A Horrible Week For The GOP

You just have to think that all of the far-right-wing Republicans -- namely, 98% of the current GOP -- are pretty depressed this week. First of all, you have the whole 50th anniversary of the March on Washington debacle -- not a single prominent Republican attended. How did the GOP defend this massive fuck-up on its part? Well, by expressing outrage, of course -- outrage that no Republicans were invited to this event.

That turned out to be false -- shitloads of Republicans were invited.  Every single one of them turned down the invitation, however, which is understandable, given that there isn't a prominent Republican in this country who would allow himself to be photographed at an event commemorating, among other things, the 50th anniversary of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Fox News did its best to push this "no Republicans were invited" horseshit earlier in the week, but that effort fell apart, culminating in a very rare on-air apology by Mr. O'Lie-lly himself:

Bill O'Reilly apologized Thursday night for his erroneous comments about the 50th anniversary celebrations of the March on Washington the previous day.  O'Reilly had complained that no Republicans had been invited to the event. In fact, many, including both living Republican presidents, John McCain, Jeb Bush and John Boehner had been asked to attend. All declined for various reasons. O'Reilly admitted that he had been wrong.

"The mistake? Entirely on me," he said. "I simply assumed ... Republicans were excluded."  He advised viewers to "always check out the facts when you make a definitive statement, and added that he was "sorry I made that mistake."

The GOP's last hope was to push the notion that the Senate's only black lawmaker -- Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) -- wasn't invited, but that was also false. Senator Scott, it turned out, declined an invitation as well. I'm still waiting for Fox News to do the right thing on this, i.e., criticize Republicans for not showing up at this event.  I have a feeling that will be a long wait.

The GOP's bad week also included problems for the Heritage Foundation, the right wing group that -- ironically -- first came up with the idea of the individual health care mandate, the centerpiece for ObamaCare.  Here is Steve Benen's take on what happened:

The Kaiser Family Foundation published an interesting report this week on public attitudes on health care, noting among other things that 57% of Americans do not want to defund the Affordable Care Act. This was, of course, not what Republicans and their allies wanted to hear.

The Heritage Foundation was apparently so despondent with the findings that it lost its reading-comprehension skills -- the right-wing group unveiled a poster on Wednesday, asking folks to join the 57% of Americans who do want to defund "Obamacare." When Heritage was told it simply read the poll wrong, and got the results backwards, the organization made the same mistake again.

The Heritage Foundation was also banned this week from meetings of the Republican Study Committee, a group of 172 conservative Congressmen.

Things really turned to shit for the GOP yesterday.  Once again, here is Steve Benen to sum it all up:

The Obama administration's Department of Health and Human Services *** announced it will now extend key Medicare benefits to same-sex married couples. Soon after, the Justice Department cleared the way for Colorado's and Washington's marijuana laws to be implemented.

Also today, the White House announced new gun policies on background checks and the re-importation of U.S. military weapons; a California court endorsed a ban on so-called "conversion therapy"; and in case social conservatives weren't quite miserable enough, the IRS will now recognize same-sex marriages, even in states where marriage equality is impermissible.

I'm willing to bet that Republicans are more depressed now than they were on the day President Obama killed bin Laden. Yes, this last week was really that awful for them.

You Just Don't Get It, Do Ya Phyllis (and Mike and Rob and Ken)

I'm amazed by the number of Republicans who forget that the "real" (i.e., fake) reason for all the recently-passed voter suppression legislation is to stop fraud, not actually suppress the vote.  Most Republicans, when asked about these laws, state that the reason GOP legislatures are restricting the vote in states like Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Carolina is to stop rampant voter fraud (which, by the way, doesn't seem to exist anywhere).

But every once in awhile, a Republican comes clean about the real reason these laws are being enacted. Last summer, Pennsylvania Republican House Leader Mike Turzai actually boasted that voter identification efforts in that state were designed to suppress the Democratic vote, stating that Voter ID “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.” Well, that didn't happen, although Pennsylvania’s Republican Chairman Rob Gleason recently bragged about how the GOP “cut Obama by 5 percent” in 2012 and “probably Voter ID had helped a bit in that.”

Last June, Texas Tea-Bagger Activist Ken Emanuelson said:  “I’m going to be real honest with you -- the Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats.”

And now we can welcome Radical Right-Winger Phyllis Schlafly to the party. In a recent WorldNutDaily column, Schlafly explained why North Carolina's new voter restriction laws are necessary:

The reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is particularly important because early voting plays a major role in Obama’s ground game. The Democrats carried most states that allow many days of early voting, and Obama’s national field director admitted, shortly before last year’s election, that “early voting is giving us a solid lead in the battleground states that will decide this election.”

The Obama technocrats have developed an efficient system of identifying prospective Obama voters and then nagging them (some might say harassing them) until they actually vote. It may take several days to accomplish this, so early voting is an essential component of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.

Astounding amount of truth-telling there, Phyllis.

Ted Cruz: A Gift Who Just Keeps On Giving

Texas Senator (and Joe McCarthy look-and-act-alike) Ted Cruz really wants to win the GOP nomination for president in 2016.  There is one minor complication, however -- he has the same problem that the Birthers can only fantasize Obama has, namely, Cruz was not born in the United States.

He was born in Canada, which I find hilarious because Ted Cruz is just the kind of guy the Baggers and the Birthers would love in the White House.  I've been waiting to see how the Radical Right addresses this problem (Racist Birther-In-Chief Donald Trump danced around the issue the other day).

The story became more interesting earlier this week when it was revealed that Cruz is currently a Canadian citizen due to the fact that he was born in Alberta.  This has become such a problem for the senator that last Monday he said he would renounce his Canadian citizenship.

And now we have this:

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who says he recently discovered he is likely a Canadian, must win security clearance from Canada's spy agency, fill out a four-page form and then wait up to eight months to sever his ties to America's northern neighbor.

Eight months?  That's an eternity in American presidential politics.  How do you not see something like this coming, especially a Harvard Law School graduate like Ted Cruz. He could have put this baby to rest years ago, but instead has to now jump through a lot of hoops in order to no longer be a citizen of a country that has long embraced [gasp!] socialized medicine.

And once all that is resolved, how will the Birthers differentiate Cruz's real birthplace (Canada) from Obama's fictional birthplace (Kenya)?  Are they simply going to come clean and say it is okay that Cruz was born in Calgary because Canada is full of white people whereas Kenya is full of black people?

The bottom line for me is that I really don't care where Cruz was born because I think he's constitutionally eligible to become president.  Plus I would really love to see a Radical Right-Wing Bagger like Cruz get the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. 

But would I be upset if some progressive billionaire funded a campaign to make Cruz's life a living hell with regard to this citizenship/eligibility issue?  Probably not.

Amazing Racists, Part XXVII

Republicans in Louisiana think that Obama is more to blame for the Hurricane Katrina Debacle than George W. Bush (via TPM):

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

I'd be interested in hearing what other things Louisiana Republicans blame our first Black president for (The Great Depression? The Dust Bowl? The Crucifixion of Christ?).

It's amazing the things that racial hatred will make a person believe.  I was camping with friends at a Central Oregon lake last month and was trying to take an afternoon nap when the following exchange about Obama took place in the campsite next to ours:

MALE:  "Man, I sure hope that Nigger doesn't get reelected in 2016."

FEMALE:  "Oh, I wouldn't worry about that -- somebody will shoot him by then, don't you think?"

There were several other people in that particular campsite at the time, so I expected at least one of them would have been smart enough to point out that Obama cannot run for a third term, but nobody did. 

And the most amazing thing of all is that every one of those individuals probably vote -- although they are going to be pretty surprised when they open their ballots in 2016 and Obama isn't on it.

Quote of the Week (With Update)

"I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, 'What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?' They will have zero answer.

"We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don't have to learn anything."

- Newt Gingrich, speaking at the opening session of the Republican National Committee's summer meeting last Wednesday.

Interestingly, Gingrich has a long history of supporting the Health Care Individual Mandate - the centerpiece of Obamacare - and many other prominent Republicans also supported the Individual Mandate prior the the election of Barack Obama as president (e.g., Mitt Romney, Former Senator Jim Fucking DeMint, Senators Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, Former Senator Dick Lugar, Bob Dole, Alan Simpson, Arlen Specter, Judd Gregg, and Kay Hutchison.

And no, I am not making that last part up - all of those Republicans were in favor of the Health Care Individual Mandate prior to the election of President Blackenstein.  In fact, Jim Fucking DeMint, in February 2007, actually stated on Fox News that what Romney did in Massachusetts (i.e., an individual health care mandate also known as Romneycare) should be enacted on a national level.  DeMint's exact quote:  "Well, that's something that I think we should do for the whole country."

What is Jim Fucking DeMint doing now?  Well, he recently resigned from the Senate to take over the Heritage Foundation, and is (ironically) using that position to lead the charge against Obamacare.  Indeed, the recent poll indicating that an attempt to gut Obamacare by way of a government shutdown would not hurt the GOP was the product of Heritage Action for America, a "sister organization" of the Heritage Foundation. Both these organizations are aggressively supporting a movement to defund Obamacare.

But the irony does not end there, because it turns out that the Heritage Foundation is the conservative think-tank that came up with the idea of the Individual Mandate in the first place.  You just can't make this shit up.

UPDATE:  As usual, I can't get enough of this:

Just when they seemed to have the situation under control, Republican leaders are facing the wrath of conservatives who are furious that the heads of the party aren’t interested in risking a government shutdown over Obamacare this fall.

Conservative anxieties over the Affordable Care Act are reaching a boil as the law’s major provisions are set to take effect in the coming months. And an all-out grassroots mobilization during the month-long August recess by wealthy right-leaning groups like FreedomWorks and Heritage Action appears to be having an impact. Republican lawmakers have said their constituents are demanding they hold the line.

“I’m hearing a lot of anger that is right beneath the surface, ready to erupt,” said veteran Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX), according to The Hill. Burgess, who has influence within his caucus on health policy, said the support for the defunding push was “virtually unanimous.” ***

I was never much of an Individual Mandate supporter. I've long thought that the best way to deal with the Health Care Crisis was to expand Medicare to cover everyone. But the beauty of Obama signing a health care reform bill featuring the Individual Mandate is that Republicans now lack a fall-back position.

Had Obama enacted the public option into law, the Republicans could have then proposed the individual mandate -- their own idea -- as a replacement for it.  But since Republicans have decided to oppose Obama on everything and have nowhere to go health care-wise, all they can do now is dress up like Founding Fathers and walk down the street pissing themselves while holding signs saying that Obama is a Fascist-Socialist-Kenyanist simply because he put into place what is essentially a market-oriented (i.e., conservative) solution to a very serious problem. 

Hilarious.

Racists Say The Darndest Things

Here is the new conspiracy theory from the folks who are furious that a Black Democratic president could do something in two years that a White Republican president couldn't do in eight years, namely, kill Osama bin Laden:

Conservatives seeking to unveil the transgressions of President Barack Obama's presidency seized upon another target Thursday: the iconic photograph capturing a tense moment in the White House Situation Room on the night of the raid upon Osama bin Laden.

After skeptics coaxed the White House into releasing a photo of Obama skeet shooting in February, and Fox News suggested a photo of Obama golfing was "staged" earlier this week, Bryan Fischer, a conservative radio host and an official with the American Family Association, followed suit with a familiar, and quite detailed, conspiracy theory.

"Look at the size of his head compared to the size of the head of everybody else in the room. Even people standing in the back of the room, their heads are bigger than his head," Fischer said on his show Focal Point. "And it looks teeny-tiny next to the people that he's sitting next to. He looks kind of hunched over and small."

He continued: "Frankly I think that got photoshopped in after deal. I think Obama's approach was, 'Hey, if this thing goes south, I don't want to be in the room. I don't want to be anywhere near this thing if it blows up. If it succeeds, if it's an outstanding success, then photoshop me in there.'"

Please God -- Let This Happen (With Update)

Via TPM:

A leading conservative group unveiled poll results Wednesday that it said should assuage Republicans who are squeamish about shutting down the government in an effort to defund Obamacare.

The poll from Heritage Action for America, first reported by NBC News, surveyed likely voters from 10 competitive House districts. According to Heritage Action, the results prove that triggering a government shutdown in an attempt to gut the new health care law would not be detrimental to the GOP.

The poll, conducted by GOP firm Basswood Research between Aug. 7-8, found that 28 percent of voters in the 10 districts would blame Republicans for a shutdown over defunding Obamacare, compared with 22 percent who would place blame on President Barack Obama and 19 percent who would blame Democrats in Congress. Seventeen percent said they would distribute blame equally among all three groups.

I just can't get enough of this stuff.  Of course a government shutdown will hurt the GOP, just like it did when the Republicans pulled the same crap back in 1995-96.  With regard to this threat to shut down government over ObamaCare, the President revealed what the Democratic response will be during a recent press conference:

In a White House news conference on Friday, the president was asked about Republican threats to shut the government down if appropriations legislation contained funding to continue putting the Affordable Care Act in place in the 50 states.
 
He replied, "The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea."  ***  Obama also expressed wonder that making sure 30 million people don't have health care is "the one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment."

"Why is it that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail; their number one priority?"

The reason such a response will be effective is because it is true -- the GOP has offered nothing to replace Obamacare.  But it gets better, because it turns out that shutting down the government will not stop the implementation of Obamacare. Even Mitch McConnell knows that:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told a crowd at Baptist Health Corbin, Ky. on Tuesday that shutting down the government won't actually stop the implementation of Obamacare. "I'm for stopping Obamacare, but shutting down the government will not stop Obamacare," he said, according to Tanner Hestberg, a local reporter for CBS affiliate WYMT.

McConnell is right: As a recent Congressional Research Service report found, a government shutdown would not impact major portions of the law which will continue to receive implementation funding that the law provides outside the appropriations process.

And the absolute best part of all this is that if the Republicans do not shut down the government over Obamacare, then you know the Baggers are going to make a big issue out of it in the 2014 GOP primaries. This means, of course, that the more moderate GOP members of Congress -- if there are any left -- will lose their primaries to the more radicalized members of their party (aka the Akin-Mourdock Effect). 

Shut the government down or don't shut it down -- it really doesn't matter in the long run because the GOP is toast regardless of what happens.  Now that's what I call a win-win.

So my response to Republicans who want to shut down the government over Obamacare?  Bring it on, Motherfuckers.

UPDATE:  Steve Benen reports on the latest GOP threat with regard to Obamacare, namely, the Republicans will agree to increased the debt limit only if the Democrats agree to delay the rollout of Obamacare.  In other words, the GOP is backing down on its threat to merely shut down the government, opting instead to intentionally bring down the American economy unless Obamacare is delayed. Ezra Klein describes it this way:

Trading a government shutdown for a debt-ceiling breach is like trading the flu for septic shock. And Boehner knows it. Republicans will effectively be going to the White House and saying, “Delay the health-care law or we will single-handedly cause an unprecedented and unnecessary global financial crisis that everyone will clearly and correctly blame on us, destroying our party for years to come.”

Bottom line: the biggest threat to the security of this country isn't China or Russia or al-Qaeda -- it's the fucking Republican Party. The GOP is on a suicide run and is apparently content to bring the whole country down with it.