

And that, for Kristol, meant it had to be stopped at all costs: 

 "The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat."  --SOURCE

Happily, the only defeat was Kristol's:




Via Daily Kos:

Eugene Robinson:

It’s all over but the shouting: Obamacare is working. All the naysaying in the world can’t drown out mounting evidence that the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, is a real success. Republican candidates running this fall on an anti-Obamacare platform will have to divert voters’ attention from the facts, which tell an increasingly positive story. [...] Why was the Affordable Care Act so desperately needed? Because without it, 54 million Americans would currently have no health insurance. Within three years, according to the CBO, Obamacare will have slashed the problem nearly in half.

 Jason Millman at The Washington Post:

The health-care law's expansion of insurance coverage will cost $104 billion less than projected over the next decade, according to revised estimates from nonpartisan budget analysts Monday. Obamacare's lower-than-expected costs will come largely because premiums will be cheaper than previously thought. [...] The CBO report points out that it previously thought Obamacare's exchange plans would look more like employer-based coverage, but that hasn't turned out to be the case so far — hence, the cheaper premiums. "The plans being offered through the exchanges this year appear to have, in general, lower payment rates for providers, narrower networks of providers, and tighter management of their subscribers’ use of health care than employment-based plans," CBO wrote.

Gods, Guns and Hitler by Capt. Fogg of The Swash Zone

"I have certain misgivings about hate crime laws, but we're reminded this morning -- the eve of Pesach or The Passover, and a week before Hitler's birthday, that people who belong to hate-based organizations and creeds, who post virulent hate messages and calls for extermination on-line, need their constitutional right to keep and bear arms infringed.

I feel quite protective of our guaranteed right to free speech and our right to think what we think, but speech that incites to violence, that creates a mortal danger to the public, is something else and that's been established for a long time. Frazier Glenn Miller is a founding member of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party.  That's not a crime, more's the pity, nor is shouting "Heil Hitler" from the back of a police car, but perhaps we ought to consider making it a felony to belong to groups who advocate murder because as far as I know, it's illegal for felons to own firearms.

I know -- penalties and restrictions don't prevent criminals and especially psychopathic criminals from committing crimes, but there's something wrong with Mr. Miller or Mr. Cross as he often calls himself, to own weapons.  There's something wrong if  the targets of hate groups need to arm themselves or to hire armed guards or to go about in fear because we elevate and protect a right to be armed above the right to remain alive.  We shouldn't have to wait for people like that to run amok before we do anything. Threatening violence against groups or individuals should be sufficient to disarm someone.

Lest one think that being a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant is protection and a reason not to worry, Methodists were shot in this tragedy as well."  --Capt. Fogg

Dear World

Rush haz a sad.

The Hindenberg of Gasbags, Rush Limbaugh, has taken to his fainting couch because Stephen Colbert will take over The Late Show when David Letterman retires:



Limbaugh:

"CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America," Limbaugh said on his radio show Thursday. "No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values [and] conservatives. Now, it's just wide out in the open. What this hire means is a redefinition of what is funny and a redefinition of what is comedy." 

 Colbert said in the announcement that he would retire his faux conservative character from "The Colbert Report" when he starts on CBS. 

However, Limbaugh argued CBS was "blowing up" the traditional, 11:30 p.m. late-night show with a brazenly political hire. It amounted, he said, to the media "planting a flag." "They've hired a partisan, so-called comedian, to run a comedy show," Limbaugh said. "So, that's what I think."




Awwww.

If Limbaugh is p.o'd about this, then it's a spectacularly good thing, and we're thrilled that his tightie whities are uncomfortably bunched up in  his prodigiously large pink posterior.

Rush is upset over Colbert's success? Well that's fabulous for comedy in America; because if there's one thing everyone knows about Limbaugh, it is that he sucks at being funny.  He's embarrassingly lame.   If you have the comedic sophistication of a 12-year old boy, you probably think he's hilarious. But his misogynistic and rascist rants all fall flat on their puerile faces for anyone over their pre-teen years.


Congratulations to Stephen Colbert, one of America's funniest and best.

Former GOP Senator and Head of Heritage Foundation Knows Bupkis About His Heritage

Jim DeMint embarrassed himself and his American history teacher the other day by saying, among other wildly inaccurate things, that the Constitution freed the slaves:


"Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people," DeMint said on "Vocal Point" with Jerry Newcombe of Truth In Action Ministries, as recorded by Right Wing Watch. 

"Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to 'all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights' in the minds of God."

The Constitution was "like the conscience of the American people?"  Hmmm, I thought the Constitution was the basis of the law of the land.

The Constitution didn't call us back to "all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights."  That would be the Declaration of Independence.  And I can't begin to understand what he means when he tacked on "in the minds of God" to that statement.

DeMint added that "big government" did not end slavery, a Republican did. "So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God," he said. 

Right Wing Watch notes that while Lincoln was president, the Republican party was not the states-rights party. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment was initiated by the federal government.

Historian Michael Les Benedict notes that Republicans at the time advocated a “nationalist” view of the Constitution, unlike “the largely state-rights Democratic party.” Abraham Lincoln’s critics, historian Don E. Fehrenbacher points out, pilloried him as a “tyrant” who was “bringing about destruction of the old Union of sovereign states and setting the nation on the road to totalitarianism” by “subverting the rights and powers of the states.” Confederate leaders insisted that the Civil War was a “war waged by the Federal Government against the seceding States.” 

 Lincoln, in fact, greatly expanded the role of the federal government and signed into law the first federal progressive income tax. --SOURCE

This guy was a US Senator and is now the head of a conservative think tank?  

What were they thinking when they hired him?

A River (of insanity) Runs Through It

"It" meaning the GOP:



"In an interview with the Daily Times Herald, Iowa Republican senate candidate Sam Clovis claimed that President Obama’s race is saving him from impeachment. 

 Clovis said, “I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not that what he has done would not rise to the level where it might be impeachable. I don’t think it’s a practical, pragmatic issue. And simply because I don’t think the nation is ready for it.  You know, within this generation, we went through the impeachment of a president, and it didn’t end well, and now we have a situation where race is thrown into the cards as well. Whether we like it or not, race is an issue.” 

Clovis was asked if Obama was white would he be impeached. He answered, “I wouldn’t say that I think people would.” He was asked if he thought the only reason why Congress isn’t going after impeachment is the color of the president’s skin. 

Clovis answered,”I would say there are people in the House of Representatives right now that would very much like to take the opportunity to start the process. And I think the reason that they’re not is because they’re concerned about the media.”


IOW, Clovis believes those people in the House of Representatives (TeaPublicans) are moral cowards with no convictions.  If they believe Mr. Obama has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, why the hell would they be concerned about the media?  Are they not obligated to protect and preserve the Constitution?  Meanwhile Clovis doesn't name one high crime or misdemeanor the president has committed.  He, like other GOP cowards just like to flap their gums about "impeachment."  

Clovis is nuts, of course, and he's found a very comfortable home in the GOP.

In other news, Louie Gohmert (R-Crazy Town) is still making a fool of himself:

Louie Gohmert Hails Mississippi Anti-Gay Law, Attacks 'Intolerant' Gays 


Earlier this year, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) endorsed Arizona’s failed “right-to-discriminate” bill for challenging attempts to “establish the religion of secularism.” 

 In reaction to Mississippi’s enactment a similar law, Gohmert yesterday told Washington Watch host and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins — who stood behind Mississippi’s governor at the bill’s signing ceremony — that he is “so proud of Mississippi and what they’ve done.” 

After Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant came on the show to receive Gohmert’s plaudits, the congressmen called the anti-gay law “a wonderful example of real freedom” and attacked gay rights critics as intolerant: “You’ve seen it first hand, there is nobody more intolerant in this country than those that are screaming for tolerance. 

Christians are not intolerant but whoa, goodness these people that have their leftist agenda that are so intolerant so thanks for having the courage to stand up.”



More GOP insanity here:

Maine Republican Says He’s Qualified To Be A Senator Because Smacking His Wife Around Means He Has Guts (VIDEO)

And Mike Huckabee reaches out to women by insulting and demeaning them:



Mike Huckabee: Men Like to Hunt Together While Women Like To Go To the Bathroom Tgether

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

From Andrew Sullivan's blog:




“Imagine this. Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Elizabeth Warren and multiple lesser Democratic notables travel halfway across the country to kiss the ring of a Palestinian-American billionaire who has shown himself willing to spend tens of millions of dollars subsidizing presidential campaigns. 

The billionaire has some provocative views. Six months earlier, he suggested that if Israel does not end its nuclear weapons program, America should drop an “atomic weapon…in the middle of the [Negev] desert that doesn’t hurt a soul.”   If that doesn’t work, America should drop “the next one…in the middle of” Tel Aviv. 

The billionaire insists that there is no such thing as the Jewish people. It’s a hoax; the Jews “have fooled the world very successfully.” And he declares that “There isn’t a” Jew “alive who wasn’t raised on a curriculum of hatred and hostility toward the” Palestinians. 

Change the words “Democrat” to “Republican,” “Israel” to “Iran” and “Palestinian” to “Jewish,” and that’s exactly what just happened. 

Leading contenders for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination spent last weekend wooing and feting a billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, whose views – if directed at Jews—would put him in the company of Louis Farrakhan and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” – Peter Beinart, Haaretz.

The Sheldon Adelson Suck-Up Fest


",,,in Las Vegas, Sheldon Adelson pulled up to his private airplane hangar in twin powder-blue Maybach limousines. (The second was for his bodyguards.) Inside, the rich and right-wing were gathered to hear from Jeb Bush, a private audience whose exclusivity seemed to signal the former Florida governor's privileged position in the suck-up contest. 

Three other Republican leaders—New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and Ohio Governor John Kasich—were consigned to the public program of the event, which was ostensibly a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. But everybody knew what it was really about: impressing Adelson. 

Like the daughters of King Lear, or the cast of Mean Girls, each sought to outdo the others in his fawning. Christie told of his recent trip to Israel, which, he noted, is "about the same size as New Jersey." Walker mentioned he owns a menorah. Kasich dispensed with the pretense of speaking to the roomful of Republican Jews and addressed his remarks to Adelson directly, as in, “Hey, listen, Sheldon, thanks for inviting me.”



But...but...GEORGE SOROS!

While no one was paying attention, the House Republicans

"...quietly secured a recent change in President Barack Obama’s health law to expand coverage choices, a striking, one-of-a-kind departure from dozens of high-decibel attempts to repeal or dismember it.

Democrats describe the change involving small-business coverage options as a straightforward improvement of the type they are eager to make, and Obama signed it into law. 

Republicans are loath to agree, given the strong sentiment among the rank and file that the only fix the law deserves is a burial. …. 

No member of the House GOP leadership has publicly hailed the fix, which was tucked, at Republicans’ request, into legislation preventing a cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

Reps. John Boehner (R-OH) and Eric Cantor (R-VA) did such a good job of hiding the fix in the bill that many House Republicans might have had no idea that they were voting on this Obamacare fix. Last month, House Republican leaders introduced three fixes to the ACA while their party was distracted by CPAC."  --PoliticusUSA




"Democrats now have a chance to shift the healthcare debate from whether the law should be repealed to how to improve it. Recent polls have found that between 53% and 71% of respondents (depending on how the question is worded) favor keeping the law and fixing it."--Doyle McManus, LATimes




I wonder when Speaker Boehner will hold another vote to repeal the A.C.A.?  It's been a while, and the sheeple in his party need to know that the House Republicans are doing their jobs as good little Kabuki players.

Definition of idiocy:  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. (See above.)





LOL!

Who's Your Daddy Koch?

The Koch brothers' father, Fred Koch:


"The fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. 

Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. 

Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. 

He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. 

Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.” 

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. 

Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. 

“The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. 

Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”


Sound familiar?  Hop over to the conservative blogsphere and read almost those exact words and paranoid accusations about President Obama from conservative bloggers and their fevered commenters. Every other word about the POTUS is "Commie," but here we have the history of the famous Koch brothers and evidence of their Stalinist connection, a connection that was the basis of their "all-American" fortune. 

But here's what we, who do the awful work of reading those blogs, need to understand:  When Conservatives deal with Communists, that's fine!  There's no shame or suspicion attached to their history.  Just remember that, and everything will be O.K,(och)!

Read the rest of this highly informative article here:


The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. 





KOCH FAMILY VALUE EXPRESSED BY DADDY KOCH:

“The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,”

More guns do not make people safer.

After the tragic shooting at Ft. Hood, the national conversation again turned to the relationship between guns and gun deaths.  It doesn't take a genius to see the correlation between the number of guns a country tolerates and the number of deaths that country sustains from those guns.



The United States has more guns and gun deaths than any other developed country in the world, researchers found. 


A study by two New York City cardiologists found that the U.S. has 88 guns per 100 people and 10 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people — more than any of the other 27 developed countries they studied. 

Japan, on the other hand, had only .6 guns per 100 people and .06 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people, making it the country with both the fewest guns per capita and the fewest gun-related deaths. 

Drs. Sripal Bangalore, who works at NYU Langone Medical Center, and Dr. Franz Messerli of St. Luke’s Medical Center studied the statistics of guns per capita and gun deaths. They used firearm injury data from the World Health Organization and guns per capita data from the Small Arms Survey to put together a list of 27 developed countries. 

They said they carried out their study because of what they said are seemingly baseless claims on either side of the gun control debate. “I think we need more of what I would call evidence-based discussion and not merely people pulling things out of their hats,” Bangalore said. 

“We hear time and time again about these shootings, especially in the last year or so. A lot of claims are made…so we wanted to look at the data and see if any of this holds water.” 

They concluded that more guns do not make people safer.

GO HERE TO SEE THE CHART ON GUNS PER CAPITA IN OTHER COUNTRIES AND GUNS DEATHS.



Even in countries where there are lots of firearms in circulation, the stats show the U.S.A. still leads those countries in gun deaths, suggesting that perhaps Americans don't know enough about gun safety or perhaps they're too dumb to be allowed to own those extremely dangerous weapons.  Almost every day we read somewhere that some irresponsible gun owner has left his loaded firearm where children can get hold of it and kill either themselves or others.  Almost every day we read of some irresponsible gun owner accidentally shooting himself or someone else as he cleans his gun or demonstrates its use to someone.  

Because of the widespread availability of firearms, this country has high rates of suicide by firearms as well.



US Child Gun Deaths Rose 60 Percent In 10 Years


 If there were a childhood disease that increased at that rate, parents would demand research into what was the cause of that increase.  The criminals who run the NRA and its lackeys in Congress were successful in getting legislation passed that would make it unlawful to study such statistics.  


Prior to 1996, the Center for Disease Control funded research into the causes of firearm-related deaths. After a series of articles finding that increased prevalence of guns lead to increased incidents of gun violence, Republicans sought to remove all federal funding for research into gun deaths. 

 In 1996, Republican Rep. Jay Dickey removed $2.6 million from the CDC budget — the precise amount the CDC spent on gun research in 1995 — at a time when the center was conducting more studies into gun-related deaths as a "public health phenomenon," according to The New York Times. 

The NRA and some pro-gun Congressmen perceived this as more of an attack. Here's an excerpt of a 1997 article in Reason about the fight to kill gun science: 

Since 1985 the CDC has funded scores of firearm studies, all reaching conclusions that favor stricter gun control. But CDC officials insist they are not pursuing an anti-gun agenda. In a 1996 interview with the Times-Picayune, CDC spokeswoman Mary Fenley adamantly denied that the agency is "trying to eliminate guns." 

 At the behest of the NRA, Congressional Republicans successfully removed all federal funding to the Center for Disease Control that would have gone into researching the effect of guns and the root causes of gun violence.


There's a very good reason the criminals who run the NRA used the US Congress to stop all funding into firearm studies.  The results would show that more guns  in ciruculation means more gun deaths.

Supreme Court Delivers New Gilded Age Era to U.S. Democracy

Thanks to the conservatives on the Supreme Court:

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New York Times:

Donors will now have a wide array of choices in where to spend their political dollars, thanks to the Supreme Court. The 2010 Citizens United decision, combined with lower-court rulings, opened the door to giving unlimited amounts of money to “super PACs” and nonprofit political groups, money that was spent on electing and defeating specific candidates. 

The court’s McCutcheon decision on Wednesday allows donors to give as much as $3.6 million to joint fund-raising committees set up by the parties, which can be used to benefit individual candidates. That makes the parties players in the big-money race for the first time, since an individual’s contributions to party committees had been limited to $74,600 per election cycle. But the parties will be competing with the super PACs for those six-figure checks, and the check writers know it. 

For that kind of money, donors expect something beyond a nice table at a fund-raiser and a photo with a party leader. And the parties, which are controlled by the top lawmakers, are in a position to provide it — tax benefits, special clauses in regulatory bills, spending that helps a particular industry.


LA Times:

 America has seen some impressive winning streaks -- the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan, the New York Yankees for half the 20thcentury, Tiger Woods until his wife caught him with his putter on the wrong green --– but few can surpass the string of wins being racked up by rich people. And now, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservatives, the super-wealthy can take another victory lap. [...] By the presidential campaign in 2020, the role of money in American politics is likely to have returned to the unencumbered condition of the 1890s Gilded Age when rich robber barons could spend freely to buy a compliant Congress that would look after their interests.


The Boston Globe:


 The decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission pays no heed to how special-interest money corrupts the democratic process and is sure to magnify major donors’ already immense influence over Congress. [...] In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer described how a complex web of allied political committees would allow like-minded donors to write multimillion-dollar checks while staying within Roberts’s legal framework. That dissent, sadly, may now become a road map for donors who would use the McCutcheon case to expand their influence over congressional races.

7+ Million Goal Achieved for ACA. GOP depressed.

UPDATE:



Obamacare numbers coming in huge: Here's a guide to GOP excuse-making 






The Obama administration announced yesterday that the ACA enrollment hit their goal:  7.1 million sign-ups, and mirabile dictu! the United States of America did not implode and President Obama did not throw Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin in prison!  

The folks who hoped this soshallist-government-sticking-its-nose-in-their-lives act would fail now have to come to terms with the fact that it didn't, that Americans actually like it, and that they've been WRONG!  WRONG! WRONG! about all the catastrophic predictions they hoped with their tiny little minds and hearts would come true.  

Now they can go back to attacking Mrs. Obama and her nefarious program to get American children to eat healthy food and exercise.  Can you imagine the impudence of a First Lady suggesting anything so sensible?






Death panels.

Sarah Palin and others warned the ACA would include government-controlled “death panels” that would ration care, effectively deciding who qualifies for life-saving treatment and who doesn't. That was never part of the law and nothing like it is in effect. While the government, under the ACA, provides subsidies and tax credits and helps [wink wink] with enrollment, all insurance is provided by nonprofit and private-sector firms, just as before the law. They have their own rules governing what’s covered, based on the type of policy — but that has always been the case.

 Mass layoffs.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and others warned that many firms — especially small and medium-sized businesses — would be forced to slash payrolls on account of the ACA. That hasn’t happened. The economy has added nearly 900,000 jobs since the ACA went info effect, and small-business optimism has improved substantially. Back in February, ACA critics waved around a Congressional Budget Office report estimating the law would reduce employment by about 2 million people during the next 3 years; but rather than "killing jobs," the CBO itself pointed out that the law would allow people working mainly to obtain healthcare benefits to quit their jobs. Meanwhile, it’s true that penalties for employers that don’t comply with the ACA have been delayed until 2015, but those don’t apply to firms with fewer than 50 employees, and so far there are no major signs that bigger firms will axe workers. It will probably happen in a few cases — especially at firms right around the 50-worker threshold — but overall, economists expect job growth to pick up in 2015 and beyond.

 Part-timer nation.

Another concern has been companies replacing full-time workers with part-timers, to skirt ACA requirements that mostly relate to full-time workers. That hasn’t happened either. The full-time workforce has increased by 936,000 since the ACA went into effect, while the number of part-time workers has fallen by 91,000. It’s still plausible some firms will replace full-timers with part-timers as the 2015 deadline approaches, but there are business reasons not to do that and other economic trends may simply be more powerful than incentives generated by Obamacare.

 Skyrocketing health costs.

Sort the data in such and such a way, and you can find instances where insurance premiums or overall healthcare costs seem to have skyrocketed since the ACA became law in 2010. But in general, there’s been a surprising slowdown in the rise of insurance and healthcare costs during the last few years. The annual premium for a typical family plan rose by 13% per year from 1999 to 2013, on average, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But from 2012 to 2013, premiums rose by only 4%. Data from Standard & Poor’s shows that overall medical costs have been rising at a smaller rate as well since at least 2010. It’s probably not accurate to claim Obamacare is responsible for those improvements, since it could mostly be due to pinched consumers spending more carefully or other factors. But it is does seem clear Obamacare has not pushed costs up.

The total collapse of American society.

Rush Limbaugh predicted Obamacare would boost the divorce rate. Other fears include government agents snooping on your sex life, showing up at your home for unannounced inspections and imposing a whole range of unadvertised new taxes. Nobody would be able to see an actual doctor any more, and America as a whole would end up as a failed socialist state.

SOURCE

Ginni Thomas speaks with woman who implies President Obama is a tyrant...

and that America needs to turn back to God and away from secularism.

And Mrs. Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice, Clarance Thomas, agrees.



In an interview for her column in The Daily Caller that was published on Sunday, Ginni Thomas asked anti-choice crusader Lila Rose of Live Action how to “stop the erosion” in America’s culture. 

Rose predicted that history books would say that the U.S. “wandered from our principles, but we came right back to them.” According to Rose, those principles mean that “god is a higher power than any man-made structure of government.” 

 “There is a natural law out there that is higher than government, than man-made law,” she explained. “That’s what we need to return to.” “And so this idea that government is secular, and we have our faith over here, no!” Rose continued. “Secular is somehow saying there is no God, there is no higher power, there is no higher law. 

You can’t say that because when you have a tyrant in power, which you often sadly do — and I believe there’s aspect of tyranny of who’s in power now in our country — then whole groups of people, their dignity is not respected, their rights are not protected. And you have human rights abuses.” “We have to go to what are the natural rights, and what is natural law.”


Lila Rose is ignorant.  The U.S. Constitution is the basis of U.S. law, and nowhere in it is there a reference to a "higher power," "God," or "faith."  And no matter how hard people like Rose, and her friend Mrs. Thomas, try, the U.S. Constitution will not bend to their religious wills.

Also, Lila Rose needs to move to North Korea so that she understands what living under a real tyrant is all about. Her implication that President Obama is a "tyrant," is further evidence of her looney beliefs and partisan hackery. And shame on Mrs. Thomas for her complicity in that implied slander.

The U.S.A. is a secular government which, by law, does not favor any religion.

Americans are free to practice their religious beliefs without interference by the government, but some religions want to impose their tenets on everyone because they truly believe that's what their God wants and they mistakenly believe that's what the Founding Fathers wanted. They forget that there are many religious beliefs in this country, and even millions of Americans who hold no religious beliefs.

There are millions of Americans who see no "erosion" in America's culture, in fact, millions see the acceptance of equality in marriage, diversity, and compassion for those less fortunate than they are as signs that America is becoming a more perfect union.  

Embracing dignity for all citizens is an American value.